One of the more valuable draft preparation practices is to break each position down into tiers so that you know when a drop in talent is starting to come up. This tiered cheatsheet creates new tiers based on player projected values at various average draft positions and can be used as a roadmap for how to handle your draft because of upcoming drops in talent at a position. My first step in creating these tiers involves taking a numeric look at quality and quantity of players at each position over those rounds:
Above and on the left are the projected roto values of players at each position during a set of rounds going up to the 20th round of a 12-team draft. And, on the right are the number of players taken at the position through each of those rounds. Looking at the average player values in those regions for each position, there are some pretty clear places where a new tier of talent starts to form. Sometimes, those tiers encompass a large number of rounds (the third tier of catchers goes from Round 7 to 20 without much talent dropoff for instance). So, if you’re in Round 10 and looking at the third tier of catchers, you can certainly consider waiting a long time and still get relatively the same talent level according to this exercise.
After assigning actual names to those mysterious values in each round, we get the following printable cheatsheet now available on the site:
2011 ADP Positional Tiers
Keep in mind that all players in a tier are not created equal necessarily but this gives you a good indication of similarly valued player ranges and when you might start experiencing a drop in talent. In the future, there will be a similar version for roto categories broken down by ADP tiers as well. Enjoy, and let me know if you have questions.
