I am interpreting your redraft player rankings to be based on the following process:
1. Estimate how many times that player will start for your fantasy team.
2. Project an points-over-replacement number for that player.
3. Multiply.
Now that looks very much like VBD to me. I realize that it is not the same and that your method factors in team-need but the value you are generating is based on value over a replacement player at the position in question, which seems to me to make it pretty similar to VBD analysis. How you arrive at the number might be tweaked a little bit but the number itself seems to represent close to the same thing. Is this a fair assessment or have I mischaracterized you?
First off, to clarify, this is not the process by which I generate my rankings. I was talking in an abstract- in a perfect world, if we know the value of every variable, this would be how we measure a player's worth to his owner. A player's worth has to be both a function of production over some certain baseline *AND* number of starts (because all the production in the world is only worth 0 points if it comes on your bench).With that said, I think it's perfectly fair to say that the concept borrows very heavily from VBD principles. I would say the biggest difference would be using starts rather than just comparing total points to a static baseline. For instance, if QB1 scored 80 points of VBD and QB8 scored 40 points of VBD, it's not as simple as saying QB1 was worth twice as much as QB8. In reality, you would probably start QB1 every single week of the year, while QB8 would very likely wind up sitting several weeks thanks to matchups. Think of it as a refinement on VBD, much like VBD itself is a refinement on total points.
So you estimate dynasty value by considering a combination of 1 and 2.
1. You assess a player's job security and aging patterns (this gives you projected starts).
2. You assess a player's talent level and supporting cast (this gives you points-over-replacement estimates).
I am able to more or less understand how to assess aging patterns. Specifically, I am aware that younger players are worth more than older players. I know that RB production tends to fall off sharply after age 30 while other positions can last into their mid-30s or even longer. I can probably do some statistical analysis on how dynasty players age to see what a typical career arc looks like.
I have no idea how to assess job security, talent level, or supporting cast in a useful way. I can vaguely point at "good" or "bad" job security (Adrian Peterson good, Marion Barber bad) and I'm able to make some talent assessment (Calvin Johnson is more talented than Jerricho Cotchery). I have some idea how to call a supporting cast "good" or "bad" although I don't know how that information would be applied even if I did have it.
The question/worry is this: I don't know how I'm supposed to use job security, aging patterns, talent level, and supporting cast to come up with a player's true value. I realize that all are probably important (well, I'm not sure about supporting cast but I'm not going to pick nits) but I don't know how I'm supposed to take all of that and make sense of a player's value. Is job security more important than age? If so, how much more important? Does age matter more or less than talent? Etc. I get that they are positively correlated to dynasty value but I don't know how strong those correlations are or how they compare to one another.
Finally:
While I can't be sure, it looks like you do not assign numeric dynasty values to players (if you do, in fact, assign numeric values then feel free to disregard this). If you don't assign numbers, how do you compare players across different positions?
Yes, I would say that calling my process a combination of steps 1 and 2 is a fair, albeit simplistic, characterization. I try to figure out how frequently a player will be starting, and I try to figure out how good he's going to be in those starts, and the resulting figure is, in theory, a player's dynasty value. That just goes directly back to my abstract in part 1- value is simply points above replacement per start.As for how to do those four steps... here's a quick primer. This isn't meant to be the be-all, end-all, it's more just a starting point for how I go about my rankings.
First off, aging patterns. This one is easy. Stud RBs typically remain studs up to and including age 28, remain productive if not quite as studly at age 29/30, and fall off a cliff after that. It's important to keep in mind that that's just a guideline and not a hard and fast rule- one of my favorite sayings is that exceptional players are, by the very definition of the word, exceptions to the rules. Every player is different and unique, but if you ran regressions, statistically, that's what the typical lifespan of a stud RB would look like. Mediocre players are always a different story, of course- they can disappear at any time, because they simply aren't good enough to withstand any loss in physical ability due to age. At WR, production typically remains undiminished through age 32 or so and remains valuable through age 34 or 35. At QB, stud players can remain effective pretty much indefinitely. TE's kind of an interesting case study- historically, TEs have aged like RBs, but that's largely due to the fact that there simply haven't been all that many TEs in the past like today's hybrid WRs. Regardless of what the aging patterns have historically been, I suspect the current crop of stud TEs will age more like receivers than the tight ends of the 80s.
Now, while the impact of age on actual production varies wildly (some guys like Ricky Williams and Terrell Owens defy the "rules", while others fall off a cliff early), the impact of age on PERCEIVED VALUE is incredibly predictable. When a WR turns 30, his trade value takes a hit. When he turns 32, it takes another hit, and it continues to slide from then on regardless of what the WR actually does on the field. This is the single most predictable phenomenon in all of fantasy football, mostly because it's wholly dependent on other owners (who are predictable) and not on the players themselves (who are unpredictable). If you don't want to get stuck holding a former stud and finding yourself unable to get anything in return, you have to trade those players about 3 years before their expected decline. After that, their market value enters freefall.
