r/dataisbeautiful • u/rsrgrimm • 2d ago

How did draft position affect fantasy football league performance in 2024? (12-man leagues, snake draft)

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To assess how draft position affected league performance, I looked into over 400 12-man leagues (all snake drafts) and plotted win ratio, normalized points earned (normalized within a given league to account for various scoring and roster settings), and final league ranking for each draft position.

Surprisingly, 1st pick performed worst on average across all metrics.

League data collected from Sleeper API.

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u/rsrgrimm 2d ago

I plan on diving into this data more, so let me know if you have any suggestions for further analysis

20

u/drc500free 2d ago

Performance by drafting CMC at 1.1 vs picking anyone else. 

2

u/rsrgrimm 2d ago

Yeah, I'd like to look into the effect of drafting specific players for specific picks.

10

u/JamminOnTheOne 2d ago

I’d suggest looking at multiple years of data, so it’s not overly influenced by the specific players drafted in certain spots having especially good or bad seasons (like McCaffrey at #1 in 2024).

1

u/rsrgrimm 2d ago

Yeah, I plan on doing that analysis. This data definitely isn't robust enough to indicate whether draft position has a consistent influence on season performance. But I still thought it was interesting.

2

u/zanderman12 1d ago

Its actually pretty consistant in that the consensus #1 has busted for like 5 years in a row. I did this a few years ago but even 4 years of data shows a similar pattern: 2022 Snake Draft Strategy Review

1

u/zanderman12 1d ago

Hey OP, I love analyzing this type of data. I've done so in previous years but havent had the time this year. Feel free to look through my old posts for inspiration and feel free to DM me if you have questions or want to talk anything through: Snake Draft Strategy Review: What Worked in 2023

1

u/rsrgrimm 1d ago

Awesome, will do. Thank you. I've actually read some of your posts before. Are you also collecting your data from Sleeper?

1

u/zanderman12 1d ago

I started with ESPN, but have done more with sleeper recently. Sleeper is a lot easier to collect a large number of leagues and have an actually documented api, but espn has access to weekly historical projections which can unlock some other analyses