How do really good players use Draft Dominator (DD) for their redrafts?
My assumption is that the more sophisticated, involved, and on-the-ball owners DON’T use DD like the rest of us do, but have found ways to make it better.
Here’s my background to get you thinking. It’s my “three phases of DD”.
1. When you first discover FBG and purchase a subscription, you find that the DD application is the best thing since sliced bread. And I still think it is an awesome program. It may take a while to feel like you’re comfortable enough to use it for your redraft, but once you figure it out, you do very well. You love DD!
2. If you have a little geek in you (like I do), then the second phase sneaks up on you. You want to learn more about the program, and figure out some of the other neat things you can do to get better with it. For example, you like the Dropoff Calculator, and if you have data from previous drafts with your league, you may figure out that you can implement the Custom Dropoff Calculator, and that is another evolution that is very cool – again only if you have the geek in ya. You are now madly in love with DD! By the way, when I was going through this phase, CalBear was an incredibly knowledgeable and patient resource, and has some nice write-ups in the DD Applications forum.
3. So now comes the third phase of DD. In this one, you start to wonder if you can better utilize it.
a. You begin to think more about the projections in DD, and even though in the Projections Dominator you can choose any combination of Dodds, Henry, Tremblay, Wood, or your own, you aren’t satisfied with this. You wish you could add in MOP’s, or David Yudkin’s, or Chase Stuart’s, or Matt Waldman’s, or somebody else’s.
You wonder how to do this, and if other folks have found a way to do it?
b. Thinking back on your last redraft, you remember that when your Custom Dropoff Calculator said Braylon Edwards had the most value at that selection, that as you looked at his Custom Dropoff Value, it showed a 28 point difference, while the highest rated QB, RB, and TE were all at 24 or less. On the surface Edwards was the solid choice. But if you had any hesitation about Edwards, you might have noticed that the delta for the next rated WR was only at 18. “Hmmm” you think. Maybe Edwards was rated too high? If he was, then WR wasn’t the clear choice there, but rather a QB, RB, or TE since without Edwards in the equation, they would all be at 24 points or so, and quite a bit higher than the highest WR.
You’re a bit confused, and wish you had an answer.
c. So now you start to think about “tiers”. Instead of just seeing the “list” of WR’s that you have when your Custom Dropoff Calculator says Braylon Edwards has the most value at this selection, you think, “I wish that before the draft I had found a better way to look into this block of players within which Edwards is graded, and maybe see two or three others that I FEEL might be a better choice”.
Also regarding tiers, it makes me wonder about how to show tiers in DD. I’m not sure how to get them in there, but if you could, wouldn’t it be useful to be able to “see” who was left in one of your tiers? One way might be to “leave” the players in the player pool even after they have been selected. Instead of them disappearing when they go to your draft board, maybe they’d change to a “shadow’, or maybe the font could change from black to red? But as you looked at this player pool for WRs for example, you could see all the players you had ranked in your original tier. Then by the shading or “fonting”, you could see at a glance who was left in your tier.
Anyway, in this phase, you’re wondering about tiers and how they might help you.
So all of this leads me to ask “How do really good players use DD?” What do players like David Dodds, David Yudkin, MOP, Chase Stuart, CalBear, and a host of others, including lots and lots in the Shark Pool, do for their redrafts?
As a strange example, I put myself in David Dodd’s shoes. By the way David, please accept my apologies if this is bad form. I love your site, all your articles and staff, and appreciate your input. And simply to develop a reasonable example, I thought I had to come up with a truly off-the-wall one to illustrate the point. I figured you wouldn’t mind…
Now I just can’t imagine David coming home from work one afternoon just like the rest of us, downloading DD onto his laptop, clicking into the projections and making Dodds 100%, and then heading off to his redraft. Just would never happen.
No. Before using DD for his redraft, David would do lots and lots of things. He’d get comfortable with all the players, he’d have tweaks to the projections, he’d have his custom drop-off calculated, he’d have his tiers on something besides a 3x5 card in his pocket, he’d have a plan for when he needed to think about his QB, TE, and Defense, he’d have comments in the notes for certain players in DD, and so on. He’d have a plan.
So just to reiterate, I love the Draft Dominator and Footballguys. With that in mind, here are my three questions for all of you.
1. What do you do to come up with projections in DD? Do you tweak them, and if so how? Have you found a way to incorporate projections from other sources, or do you simply put in your own “owner” projections and use them 100%?
2. Do you integrate tiers into your planning? If you do, how do you get them into DD? Do you go into the projections and make all the players in that tier the same VBD value? Do you use a 3x5 card, rather than plugging them into DD somehow?
3. What have I missed that you really good drafters use? As with anything, there are alterations or changes that folks figure out that they really like, and I think there are lots of us out here that would like to hear what you have to say.
Please note that I could have put this thread into the DD applications forum, but with some of the good projection and ranking philosophy going on right now in this forum in the “off-season”, I thought this was the right place. As MOP once said, “This is an excellent time of year for those that don't just open up in August getting ready for their draft, many of the posters in here right now follow football the way many follow the stock market.” So basically I thought putting this thread here would get more thoughts from the hard core fantasy football folks.
