Roto FC is a new style of Fantasy Football game being run in partnership with Row-ZZ. Click here for more information about the game.
The Boot Room is a series of articles written to help guide new managers through this game, and give even the more experienced some food for thought.
Patience is a Virtue
When preparing to draft a fantasy team, there are two great unknowns. You need to predict which players will earn your team the most value over the coming year, obviously. If that weren't enough, however, a productive drafter must have a good sense of which players their opponents will see as having the most value.
A little-known striker languishing in the reserves at Hull may turn out to be the best player in the league, but to reach for them in the first round is a draft folly. Better strategy is to take the player with the big reputation while he's still on the board, and come back in later for the diamond you have spotted lurking in the rough.
Knowing how long you can hold back for a player is not an easy matter. Any player is only a pick away from being snapped off the board, and the official draft rankings may not be the best indication of how long you can wait to pounce. The rewards of waiting patiently for the last possible moment to grab the player you want can be huge, but the frustration of seeing him snatched up in the round you were planning your move greater still.
Over the next few weeks we will be publishing a few mock drafts here on Row-ZZ, which may give some hints and tips; for more than this you will need to get inside the mind of your fellow managers. Who will be willing to take risks on the untried foreign import or emerging young talent? Who will build a team of wily veterans? A manager may lean towards players from their own supported team, or hedge their bets by steering clear of their Saturday heroes. Of course, in a public league you may have no clues at all.
Plan of Action
The draft has ticked around to you for the first time. Confronted with a list of over four hundred and fifty options, you have only a minute or two to choose who will help your side most - where do you turn? Obviously it helps to be able to narrow these hundreds down, and there are a few methods which fantasy drafters may employ.
#1: Best Player Available
This is the simplest approach. With a pre-determined list of all players in the game ranked in the order of value you expect from them over the season, you take the top available name at a position you have free. Not rocket science, and particularly appropriate to the early rounds, where you have unlimited blank spaces on your team sheet.
However, a manager drafting on a rigid 'BPA' principle is likely to end up with an imbalanced squad, lopsided in favour of one position of category. Remember that the maximum score available from any of the scoring categories is 10 points, and that you receive this no matter whether you win it by a single goal, tackle or save – or three hundred. Once you have enough talent in a given category to win it, anything else is wasted resources which could help you compete elsewhere.
A manager who fancies themselves as a wheeler-dealer may conduct the entire draft on a BPA principle, planning on trading the surplus of whatever they end up over-burdened with to strengthen weaker areas in due course. However, there is always the risk of being marooned with no trading partners to be wary of. To create a balanced side straight out of the draft, you must consider the issue of scarcity.
#2: Positional Scarcity
Every team is required to field 2 players in goal, 6 each in defence and midfield, and 4 forwards. This means that a minimum of 20 goalkeepers, 60 defenders, 60 midfielders and 40 forwards must be drafted. However, some of these positions are deeper than others. Consider the table below, which identifies the last player who would have been required at each position in a perfect draft for last season, and their fantasy rank:
As you see, goalkeeper is by far the thinnest position. While each team must field two keepers, the last ones to be chosen will not have much value to a team at all, compared to the last midfielders.
Positional Scarcity suggests that a goalkeeper who can deliver a given fantasy value is worth choosing ahead of a midfielder who will deliver the same. Predicting which goalkeepers will be of value, of course, is the first hard task. The second is working out how much weight you choose to give positional scarcity. Do you take a keeper who could deliver 90% of the value of the best available midfielder? What about one who could only deliver 70%? Weighting the depth of the respective positions is key to drafting a balanced team.
#3: Categorical Scarcity
Similarly, not all categories are as deep as one another. The table below shows the top score and standard deviation from this mean, illustrating the distribution of the performers.
* Number of passes completed beyond the league average rate of 73.92%
** Number of shots saved beyond the league average rate of 69.38%
*** Since the aim is to accrue as few discipline points as possible, each card provides negative points, so an un-cautioned player has 0.
So far, so maths. Ugh, I can only apologise. If, however, I managed to absorb anything at all from the assorted folk who tried to teach me about the subject (and this is, admittedly, not a given), it's that the lower the percentage of the top score represented by one standard deviation, the thinner the category is in terms of elite performers.
In practice, this means that there are few top level shot-stoppers, which fits with what we saw earlier. There are also relatively few players running up really high totals of goals scored and shots on target. At the other end of the spectrum, there are a lot of guys out there giving you solid performances in the 'minutes' category.
How does this help draft strategy? It suggests that a player who is elite in one of the scarcer categories is more desirable than one who is elite at one of the deeper ones, and that to dominate a category like goals or save percentage requires fewer top performers than net tackles or minutes played would. The official rankings from last season take this into account, but it is still well worth bearing in mind when drafting.
#4: Punting A Category
The best possible outcome of a draft is to have a team which can compete in all 10 categories. This gives you a maximum of 100 points. You may reach a stage, however, where you decide that this has become impossible – if, for instance, by round 15 you have no goalkeepers and all those you feel could help you pick up more than a point or two are off the board.
In this unfortunate event, you have two choices. Either make the best of a bad job and hope to make up the scores later in the game by trading or shrewd free agent pick-ups, or decide to 'punt' or abandon a category entirely. The downside of the decision to punt is that you resign yourself to an inevitable score of only 1 point for this category, reducing the total available to 91, but it is possible that you may feel this will bring you a higher score overall.
In this situation, rather than grabbing the best of the worst 'keepers, the drafting manager will leave them to the very last rounds of the draft, taking whatever dregs are left over there, and concentrate their resources in scoring top points in other categories.
Another example might be a midfield assembled with no tacklers, only good passers and creators, or a forward line which scores very few goals but creates a plethora of chances, tackles back effectively and so on. In very rare situations, cutting your losses entirely may be the way to go, but this is only advised as a very last resort.
Know Your Place
A final important consideration is your place in the draft ladder. Because of the snake format of the draft, a manager with the tenth picks in any round will immediately get the chance to start the next. This 'turn' position can be used to great effect by snapping up two similar players, effectively starting a run on them; but requires greater foresight in judging which players will still be around next time the selection passes to you.
By Sandy King
The Boot Room will return soon with some thoughts on strategies managers may consider when weighing up some types of players and the risks - and rewards - associated with them.
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