Draft Ranker 2.0: Return of the Rank
Bringing back a Fantrax Community favourite, prettier than ever, and ready to help you win your drafts
When we started this blog a few years ago, we made a pact: we were never going to publish draft ranks. As those who do so can tell you, making your own ranks is painstakingly difficult. Sifting through hundreds of players, researching new league entrants, continuously updating throughout the offseason—it’s not easy—and all to look back on draft day and realize you forgot to include that season’s diamond in the rough on your big board.
Andrew, June 2022 on OverthinkingFootball.com
With the words above, Overthinking Football launched Draft Ranker 1.0 last Summer. Like a football geek’s unholy dream marriage of Tinder and Top Trumps, the Ranker allowed 2022/23 Fantrax players (us included) to ‘swipe’ at their heart’s content. Did you want De Bruyne or Salah? Nunez or Haaland? Vardy or Ronaldo? Ranker let you make those decisions over and over, until eventually giving you a breakdown of your own draft ranks and a comparison of your ranks to the rest of the Community / Average Draft Position (ADP).
When planning the product for this year, there was no question about it, we needed the Draft Ranker back. But we wanted it to be even better. So Chris was banished to the Overthinking Lab and not allowed to see the Sun until he had come back with Ranker 2.0. It looks better, it works better, and it’s just as useful as ever when draft day comes around. And you can find it on our website from today.
It’s still powered by the underlying stats that we’ve put out for years, now with handy visuals to help you assess the players. We even included those back and skip buttons that everyone was clamoring for!
You can choose to rank on just gut instinct, with deep statistical comparison, or anywhere in between. But, putting the dopamine hit of rapid decision making aside, there are some great reasons why creating your own ranks is the way forward this Summer to elevate your draft performance. And we’re going to talk about some of them today.
1. A true edge can only really be found in having a different cheat-sheet to everyone else
In a world where everyone is part of the same small community, with the same sets of expert rankings, the edge is not in the homogeneous advice, but rather in trusting your own instincts and breaking from the pack. Let’s be honest, the EPL is an extremely random league. While some players are more likely to breakout or regress than others, the majority of projections and pre-made rankings come down to (informed) guessing games.
The general order is likely to be correct, but within that framework there is plenty of room for informed guessing. And that’s where you come in! By building your own ranking, you can free yourself from the shackles of group-think and find edges on draft day, tailored to your own intuitions.
You think Alexis Mac Allister’s move to Liverpool will hurt his fantasy prospects? Move him down a round. You believe the return of Poch will ignite Chelsea’s attack? Take Nkunku before his ADP. Trust your feelings!
2. Learn to ignore ADP (and maybe use it to your favour)
The number one way to improve your draft is to stop being reliant on ADP. Your draft mates and auto-draft compatriots will be drawn to the top players on the ADP board like moths to a flame, but you know better — ADP is an awful measure and does more harm than good.
As it stands, many of us rely on Fantrax’s built-in Average Draft Position (ADP) to approximate Community valuations and provide guideposts for our own assessments of players. And while ADP certainly offers some value, it has clear limitations. ADP is supposedly reflective of Community consensus, but much of the Community is not represented. Shocking as it may be to the most active DraftPL Twitter users, many people are not participating in the barrage of mock drafts during the preseason. If an impromptu Twitter poll from last offseason tells us anything, it’s that a majority of individuals participate in zero or a handful of mock drafts ahead of the real deal. Meanwhile, some Community members find themselves all over the mock draft scene. According to our poll, 8.7% of users represent 57% of all mock drafts! These voices are given extra weight by an ADP metric that does not discern between the least and most active users, and overall “Community” input is drowned out.
ADP further creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. As much as we may not like to admit it, we are all influenced by the ADP rankings. We hesitate to reach too far down the list for that player we like, or think we must be doing something wrong by letting an ADP favorite fall too far. The ADP ranks, which quickly solidify based on the selections of those early to the mock-draft game—and can even be drastically influenced by a transfer placeholder—may be the deciding factor in too many individual decisions, leading to a lack of diverse opinions that can boost or tarnish a player’s draft stock.
In another problematic feature, ADP is simply not adaptive enough to account for changes of opinion or circumstances. Let’s imagine a hypothetical scenario where the other state-run Premier League club won the race for Erling Haaland’s signature last summer. At the time of the signing and following only 10 mock drafts, Callum Wilson was sitting at an ADP of 50 (this is a hypothetical, remember!), but clearly after the transfer coup, that number needed to drop dramatically — let’s say the optimal ADP for him after the signing was now 100. Even if everyone who drafted after the Haaland signing picked Wilson in his appropriate 100th position, it would take 990 drafts to get his ADP to drop to 100. Suffice to say, ADP does not budge easily.
The ever-present threat of autodrafters exacerbates both of these problems. The early drafts are impacted by autodrafters selecting the highest ranked players by ADP, which subsequently slows down how quickly a player can recalibrate during a major valuation change.
Our new ranking app, on the other hand, avoids these pitfalls. Given the “one or the other” structure of options presented to managers, individuals’ choices will be significantly less biased by groupthink. This will result in more accurate personal ranks. And after everyone has made their own personalized ranks? We will be combining them all together to create a true Community consensus draft ranking. While we know that not everyone in the Community will participate—you’ve read this far, you might as well play!—our consensus ranks will more accurately represent Community opinion. They will be less influenced by the few most active voices, allowing everyone a chance to contribute.
Taking your own personal rankings and the Community consensus rankings, you can get a real sense of how you and the rest of your fellow drafters value players. Knowing your untainted perspective come draft time is invaluable, especially when you can compare it to an accurate picture of where players are going to come off the draft board. And if you’re less confident in your own drafting abilities? Look no further than a Community consensus ranking that incorporates and distills the opinions of hundreds of drafters.
3. Simplicity
But making your own rankings is tedious? Yes, agreed, but that’s where we come in! Ranker remains a fun and easy way to do it and you just might learn something in the process.
The basic principle behind our strategy is that prioritizing your favorites from a list of hundreds is daunting, but choosing between two curated options is much simpler. Our app provides managers with a variety of head-to-head player matchups, and asks a basic question: “which player would you rather draft?” Following some magic behind the curtain, we can use these individual matchup answers to create a personalized 175-player draft ranking for any manager willing to play along, and, perhaps most excitingly, an accurate Community consensus ranking incorporating all of our participants’ responses. Either set of ranks can be uploaded directly to Fantrax’s draft room to help you out on the big day.
4. The Ranker Report
We did say there were improvements!
We are excited to offer our subscribers a personalized ‘Ranker Report!’ The Report will take managers’ Draft Ranker individual rankings and provide them with a fun and sharable snapshot of their draft preferences.
Find out interesting info about your ranks—which Overthinking Football member you draft like, who you value more and less than the Community, your favorite team in draft fantasy, and more!—and share it on socials with the rest of the Community.
Look for the Ranker Report to be live later in the offseason!
The Draft Ranker remains one of our favorite contributions to the Draft Community. Ranker 2.0 ups the ante this offseason, and should be a crucial part of every managers’ offseason preparation. We hope you enjoy the new features, and, as always, let us know what you think. As an aside,we recommend signing up to Ranker with the same email address you use here, especially if you’re a paid subscriber, to ensure no delay in unlocking your premium features.
Now get to ranking!
Going to do this now as fun way to 'gut check' my personal ranks...head? heart? tum-tum? WHICH WILL PREVAIL???