There was something of an uproar recently - or at least some grumbling, about a trade in our SDMB auction league. I offered Rashard Mendenhall and Legedu Naanee for Andre Johnson, and the most people seemed to think that deal was unfairly stacked in my favor. But Mendenhall cost $35 at our draft, and he averages $46 in all yahoo drafts. Johnson went for $37 in our draft, and averages $39. So while the actual money in our draft spent was about equal, Mendenhall costs $7 more on average.
So I asked - how can the trade be massively stacked in my favor if they were priced similarly, or Mendenhall actually cost more? Price at auction should reflect the utility of the player. Scarcity, position, and all the other factors should be accounted for in the price. A player of a higher drafted value should always be, on average, more valuable to their team than someone of lower value. At least according to the best guess of the fantasy football community.
VarlosZ sums it up:
Bolding mine. The bolded part is the crux of the issue.
For comparison, here are the top 30 players drafted on yahoo by their average draft position:
Chris Johnson (Ten - RB) 1.3
Adrian Peterson (Min - RB) 2.2
Maurice Jones-Drew (Jac - RB) 3.7
Ray Rice (Bal - RB) 4.7
Michael Turner (Atl - RB) 6.5
Frank Gore (SF - RB) 7.1
Andre Johnson (Hou - WR) 7.8
Drew Brees (NO - QB) 10.5
Randy Moss (NE - WR) 12.2
Ryan Mathews (SD - RB) 12.4
Aaron Rodgers (GB - QB) 12.6
Rashard Mendenhall (Pit - RB) 13.7
Peyton Manning (Ind - QB) 14.4
Steven Jackson (StL - RB) 15.0
Shonn Greene (NYJ - RB) 15.0
Reggie Wayne (Ind - WR) 15.3
DeAngelo Williams (Car - RB) 15.5
Calvin Johnson (Det - WR) 18.7
Larry Fitzgerald (Ari - WR) 20.1
Miles Austin (Dal - WR) 22.1
Brandon Marshall (Mia - WR) 22.5
Roddy White (Atl - WR) 23.0
Ryan Grant (GB - RB) 24.3
DeSean Jackson (Phi - WR) 27.6
Tony Romo (Dal - QB) 28.1
Greg Jennings (GB - WR) 30.3
Tom Brady (NE - QB) 31.5
Marques Colston (NO - WR) 32.2
Cedric Benson (Cin - RB) 32.3
Matt Schaub (Hou - QB) 33
In comparison, when you list them by average draft price:
Chris Johnson (Ten - RB) $69.4
Adrian Peterson (Min - RB) $66.7
Maurice Jones-Drew (Jac - RB) $61.0
Ray Rice (Bal - RB) $59.0
Michael Turner (Atl - RB) $54.3
Frank Gore (SF - RB) $53.2
Rashard Mendenhall (Pit - RB) $46.7
Ryan Mathews (SD - RB) $44.3
Shonn Greene (NYJ - RB) $42.5
Steven Jackson (StL - RB) $41.0
Andre Johnson (Hou - WR) $39.1
Jamaal Charles (KC - RB) $38.2
DeAngelo Williams (Car - RB) $34.5
Ryan Grant (GB - RB) $34.2
Randy Moss (NE - WR) $34.1
Beanie Wells (Ari - RB) $31.5
Larry Fitzgerald (Ari - WR) $30.8
Aaron Rodgers (GB - QB) $30.4
Calvin Johnson (Det - WR) $30.2
Drew Brees (NO - QB) $30.0
Cedric Benson (Cin - RB) $29.5
Miles Austin (Dal - WR) $28.6
Peyton Manning (Ind - QB) $26.2
Brandon Marshall (Mia - WR) $26.1
Jahvid Best (Det - RB) $25.7
Pierre Thomas (NO - RB) $25.3
Reggie Wayne (Ind - WR) $25.2
Roddy White (Atl - WR) $23.2
Greg Jennings (GB - WR) $22.6
Anquan Boldin (Bal - WR) $20.6
These lists should be ordered roughly the same way. Whoever you value most, you should either draft the highest or pay the most for. But there are significant divergences. Rashard Mendenhall is the 12th player taken in standard drafts, but is the 7th most valued player in auctions. Andre Johnson averages 7th in standard drafts but number 11 in auctions. Drew Brees is 8th in standard drafts, but all the way down to 20th in auctions. There are other examples that you can see for yourself.
