Updated Rookie Draft Rankings [Including Market-Adjusted Rankings]

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Hey gang, The grind continues in my absolute favourite week of the year. I don’t pretend to ever be a one-stop shop for all your fantasy football needs but if there’s one aspect of this game where I think you truly do get an unmatched product it’s rookie drafts. We’ve been grinding around the clock the last few days to get you reactions to all the major landing spots and I posed my first post-draft rankings set last night. Today is the next step in our rankings process which is to have a look at how our friends in the dynasty community are drafting. There have been over 1,500 dynasty rookie drafts which have at least started since the conclusion of the NFL Draft and inputted into Dynasty Data Lab . As I do every year, I’ve taken a look at DDL ADP and created an updated set of rankings that blends my own “ Base Rankings ” (i.e. how I would draft in a vacuum) with the market at large to create “ Market Adjusted Rankings. ” If you’re a multi-year subscriber and you’re familiar with my Market-Adjusted Rankings process, please feel free to skip to the bottom of this post where you’ll find a link to a spreadsheet which contains my updated base rankings (I’ve made a few changes since last night), market-adjusted rankings, as well as ranking sets for a variety of different formats (my standard dynasty format is SF TEP PPR). How to Use My Market-Adjusted Rankings and Target Exposures It’s funny reading the discourse today about whether NFL teams should be cognizant of the consensus board knowing that over the next two days I’ll be writing all about how to conduct a draft (or a portfolio of drafts) balancing your own rankings with the market-at-large. Obviously there are several differences between a dynasty rookie draft and the NFL Draft, but in any market-based process it would be foolish not to consider the opinions of the market. Incorporating ADP is integral to your dynasty rookie draft plan at least three ways. In each draft, you’ll have a better sense of which of the players you’re targeting has a better chance to last until your next pick, or whether you should trade up / down for a given target or tier. Over a portfolio of dynasty teams, breaking ties toward higher-ADP players will give you a chance to spread out your exposure across a number of targets at the most efficient prices. As I’ll articulate in more detail in tomorrow’s Walkthrough column (my favourite of the year!) my rookie draft rankings are only the first piece of the puzzle for how to attack draft season. Once I look at my rankings compared to ADP, I formulate a target exposure for each player. In the spread sheet you’ll see this expressed as “1X,” “0.5X,” “2X” etc. This figure represents the percentage of my teams I’m desiring to draft each player assuming I have a proportional number of rookie picks in each league across all ranges of the draft. In other words, a “1X” target exposure means I want to have 8.33% rostership (1 share per every 12 leagues). 2X = 16.67%, 0.5X = 4.33%, FADE = 0% etc. etc. If you have twice as many rookie picks as you’d be automatically assigned (i.e. 40 1sts across 20 leagues) then you should internally adjust your target exposures to match your surplus of rookie picks, and vice-versa if you have far fewer picks than average. In reality I don’t use my market-adjusted rankings in my own drafts. I draft off my base rankings, but pick and choose spots to take lower-ranked, higher ADP players on a case-by-case basis in order to get closer to my ta…