Evaluating the Top 20 Dynasty Rookies - 1 comments

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The dynasty rookie draft is always a great time. This is your chance to grab the next superstar and show off your dazzling scouting and player evaluation skills. The one drawback is there aren’t a lot of rankings out there to pull from. In addition, rookie drafts are very dependent on team needs, leaving many rankings not as valuable for your specific leagues. That brings me to ADP. We are far enough into the Cafe League rookie drafts that it’s time to analyze. I am breaking this data into two articles. Today we will take a look at the top 20 and what trends we can identify. In my next article we will take the same data and take a look at positional ADP to determine if we can identify any trends and or tiers.

Back to the top 20, below you will find results from the 9 Cafe Leagues that have completed their drafts. You will see a column that lists their average ADP and also their earliest spot and the latest spot they were drafted to help you determine not only the average spot they are being drafted, but also the extremes for their drafted spots to help identify when you need to pull the trigger.

One thing that jumps out to me is that almost every player outside the top five or so has a fairly large draft selection range. If ever there was a draft where owners are “reaching” for the guy they like, this is that year. I think the take-away from this information is if you have a guy you really want, you are going to have to be prepared to reach for him to ensure that you roster him. There is probably another owner that feels the same way and you will need to be aggressive in order to secure your guy. Christine Michael and E.J. Manuel stand out as being the most glaring examples of this.

Another piece of data I obtained in this exercise is I want nothing to do with picks 5-8. Don’t get me wrong, good players will come off the board here. My issue is I am not sure they are markedly better than the players going 8-14. I personally see a lot of value in trading down if I am in that range.

I wanted to end with a couple of asterisks to consider, one being some of these drafts occurred well before camp started and players like Da’Rick Rogers began to climb up the draft boards. In my opinion, it will be much harder to get him at pick 20 if you are drafting today. Another factor is there are multiple owners that participate in more than one of these leagues. So one owner’s infatuation with a player may be pushing their ADP higher than what you will see in your home league. Just things to consider as you mine the ADP data provided.

As I always say, at the end of the day, it’s your team. Always pick who you want to with confidence. Hopefully the ranks you see here today will be a contributing factor on how you evaluate your draft strategy.