In general, RBs are very valued in auctions whereas even the top QBs and WRs tend to be pretty cheap relatiev to them, in comparison to standard drafts.
What do you think accounts for these differences? I have some half-formed ideas, but I don’t want to influence the direction of the discussion quite yet. Anyone want to take a stab at it?
Why should auction value have anything to do with trade value?
I might say that if I got Chris Johnson and Adrian Peterson for only $120 (in a standard $200 auction), I did very well. In fact, I’d be a likely contender for my league’s fantasy championship.
But that’s because Johnson and Peterson offer a tremendous advantage over an “average” RB.
Mendenhall is one of the top RBs in the draft, but he (likely) doesn’t offer that same degree of advantage over an average RB. But Andre Johnson does offer that for WRs. (And Naanee is likely worthless.)
If I had Andre Johnson I would never make that trade, and if I had Mendenhall I would always make that trade. Just sayin’.
Actually, now that I think about it, that might mean you could walk away with your #1 QB, 3 of the top WRs, your top TE, D/ST, Kicker, and two mediocre RBs (and backups)… and that just might make you a fantasy monster.
I wonder if gaming the system like that would pay off?
That isn’t the main focus of this thread. It is what brought up the issue. The idea that a few days ago we could have an auction which says “these two players were worth the same dollar amount to the league” and then turn around and say “trading them is way unfair, one is way better than the other” isn’t consistent. If one is way better than the other, why wouldn’t people bid higher for the better value player to reflect that?
Would you trade the best kicker (or defense, or tight end) for the 7th best RB then? The best kicker has an edge over the other kickers, whereas the 8th RB isn’t that special relative to other RBs.
Are you willing to pay Mendenhall prices ($46 average) or prices similar to RBs like Mendenhall for Andre Johnson? More, because you claim Johnson is more valuable? Would you spend $50 on Andre Johnson? Why or why not?
Aaah, I think I see. Sorry for the near-hijack, then.
You’re upset at the inconsistency: that people would pay more money on average for a player that’s legitimately worth less than one you’d pay less money for.
If I had to hazard a WAG for why, I’d say that by time you get down to someone like Mendenhall, there’s a little bit of an RB panic. About half of the teams drafting will have a very good RB by that point (some may even have two), but a few teams will have none, and that’s where the panic sets in. Mendenhall, Ryan Matthews and Shonn Greene are hyped pretty heavily, but they’re a definite drop from the Steven Jacksons and Frank Gores. And by time you get to the Cedric Benson/Ryan Grant-tier, that’s who you want as your RB2, not your RB1. I think what you’re seeing is the panic, and so inflated values for (what I consider) overhyped running backs.
These are some of my “unformed, totally untested” ideas I referred to in the post quoted in the OP:
– I can think of one factor in each type of draft that would uncontroversially bias the results . In standard drafts, the rigid structure makes roster construction a huge influence: “The best player relative to the remaining options at his position is X, but I already have two players at his position and I need some balance, so I’m forced to take Y.”
In auction drafts, OTOH, what you see is bidding wars on the last one or two players on a given tier (the last one or two remaining, not necessarily the least desirable one or two), as the people who have been waiting to acquire a player all of a sudden really need to get this guy and have a bunch of surplus cash.
– More speculatively, for standard drafts: perhaps people are just bound by tradition and accepted practice in their thinking. I mean, every single year is structured exactly the same: The first six picks will be the consensus top 5 RBs, and *maybe *the top QB (depending on how many TDs the top guy threw last year). The next six picks will feature the top WR (without a doubt), at least 4 more RBs, and one pick that could be any of three positions. Early in the 2nd Round you’ll get the #2 QB and WR (assuming they didn’t go at the end of the 1st), you’ll get about three more WRs towards mid-late part of the round, and the rest is RBs. The top TE comes off towards the end of the 3rd, then after a lull there’s a run on them about 1.5 Rounds later. Etc. So it is, and so it always shall be, even though the game has changed a fair amount in the 10+ years I’ve been doing these drafts. What if this pattern is no longer optimal? (Or what if it never was?)