Judging job security is another one that tends to be pretty easy to do. In this case, a lot of what you have to do is just listen to the team and pay attention to the moves they make. Does the front office keep bringing in competition? That's a bad sign. Does the coach keep raving about a player even when he struggles? That's a good sign. When Cleveland traded for Peyton Hillis and drafted Montario Hardesty, that was a sure sign that Jerome Harrison had NO job security despite rushing for an obscene number of yards to end last season. Ditto that with Justin Forsett in Seattle. On the other hand, when Minnesota traded away Sage Rosenfels, that just showed that Childress was hitching his wagon to Tarvaris Jackson, for better or for worse. The other part of job security (outside of just watching the front office) is a function of talent- good players have job security, bad players typically don't. Chris Johnson is still going to be starting for the Titans 3 years from now, because he's a fantastic talent. Lagarrette Blount will probably not be starting for the Bucs 3 years from now, because he's not a fantastic talent.
Speaking of, that segues nicely into the next point- evaluating talent level. There's no real magic bullet for this one. Really, the only thing you can do is watch football. Lots and lots and lots of football. I'd also say trust your instincts. If you are watching a game and you think "wow, this player looks good out there", then trust that voice in your head. No, you are not a scout. You might not even know why you think he looks good- you might not have the "scout language", so you can't say things like "he has fluid hips" or "he's good at setting up his blocks" or "he has phenomenal phone booth quicks". That doesn't matter- the simple fact is that the player did SOMETHING to jump off the film to you. The human subconscious is a powerful thing, and it frequently picks up on signs that the conscious mind misses. If someone looks good to you, trust that instinct. The more football you watch, the better your instincts will become. Watch highlight reels. Get NFL Sunday Ticket and watch a lot of the Short Cuts (they cut out all commercial breaks and condense an entire game's worth of action down to 30 minutes). Also, I'd recommend coming here to discuss players as much as possible. Solicit outside opinions. Find some people whose opinions you trust, but never take anything blindly- always continue to think for yourself. Don't be afraid to disagree, even if you can't consciously express why you disagree. Again, trust your instincts.
Finally, supporting cast. This is a controversial one. The simple fact is that supporting cast has a huge impact on a player's production. Look at Peyton Hillis- he's not the 2nd best RB in the league, but the Cleveland offensive line is unbelievable at run blocking, so Hillis has the 2nd best production in the league. The problem with using supporting cast is that it is much more sensitive to change. When you're evaluating a player's talent level, there's really only one variable. The player's talent can ebb or flow, but that's just one player. When looking at supporting cast, there are 10 different moving parts that can get better or worse or injured or healthy- and that's if you're not counting defense, head coach, or coordinator as part of supporting cast (I do). Supporting cast changes so wildly from year to year that it's hard to count on long term in most cases. There are exceptions, though- Peyton Manning is Peyton Manning, and he always will be, so it's easy to give all Colts WRs a "Peyton Manning bump". Cleveland's offensive line is so good and so young that I'm in favor of rostering all Browns RBs just on principal. As for how you evaluate supporting cast... it's the same way you evaluate talent, only more complicated. Watch a lot of football, form a lot of opinions, talk to people you trust (and even people you don't trust, because dissenting opinions have value, too).
Now, when you've finally taken a look at those four factors, what do you do with it? I think most people want to come up with some sort of weighting system or scoring system so they can just add a bunch of numbers together and come up with a "value score" and be done with it... but I think that's just wishful thinking. I think it's a terrible method that produces terrible results, and then you have to spend more time tweaking the formula until you finally get results that match your gut feelings... so why not just go with your gut feelings in the first place instead of trying to develop a magic formula? To be perfectly honest, after doing all that rigorous analysis, you probably have a pretty strong feeling on where a player ranks. Trust that feeling more than some stupid formula.
Instead of thinking of players as a sum of various different scores, think of them as points on a spectrum. Imagine a giant Cartesian Plane, and envision the players as points plotted on it with "future starts" on the X axis and "production per start" on the Y axis. Obviously the players in the very top right are the most valuable, but when it comes to comparing players more up than right vs. players more right than up, it's not a science, it's an art.
To answer your last question, I actually do assign numeral values to dynasty players, but I mostly use those numerical values to sort of indicate how large the gaps in the rankings are (i.e. "player #2 is very, very, very close to player #1, but there's a substantial gap between him and player #3"). There's no science to the numbers I assign to players, no magical equation, it's all a matter of creating numbers that make intuitive sense to me to match the gaps in my mind. It's an art, not a science. The numbers are not meant to compare players cross-positionally, since that's too complicated a comparison to be wrapped up in one magic formula or one magic number. I'm actually working on cross-positional value scores based on historical production by players at certain positions (for instance, over a 5 year span the value- using the definition of value I provided earlier- of the top WR might be X while the top RB might be Y, so from that we can conclude that top RBs are worth Z% more than top WRs, etc). In the meantime, there are no quick fixes for comparing across positions. You really just have to do the best you can and not be afraid of making mistakes.
