What is a Draft Pick Worth in Your Fantasy League?

Ein mehr Bier, bitte! When I was learning German, my family joked that the one phrase I’d need to get through traveling in Central Europe was “one more beer, please!” While they’re not entirely wrong about there being a strong drinking culture in “Deutschland”, there is much more nuance and depth to the language that English sprung from than many people think. There is a beautiful complexity in languages around the world that gives hints as to what those peoples or cultures value, or how history has shaped them, or what other cultures they’ve come in contact with.

The trick to finding the keys that unlock those mysteries is that you first have to be able to translate the language into something you can understand.

Joining a new dynasty league format can often feel like learning a new language: you’re dealing with a new grammatical structure, sometimes with letters that don’t even look like yours, and you have no idea what the words being thrown around mean. Superflex? IDP? Devy? What in the world is C2C?!

That’s why I set out to create a universal dictionary, if you will, to help calculate the values of a rookie draft pick in a non-Individual Defensive Player (IDP) league to an IDP league’s rookie draft, to compare the value of a devy draft pick to a rookie draft, and even to compare a rookie pick in an offense-only league to a devy pick in an IDP format.

If that seems like a lot, stick with me: I promise I won’t leave you confused and flipping through your phrasebook. Grab your bags and passport, and let’s figure out what a draft pick is worth in your league.

In his piece on DLF, Pitzer lays out how high the player drafted at each Devy slot was selected in rookie drafts on average, as well as demonstrating how much a Devy component depletes the regular rookie draft. I simply took his slot-by-slot data and normalized the curve, as well as extrapolating out to later picks in both drafts for those leagues with deeper drafts. Obviously a league with deeper developmental rosters will result in an even more Devy-depleted Rookie Draft, but this provides a solid baseline to operate off of in negotiating pick values and translating online trade calculators or rankings to your Devy league in question.

Finally, in order to translate the value of an Individual Defensive Player league Rookie pick to that of an offense-only league, I examined MyFantasyLeague.com’s rookie ADP data from 2013 to 2020. I tracked how often a draft slot was used on an offensive player and used that rate as a guide to adjust slot values. Essentially, if five IDP have been frequently drafted in the top-16 of a Rookie Draft, the 16th pick in an IDP league draft is closer in value to the 11th pick in an offense-only league — meaning picks retain more value later in IDP.

Now that you have a rough understanding of how I translated these values, let’s look at the results. Just what is a draft pick worth in your fantasy league?

As you can see, the average Devy 1.01 ends up being worth something more along the lines of the Rookie 1.07, while even if we assume a 12-team league, the last pick of the Devy first round (1.12) will end up closer to the Rookie 3.01 than anything else.

This is a testament to how hard it is to prognosticate on college players multiple years out. You have to hit on talent, sure. Also baked into finding a developmental star, however, is that player not getting injured, not being in a program that dampens their production, not transferring, not having college teammates who eat up workload, and finally having all the critical X-factors it takes to get drafted highly in the real NFL Draft.

As you can see on the chart, around the 13th Devy Draft pick is where the curve eases off and Devy picks begin to catch up in value, finally equalizing around pick 56 (the late fifth round) — if you have drafts that last that long.

This chart depicts the value of a Rookie pick in a traditional, non-Devy league compared to one in a Devy-depleted Rookie draft. Obviously, a pick in a Rookie draft with options removed by Devy picks will be worth less, but it will help you to know by just how much these picks’ values are diminished.

For starters, the Rookie 1.01 in a Devy league ends up often being worth the 1.04 in a non-Devy league’s Rookie draft. This might seem odd, since before we showed that Devy picks end up on average being worth below even the fourth pick at best. So where do the values of Rookie 1.01 to 1.03 go in Devy leagues? This is just an example of how luck plays into the results of Devy league drafts quite often. It can be hard to nail down those players who will end up a top-three pick in Rookie Drafts, but sometimes you’ll just luck into them. The curve begins to straighten around depleted Rookie 20 (2.08 in a 12-team league) and standard Rookie 30 (3.06), finally equalizing at pick 63 — the early sixth round.

The aforementioned changes involving Devy remove talent from the Rookie draft pool in any given year, but this final format actually serves to add talent back in. That means that when you add IDP to a league, the value of picks actually gets a slight bump up.

Interestingly, per MFL’s rookie draft ADP, the Rookie 1.01 was spent on an offensive player in every single season over the last eight. That means adding IDP doesn’t affect the top spot, but it does mean the IDP Rookie 1.02 and 1.03 are worth about the same as an offense-only 1.01, due to the added impact of defensive players. This finally slows down around IDP Rookie 44 (a late fourth in 12-team leagues) and offense-only Rookie 36 (late third), equalizing at Pick 123. Basically, while Devy to Rookie values level out later in drafts most times, IDP is a near-permanent inflation for draft picks unless you’re in a league with more than 16 teams.

It’s crucial to have your finger on the pulse of the worth of a draft pick in your league. Franchise value is not often improved in blockbuster trades where one side completely fleeces the other, so don’t expect Herschel Walker-level deals to bail out your team. It’s important to know the small edges you can shave off into your pocket on trades and drafting, because it’s the volume of those over time that will take your team to the top and keep it there.

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