– More speculatively, for auction drafts: A few things. People could get caught up in the heat of bidding and wind up spending more than they wanted, perhaps leading to less rational results than standard drafts, in which people are frequently working off of pre-set lists they’ve drawn up for the first few rounds. It’s relatively newer than standard drafts, so perhaps people don’t yet have a good intuitive understanding of how to properly budget their roster. On the other hand, auction drafts probably get a smaller proportion of casual (i.e. poor) players, so perhaps that would make the drafts more rational.
So, I don’t know. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to test which draft yields more rational results, since every player’s value needs to be weighed against the alternatives at his position.
A good thought, but, as it happens, in this particular draft Mendenhall was actually the second player to be bid on. If anything, that depressed his value (I was going to bid more than he went for, but I just wasn’t settled yet and basically choked).
I haven’t done a football auction, but my experience in auctions is no they don’t. If anything the first few guys are a bit undervalued, because there are many options the board. The guys who tend to be overpriced are the last ones of a tier. Everyone is okay letting Ray Rice go knowing, Johnson, Peterson, and Drew are still on the board. So perhaps Johnson is going cheaper because there are always other top receivers on the board while running backs go higher since everyone is desperate to get at least one top guy.
As an aside football outsiders have Mendenhall as a top 5 back and I believe he went 4th in their internal draft. I don’t know that I would rank him over Johnson, but certainly a case can be made.
Are the people grumbling about the trade fantasy rookies? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that trade, auction or not. They’re ranked very similarly, and if one team developed a need for a WR1 and the other for a stronger RB as well, there’s simply no reason to moan about that.
It seems to me that the disparity is quite ably explained by the fact that in an auction draft, you aren’t guaranteed anybody. In every conventional snake-type draft, you’re never more than a round away from your next pick. If you don’t get MJD, you’re definitely going to get a crack at Mendenhall or Jackson or somebody. Secure in the knowledge that you’re getting one or the other, you’re free to take Andre Johnson first and the 2A running back second, rather than the 1B running back first and another receiver second.
So, assume that #1 running backs are a scarcer resource than #1 wide receivers. Take away the security afforded every team owner by the fact that they have an exclusive first round pick. It isn’t strictly scarcity, it’s scarcity combined with the way the teams are being filled.
Now add to this the possibility that there are large groups of players of similar value, or at least of value that is considered to be roughly equivalent by most players. In a snake draft, one has to be deemed more valuable than the other, because one has to be picked first, but really that’s a misleading way of looking at it, since all it says is that the person with that pick valued the one over the other. In an auction, though, ‘value’ is collectively assigned, and players who are more or less considered equivalent can actually be valued equivalently.
It seems to me, unless I’m missing something huge, that this would explain why running backs, the group where there’s way more consensus in favor of a pecking order, and the group with way more scarcity at the top, would be the one where values would be driven up by consensus, because every team is forced to participate in the process rather than simply relying on the inevitability of its first round pick. It also follows from this, I think, that the auction style is the more ‘rational’ one, assuming that a player’s value is really determined by how coveted he is.
I didn’t really have time to get into much depth when I posted this, but I wanted to revisit the issue because I think the relative valuations of each draft type are interesting.
That’s an interesting issue to raise. In general, the issue of momentum and common wisdom and basically just copying other people’s ideas is pretty huge in FF. I doubt 99% of FF players truly think about how to maximize their resources, whether draft position or monopoly money, in relation to getting the best marginal value over replacement, scarcity, etc. They look at their cheat sheets and apply a few personalized tweaks (“I think so and so is going to have a big year now that he’s 2 years removed from knee surgery)” and they’re done.