My assumption is that the more sophisticated, involved, and on-the-ball owners DON’T use DD like the rest of us do, but have found ways to make it better.
Here’s my background to get you thinking. It’s my “three phases of DD”.
1. When you first discover FBG and purchase a subscription, you find that the DD application is the best thing since sliced bread. And I still think it is an awesome program. It may take a while to feel like you’re comfortable enough to use it for your redraft, but once you figure it out, you do very well. You love DD!
2. If you have a little geek in you (like I do), then the second phase sneaks up on you. You want to learn more about the program, and figure out some of the other neat things you can do to get better with it. For example, you like the Dropoff Calculator, and if you have data from previous drafts with your league, you may figure out that you can implement the Custom Dropoff Calculator, and that is another evolution that is very cool – again only if you have the geek in ya. You are now madly in love with DD! By the way, when I was going through this phase, CalBear was an incredibly knowledgeable and patient resource, and has some nice write-ups in the DD Applications forum.
3. So now comes the third phase of DD. In this one, you start to wonder if you can better utilize it.
a. You begin to think more about the projections in DD, and even though in the Projections Dominator you can choose any combination of Dodds, Henry, Tremblay, Wood, or your own, you aren’t satisfied with this. You wish you could add in MOP’s, or David Yudkin’s, or Chase Stuart’s, or Matt Waldman’s, or somebody else’s.
You wonder how to do this, and if other folks have found a way to do it?
b. Thinking back on your last redraft, you remember that when your Custom Dropoff Calculator said Braylon Edwards had the most value at that selection, that as you looked at his Custom Dropoff Value, it showed a 28 point difference, while the highest rated QB, RB, and TE were all at 24 or less. On the surface Edwards was the solid choice. But if you had any hesitation about Edwards, you might have noticed that the delta for the next rated WR was only at 18. “Hmmm” you think. Maybe Edwards was rated too high? If he was, then WR wasn’t the clear choice there, but rather a QB, RB, or TE since without Edwards in the equation, they would all be at 24 points or so, and quite a bit higher than the highest WR.
You’re a bit confused, and wish you had an answer.
c. So now you start to think about “tiers”. Instead of just seeing the “list” of WR’s that you have when your Custom Dropoff Calculator says Braylon Edwards has the most value at this selection, you think, “I wish that before the draft I had found a better way to look into this block of players within which Edwards is graded, and maybe see two or three others that I FEEL might be a better choice”.
Also regarding tiers, it makes me wonder about how to show tiers in DD. I’m not sure how to get them in there, but if you could, wouldn’t it be useful to be able to “see” who was left in one of your tiers? One way might be to “leave” the players in the player pool even after they have been selected. Instead of them disappearing when they go to your draft board, maybe they’d change to a “shadow’, or maybe the font could change from black to red? But as you looked at this player pool for WRs for example, you could see all the players you had ranked in your original tier. Then by the shading or “fonting”, you could see at a glance who was left in your tier.
Anyway, in this phase, you’re wondering about tiers and how they might help you.
So all of this leads me to ask “How do really good players use DD?” What do players like David Dodds, David Yudkin, MOP, Chase Stuart, CalBear, and a host of others, including lots and lots in the Shark Pool, do for their redrafts?
As a strange example, I put myself in David Dodd’s shoes. By the way David, please accept my apologies if this is bad form. I love your site, all your articles and staff, and appreciate your input. And simply to develop a reasonable example, I thought I had to come up with a truly off-the-wall one to illustrate the point. I figured you wouldn’t mind…
Now I just can’t imagine David coming home from work one afternoon just like the rest of us, downloading DD onto his laptop, clicking into the projections and making Dodds 100%, and then heading off to his redraft. Just would never happen.
No. Before using DD for his redraft, David would do lots and lots of things. He’d get comfortable with all the players, he’d have tweaks to the projections, he’d have his custom drop-off calculated, he’d have his tiers on something besides a 3x5 card in his pocket, he’d have a plan for when he needed to think about his QB, TE, and Defense, he’d have comments in the notes for certain players in DD, and so on. He’d have a plan.
So just to reiterate, I love the Draft Dominator and Footballguys. With that in mind, here are my three questions for all of you.
1. What do you do to come up with projections in DD? Do you tweak them, and if so how? Have you found a way to incorporate projections from other sources, or do you simply put in your own “owner” projections and use them 100%?
2. Do you integrate tiers into your planning? If you do, how do you get them into DD? Do you go into the projections and make all the players in that tier the same VBD value? Do you use a 3x5 card, rather than plugging them into DD somehow?
3. What have I missed that you really good drafters use? As with anything, there are alterations or changes that folks figure out that they really like, and I think there are lots of us out here that would like to hear what you have to say.
Please note that I could have put this thread into the DD applications forum, but with some of the good projection and ranking philosophy going on right now in this forum in the “off-season”, I thought this was the right place. As MOP once said, “This is an excellent time of year for those that don't just open up in August getting ready for their draft, many of the posters in here right now follow football the way many follow the stock market.” So basically I thought putting this thread here would get more thoughts from the hard core fantasy football folks.
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