The Right Framework: VBD
The best piece of thinking about fantasy football in the history of the genre belongs to Joe Bryant and David Dodds of footballguys.com, who developed the concept of value-based drafting (VBD). If you're familiar with VBD, skip ahead, but it's a fundamental concept that everyone who plays fantasy football needs to keep in their heads at all times.
Bryant and Dodds describe the VBD concept succinctly: "The value of a player is determined not by the number of points he scores, but by how much he outscores his peers at his particular position." Now, even if you haven't heard of VBD before, that logic is already at least slightly instilled in your head; Mark Sanchez (253 fantasy points last year) and Arian Foster (256) scored roughly the same number of points last season, but one's a top-five pick and the other's a 13th-rounder. Quarterbacks produce more fantasy points than running backs, but because most leagues start two or more running backs and just one quarterback, running backs are a far scarcer (and therefore more valuable) quantity.
How do you apply VBD to your draft board? There are a variety of tools and theories out there that will do so, but the simplest way is to find the number of points produced by the guy who would be the worst starter in your league at his given position and use that as your baseline. In a traditional league with 12 teams, that would be the 12th-best quarterback, tight end, kicker, and team defense, the 24th-best running back and wide receiver, and then the 60th-best running back/wide receiver (for the flex spot). Once you've got their seasonal totals, you build your draft board upon how many points each player would score versus that baseline at their respective position.
As an example, here's last year's baseline skill-position players using those rankings:
FANTASY BASELINE TEAM
Position Player Points
QB Michael Vick 241
RB Benjarvus Green-Ellis 149
RB Jonathan Stewart 147
WR Brandon Lloyd 127
WR Jabar Gaffney 125
TE Fred Davis 98
FLEX Malcom Floyd 116
Using those baselines, Sanchez goes from being worth as much as Foster to producing just 12 points of excess fantasy value, making him roughly akin to teammate Shonn Greene, who was responsible for 162 points, 13 ahead of BJGE. Foster, meanwhile, creates 107 points more than the average back and gets catapulted into the top 10, where he belongs. Rob Gronkowski's 241 points would have placed him 24 points behind Calvin Johnson's league-leading 265 points at wideout, but because Gronkowski was doing it against a lower baseline at tight end, he actually produced four more points of value than Megatron.
VBD doesn't account for everything. It doesn't consider the specific rules or style of your league, the context in which those points were gathered, or the likelihood of injuries affecting each player. Most notably, it's a system that bases value for each player off of last year's baselines, and there's no guarantee that last year will look anything like this upcoming season. That's where you have to combine VBD with your intuitions about 2012, and where we think you might be able to game even the smartest of fantasy football systems.