In an environment like that, traditional strategies become dominant. During the draft, everyone has yahoo’s little projected value sheet right in front of them, and no one wants to deviate from it too much. The fact that the pattern hasn’t changed too much all these years despite a fairly significant change in the game, especially in relation to the number of workhorse RBs, is interesting to consider. In fact, the only major FF related change in draft strategy I can remember is how much QBs became downgraded after 4 point TDs became standard.
You could consider that the difference in valuation by the public at large may be a result of the experts making different cheat sheets for auction and standard drafts. If most auction cheat sheets have Mendenhall above Johnson and most snake drafts vice versa, the public will probably follow that tendency even if it’s illogical. That just pushes the question down one more level though - why would the experts be making their cheatsheets in this way?
I think RBs are overvalued in general, both in raw point production per point and value over replacement level. This is especially true at the top. It’s true that the current RBBC status in the NFL makes few truly valuable backs, but it also means that you can usually make something out of garbage later on, or at least take a few good gambles on later RBs.
I do a lot of thinking about draft strategy, trying to formulate my own ideas rather than just following cheat sheets, especially in auction where you have so much more control over what strategy to use and so my auctions end up being fairly unconventional. Over the last few years I’ve spent consistently less on my RBs than everyone else, always passing over the high cost of the studs, and making do with decent mid-tier guys. But this allows me to get some of the elite players at other positions. My drafts usually end up looking like I ended up getting 10 3rd/4th round draft picks. And so far it’s working well for me. I won the auction league last year with the least spent on RBs, I’m in first place this year, and I’m 2nd/20 in the now auction draft big league.
I suppose it could be because most people when making these sorts of predictions tend not to be too bold - they don’t want to do anything too ridiculous or too out of the norm, so experts probably do a lot of copying and consensus building from each other. It’s rare that you see cheatsheets that deviate too significantly from the consensus. Maybe a different group of experts specialize in auction vs snake.
I tend to believe auction drafts tend to be more rational and savvy, but I really don’t have the sample size to make that declaration. Aside from this year, I’ve only had our SDMB auction league - although I must say that it is probably by a decent margin the most competant, savvy, and competitive league I’m in, at least in terms of the draft.
As far as getting caught up in the heat of bidding, wouldn’t that effect tend to average out? Why do specific players seem to be so dramatically different - looking at the list in the OP, compare Mendenhall/Matthews/Greene type players to Johnson/Brees/etc. Other parts of the draft list seem to fall right in line.
This may be a factor, I don’t know. The top picks tend to get nominated first, and they tend to go for a lot - I don’t know what the correlative/causal relationship is here. If you nominated someone like Dwayne Bowe or Ronnie Brown first, would they go for significantly more than they normally would? My guess is that top-10 type studs will always demand a high price and that being at the top of the draft doesn’t add too much to prices. It may actually reduce the bids on non-top 10 players because people are still feeling out the market and there’s no feeling of scarcity. This is probably especially true of newer owners.
I do think you’re on to something. The primary difference here is that with snake, you’re only picking once per round, but you’re guaranteed to get that player - not in a bidding war that may end up going too high for your liking. And similarly, you can’t grab the next equal player in a tier unless they happen to fall to your next pick, whereas in auction you can fight for similar players back to back. That has to reflect in how much you feel secure in getting a player now or later. How exactly though I’m not sure. It seems like the more scarce position should go higher in snake, where there’s a higher risk you won’t be involved in the draft again until after that tier has passed, than auction where you’re always in it.
I’m not sure that scarcity directly leads to different results in the two different draft types. If #1 RBs are scarcer, they’d be scarcer either way - there’s actually more incentive to pick one up early in a standard draft because they may be gone by your next pick, whereas in an auction you can always pick your battles. So if this were true, you’d think the standard draft would see more RBs taken high where they could be guaranteed and secured early, compared to auction where you don’t have to wait until your next pick. So Johnson should be priced higher than Mendenhall/Greene/Matthews in auctions relative to their draft positions in standard, if anything.
