On episode 2 of the podcast, we had a piece of listener mail that suggested that this year J.J. Watt will not be the number one overall scorer. I agreed, but said that he should still be selected number one because he gives you a substantial advantage over the other players at his position. This is also the reason that I have players like Geno Atkins and Muhammad Wilkerson listed so high.

That got me thinking about Value-Based Drafting. If you have never heard of Value-Based Drafting, it is a system of assigning values to players – often credited to FootballGuys.com (and you can read their principles of VBD) – that holds that the value of a player is not in how many points they score but in how much they outscore other players at their position.

I took the top scorers from last year using our assumed scoring system and calculated the VBD for each player using the last guaranteed starter at each position as the baseline (LB30, DT10, DE20, CB20, S20). The results are below. I will be updating my rankings to incorporate some of this data (and recent news like Von Miller’s elongated suspension) soon:

[csv src=http://www.alanjackoway.com/vbdOutput.csv number=1,5,6]

A few things jump out at me:

• J.J. Watt is really good. Even if he drops off by 5 points per game, he could still be number one in VBD
• There are 6 cornerbacks in the top 15. Meanwhile the top safety comes in at 18. I thought these positions were very similar in terms of their depth, but that now appears to be incorrect to me.
• The other defensive ends are more replaceable than I thought. I was a little bit worried about using DE20 as the baseline. Our assumed system calls for 1 DE, 1 DT, and 1 DL. Most players play 2 DEs as they score more than DTs, so I just used DT10 and DE20, which should inflate the value of DEs relative to DTs. However, the second DT comes in at 18, while the second DE comes in at 27. Basically, if you don’t believe you know which DE is going to jump up to closer to J.J. Watt level, you can wait to take them.
• Top LBs are pretty valuable. I assumed that LBs would suffer the kind of deflation that QBs do in offensive VBD calculations (you can read ESPN’s 2012 VBD column for more. However, probably because our system plays at least three LBs (and usually more due to the DP slot), the top LBs are still quite valuable.