Okay, let’s dive into my journey of figuring out these fantasy football draft rankings.

My Deep Dive into Fantasy Football Draft Rankings
Alright, so, fantasy football season is upon us, and like every year, I was determined to dominate my league. The first step? Getting my head around these draft rankings. It’s not as easy as it looks, you know?
First, I grabbed a bunch of different ranking lists. You got your ESPN, your Yahoo, your CBS, and a few other smaller sites that some of the “experts” swear by. My thinking was, if I looked at enough of these, I’d start to see some patterns, right?
I opened up a good ol’ spreadsheet. Yep, a simple spreadsheet. I started plugging in the player names and their rankings from each site. One column for each site, and then a row for each player. It looked like a crazy matrix of numbers at first.
Then I started to look, and realised that there’s a lot of disagreement, specially after first few rows. Like, one site might have a running back ranked in the top 10, while another has him down at, like, 25. What’s a guy to do with that?
I decided to try and find some “average” ranking for each player. So, I added up all their rankings from each site and divided by the number of sites. Basic math, nothing fancy. This gave me a rough idea of where each player stood overall, according to the “wisdom of the crowd,” or whatever.
But I wanted to take into consideration differences like Standard, 1/2 PPR, full PPR.
- Here is the result of my yesterday’s reseach:
- Standard
- 0.5 PPR
- 1 PPR
But that average ranking wasn’t enough. I needed to figure out which players were consistently ranked high, and which ones were all over the place. See, I’d rather have a guy who’s consistently ranked around 15th than a guy who’s sometimes 5th and sometimes 30th. Less risk, you know?
So, back to the spreadsheet. I added another column to calculate the “standard deviation” of each player’s rankings. Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. It’s basically a measure of how much their rankings varied across all the different sites. High standard deviation means big differences in opinion, low means more agreement.
After all that, I finally had something I could work with. A list of players, their average rankings, and a measure of how consistent those rankings were. I sorted the list by average ranking, but then I also took a close look at that standard deviation.
This whole process, it took a few hours, maybe more. But it gave me a much better feel for the players and where they really stand. It’s not just about picking the “best” players, it’s about picking the best players for your team and managing risk.
And that, my friends, is how I tackled the beast that is fantasy football draft rankings. Hope this helps you crush your league this year!