This is a great point. But if, for example, the top 6-12 players are much mushier in value than the top 6, I do wonder why the RBs that go in this range are valued so much higher than the WRs and QBs. Mendenhall, Matthews, and Greene were at 46, 44, and 42, whereas Johnson, Moss, Rodgers, and Brees (in the 6-12 bracket in standard drafts) are at 39, 34, 30, and 30. Your idea does explain some premium to the RBs, but it seems like too big a gap, specifically in the difference in that range of players.
Rather late here, but draft values are meaningless after the draft. For example, right now, Jahvid Best is worth more than Ray Rice, Drew Brees, Shonn Greene, Ryan Matthews, MJD or an of the 30-40 players drafted ahead of him.
You mean upgrade right? Because the standard used to be 3 pts for both the QB and the WR. 4 pts was the next step, and then 6 pts became more commonplace once the masses started playing.
I disagree. RB valuation is undervalued at the top, overvalued elsewhere. Because the top is populated by RBs in single back systems (CJ/AP/MJD/Turner/Gore), they should be valued much higher. Backs with questions going in were overvalued, because in an auction there shouldn’t be any urgency to sign Shonn Greene or Ronnie Brown - there’s always 15 other backs to spend your money on.
Yes - and they’ll go for more over their “correct” value than a top pick will early in the draft. I spent a lot of early nominations on Kickers, TEs and Defenses, just to get money on the table I wasn’t going to spend. With no computer drafters, people were still spending $8-10 on a friggin’ kicker, because they had a giant stash of $200 and didn’t want to “be behind”. It amazes me that people stress over who to nominate - players I nominate have about a 33% chance of me even wanting them on my roster, regardless of price.
I recommend that anyone interested in this check out “Fantasyland” by Sam Walker. It’s about fantasy baseball, but it’s about the most elite fantasy baseball league in the country (Tout Wars). They operate an auction draft, and the insight is very good in the auction portion of the book. There are major difference between fantasy football and baseball (primarily the size, as well as the dual-scoring of offense/pitching), but there are a lot of draft similarities (Catchers, non-elite 2B and SS are equivalent to Kickers and non-elite DEF and TEs, etc.). It highlights a handful of auction strategies (things like Stars and Scrubs) that can translate, and then others that need some finesse (LIMA doesn’t really work for football, but works into S&S pretty well). (Munch trivia: I was in a league with Nando a few years ago as part of an expert’s draft. Great guy - made a lot of strange picks to get fantasy press, but was very communicative after the draft on feedback and link sharing.)
No, my experience corresponds with Beef’s: when I first started playing 10 or 12 years ago, 6 points per passing TD was standard, and it’s rather gradually drifted to 4 since then.
Well I think that had more to do with the peculiarities of that particualr draft. Most of us had realized that with 20 teams prices were going to be significantly higher across the board, but then they (incorrectly, IMO) applied that same lesson to the Kicker position. The problem with that, of course, was that Kicker was the one position at which it didn’t really matter that the league was so deep, because you could still grab a guy off waivers for free and be fine, so the replacement level at that position was barely affected by the deep league. That’s why I kept nominating kickers: anyone who spent more than $2 for one was making a pretty big mistake.
All TDs used to be 6 points. Then Manning threw 48 TDs and it stomped the hell out of FF, so standard scoring became 4 points per passing TD. That’s what I meant.
Which doesn’t suck for me, the guy who drafted Best in 2-3 leagues. Loves me some rookie RBs. (Now if only the slackers in SD and Buf would get their acts together…)
I got him in 2 leagues and I was seriously thinking of trying to get you to swap me the #2 overall for the #1 overall in the dynasty league. I like him a lot.
I’m actually a bit… concerned about him despite being the #1 fantasy RB scorer. His rushing numbers are pretty poor, and he’s been propped up by goal line carries/TDs. I’m not sure how sustainable that is if he can’t get his rushing average up higher.
He had a phoenominal week in the passing game of course, but teams will start to gameplan against that. Now might be a good time to sell high actually, but I still like him for this season. Just not as a top scorer like he has been.