The Late Drafts Experiment: Wow!

This year I had more time on my hands than I expected around playoff time (ahem). So I took a closer look at my performance this year. Specifically, I wanted to see whether the time of year the teams are drafted affected my performance.

Um, you might want to be sitting for this.


Team: Regular Season Placement/Championship Placement

Team 1: 1/1
Team 2: 1/1
Team 3: 1/1
Team 4: 1/1
Team 5: 1/1
Team 6: 3/1
Team 7: 3/1
Team 8: 4/1
Team 9: 3/2
Team A: 3/2
Team B: 4/2
Team C: 5
Team D: 6
Team E: 9

Summary Results: I drafted 14 teams after the scoring for week 1 had been completed, with the bulk of the teams drafted after week 4 had been closed. Out of the 14 teams drafted, 11 made the playoffs, and all 11 teams reached the championship game. Only 3 of the 11 teams lost their championship game, and one was by 0.02 points. A total of 3 of the original 14 teams drafted did not make the playoffs, all of those teams were abandoned as soon as this was clear and in all such cases the league was public. All of the teams drafted in private leagues, um, kicked ass. While I can not produce an exact Yahoo rating from this, I know for a fact that it would be north of 96%, having seen the records of people who had ratings around that figure.

Conclusion: Since this experiment was not conducted in a controlled environment, it may be a little reckless to generalize from these results for overall fantasy football purposes. However, since this is not a peer-reviewed journal, I'm just going to let it rip: The later in the season that I draft a fantasy football team, the better I do.

Speculation: Now for the why. I mean, to many people it may not be obvious why I, or anyone else for that matter, might perform better with a later drafted team. I have only one theory about why the later drafts so heavily favor me. Four games into the season we have more than just the pre-season projections and speculations from camp. We have honest-to-goodness, real and real-time data on how individuals and teams are doing. As far as I can tell, I have made better use of this information than the GMs I have drafted against. Oddly, it also implies that I have been more flexible in accepting and incorporating this data into my rankings than others have. (A charge not usually leveled against me.) The result is that opposing GMs are sticking with projections and rankings that are outdated, leaving very valuable players around for me to draft.

And yes, in 2010, I'd like to push back at least one of my drafts to see if it works with real GMs.