Considering the pedigree of John Paulsen's rankings I was confused when comparing 4for4's auction values to say fantasypros avg. 4for4 has heavily valued the rb position vs the wr position (I'm only looking at 1p PPR) which surprised me because I was assuming it would've been the opposite. Help me understand this rationale because I'm not one to go one blind faith but I would like to use 4for4's cheat sheet. Thanks in Advance!

Brandon Niles 4for4 Scout

This may also be helpful, John's response to another similar question:

John here. RV at 4for4 = Relative Value. It is basically the difference between a player's projected points and the baseline at his position. We use a Core Roster draft plan which means teams will typically draft their starters at each position and a backup at RB and WR before drafting a backup QB/TE. So a 12-team league with roster settings of 1-2-2-1, will have baselines of 12, 36, 36 and 12.

The Full Impact and Top 200 rankings are meant as a general guide to player value and not the end-all, be-all of my 2016 draft plan. Last year was a historically bad year for running backs, so if you run the numbers for 2012-14, you may get different results. This does not mean that you should necessarily draft a RB in the first round. Our projections do not account for the historically higher bust rates among early-round running backs than the early-round receivers. That is something we're talking about, but it's quite difficult to implement.

If you have a flex, you can play with your roster settings to assume that your flex is a WR. This should serve to boost WR value in the early rounds. But a better way to do it is to map out your draft plan for the first 2-3 rounds and then generally follow the rankings the rest of the way. I like the RBs that are available in the 3rd-6th rounds this year, so I'm inclined to start WR/WR (unless Lamar Miller is there in the 2nd) before turning my attention to the RB position.

Jul 19, 2016 · 12:40 PM EDT
Brandon Niles 4for4 Scout

Yeah, I get that. Hmmm... I might just play with the settings a bit and see if you can get to what you might think would be a little more realistic for your league. Personally, I've kind of been going strong at RB lately as a counter-strategy since I've been able to get some pretty top level RB's in the second round and I'm having an unhealthy pre-season love affair with Todd Gurley. That's allowing me to get some value throughout my roster since it seems like everyone is following zero RB this year, and if I'm drafting late in a snake draft or auctioning the top WR's early on in auction drafts, then it puts me in a better spot. So the auction values on our cheat sheet have allowed me to skip "over-paying" on WR's and to "under-pay" backs, as arbitrary as that might mean based on your strategy.

Try 3.5 WR's and 1.5 RB's in our custom value sheet to get the numbers up a little for WR's, but remember that the cheat sheet is about value more than strategy. I hope that helps a little more.

Jul 18, 2016 · 12:21 PM EDT
Brandon Niles 4for4 Scout

I think the idea is that WR's tend to be more predictive for success year-to-year, especially with the current pass-happy state of the league. That doesn't necessarily change the value of the top-tier RB's, it's just a strategy that's based on using that money on big-name WR's and letting others bid on the top backs. We can't really adjust our values on RB's too low because otherwise it won't be a realistic value number for owners to use. For example, in $100 PPR league, $25 is still good value for Lamar Miller in our opinion, but with out zero running back strategy, we don't necessarily think that's money better spent than $17 on A.J. Green.

Make more sense?

Jul 17, 2016 · 2:30 PM EDT
wquine

Thanks for the intensive reply, especially the part where you personally attest to being more invested in rb this year because of 0rb over correction. I think given this information I may actually use the cheat sheet along with a general cheet sheet to identify value. Appreciat all the work here. Thanks.

Jul 19, 2016 · 3:28 PM EDT
wquine

It does and it doesn't. It's billed as a cheat sheet, but if I were to strictly go off of value of this sheet then I would end up spending all my money on rb because it is skewed that way. Do you understand what I'm getting at? Other cheat sheets have WR values higher so I would not get any top WR if I followed this one!

Jul 18, 2016 · 7:18 AM EDT