What Are the Odds a Specific Quarterback Will Fall to You in Your Fantasy Football Draft?
With the apocalypse at quarterback in fantasy football last season, we've seen a pretty hefty shift in how people are drafting them for 2016. It's going to take some time to get used to it.
This type of shift requires us to have greater knowledge of the current market price at the position so that we're not taking Drew Brees in the third when we could have gotten him in the fifth. Thankfully, Fantasy Football Calculator can help save the day.
On their site, they've got the average draft positions (ADP's) and standard deviations of those ADP's for each player in most formats you can concoct. This allows us to craft probabilities that each player will be available at each pick throughout the draft, letting you wait as long as possible before snagging the dude you want.
We've already done these probabilities for running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends, so you know those bad, bad signal callers are up next. Check out their probabilities below based on your league's scoring rules.
12-Team, PPR Scoring for Quarterbacks
12-Team, Standard Scoring for Quarterbacks
12-Team, Two-Quarterback for Quarterbacks
Again, all of this comes from Fantasy Football Calculator for drafts conducted between August 19th and August 21st. All of the sheets will be updated Sunday nights to reflect the previous week's fluctuations in ADP's.
Because these sheets are open for all, they obviously can't be edited. You can still customize them for your draft, though, if you are so inclined.
Simply go to the sheet and hover over "File." Scroll down to "Download As" and select the file type you prefer, with Microsoft Excel being the optimal target if you have the program on your computer.
Once you've got it on your computer, you'll be able to fidget things around and make it fit your specific draft slots. In the top row from column D to the right, you can change the numbers up there from being intervals of five to fitting where you'll pick in your draft (i.e. picks 1, 24, 25, 48, 49, etc., in a 12-team, snake draft). This way, you'll know the availability odds of each quarterback in the pool for every time you're on the clock.
You'll notice here that some of the variances are ginormous (waddup, Blake Bortles in two-quarterback leagues?). That's going to make the probabilities even more important because they will take into account the heavy deviances from one league to another. You should be able to tell on which end of the spectrum a player will lie by knowing your league mates and reading the flow of the draft, but these can at least provide an initial guideline.
Using tools such as this won't magically allow you to pick the right late-round gem who will turn into an every-week stud. However, it can at least allow you to maximize the value you get from the selection itself while still potentially getting the player you most desire. With how much fluctuation we've seen in how people are drafting quarterbacks, we should be taking every advantage we can get.
