Overview
Last year at this time everybody wanted to have one of the first three picks in the draft. After LT, LJ, and Shaun Alexander, there wasn’t a consensus number four selection.

In almost every league LT will be the number one selection in 2007. Likewise, Steven Jackson appears to be the undisputed number two pick. After those players, one could claim there is a pretty large tier of running backs that includes Gore, Westbrook, Addai, LJ, Parker and maybe a few others.

With this type of setup, what is the best draft spot to have? Is it better to have LT and then wait a long time before filling in with lesser players, or is it better to have a selection further down the list where you can get two solid running backs?

Since most drafts happen in the next two weeks, I wanted to look at where the best draft position really falls. That way, if one position really stood out from the others, we’d all still have a little time for some pre-draft wheeling and dealing to get in a better position to win it all.

First we’ll look at a typical draft year. Then, study 2007.


A Typical Year (not necessarily 2007)
To help determine the optimal draft slot in an “average” or typical year, I’m going to leverage Greg Alan’s ”Player Potential Grid” found in the 4for4.com article: Evaluating NFL and Fantasy League Trades

To see what spot is typically best, all that needs to be done is add up value points for each of the 12 teams in a serpentine draft.

To keep this manageable, we’ll only focus on the first 4 rounds and only for redraft leagues. The full Player Potential Grid covers 100’s of picks over many years.

Here is the Player Potential Grid for the first 48 picks in a typical Redraft league.

Adding everything up by team we see the total value for each draft slot in an average year when using a snake (serpentine) draft.

As most experienced Fantasy managers would expect, for the most part, the earlier you pick, on average, the better your draft. While it may “feel nice” picking 12th and having two picks in a row, the math works against you!

Now it’s time to determine the best draft position for 2007!
I need to preface this next section by stating that I believe you can win your fantasy league regardless of your initial draft position as long as you draft intelligently. However, as shown above, having certain draft slots certainly can help. If you had LT last year, you basically had an extra running back on your roster due to the number of touchdowns and yards LT provided on a weekly basis.

Not being satisfied that any one method would really prove what draft position was best, I decided to look at three different scenarios. For this study, I used a 12-team league with typical performance-based scoring. The draft was a standard serpentine draft. To assist with these sample drafts I combined pcDrafter’s Mock draft functionality, pcDrafter’s Gold algorithm, 4for4’s 2007 player projections, and the current ADP data.

First, I ran a Mock draft using ADP values for each team in the draft. This shows the draft results if every team simple followed an average draft. Secondly, I ran a mock draft with every team using the Gold algorithm. This approach showed the draft results assuming each team made the absolute best selection with each of their picks. Finally, I ran through 12 different mock drafts, having each team use the Gold algorithm versus the other teams using the ADP method of drafting. This would show the results for each position drafting the absolute best player available, while every other team would take the projected pick for their draft position.

The Results

The results of this study are displayed in the table below:


Some observations about these results:
1. These numbers do seem to indicate that having that first overall selection really provides a nice advantage. In every scenario, the team with the first draft position dominated the rankings. The next closes positions are behind by over 100 points if you look at the average projected points for each drafting style. The next closes teams average no better than the 5th best selection, while the first pick average a perfect #1 overall in projected points.

2. One item that doesn’t show up on this chart is that during the Gold Team testing (this is where each team individually used the Gold algorithm while every other team used ADP scoring), when each team used the Gold algorithm, they were projected to be the highest scoring team in the league. This validates two separate items. The first thing this validates is that any team can win from any position if you draft well. The second thing this validated is the power of the Gold algorithm. The team using Gold had projections outscoring the other team by at least 50 points from any position.

3. Draft positions 11 and 9 appear to have their overall rankings helped by a surprisingly good performance in the All ADP draft. Without those extra 100 points the scored compared to teams 5 and 10, their overall averages would be much lower. Since it would be surprising for every team to draft using the ADP method, I believe they will perform worse than this study might indicate.

4. Draft position #6 was greatly aided in the overall rankings by having the second and third best projected points when using the Gold algorithm. Team 6 was hurt most by the All ADP draft, where they were the second-worst performer.

5. While it is not obvious in this simple table above, the first 3 round appear to be the most important, and the rounds that set apart the best performing teams. While later rounds in the draft are certainly important for building depth, you really need to hit those first three picks in order to compete in your league.


Conclusion
If you look at the overall performance of the different draft positions, you could roughly divide the draft positions into three tiers.

The top tier includes only Team #1. No matter what type of drafting style your league follows, this appears to be the best draft position by far.

The second tier of teams includes positions 8, 7, 2, 6, 12. This appears to indicate that you want to be near the middle of your draft, or to be right at the turn at either end of each round where you can take advantage of those back-to-back picks.

The third tier contains teams 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11. Teams 3-5 probably suffer due to the fact that is no consensus for the next-best player once you get past LT and Steven Jackson. Teams 9-11 suffer from that top tier of running backs being gone, but don’t have quite the same luck as team 12 to be able to grab two in a row at the bottom of the first round.


INFO YOU CAN USE
As I mentioned earlier, you can still definitely win your league when drafting from any position (see how GOLD wins over ADP every time).

However, with the additional knowledge this study provides, you might be able to make some seemingly insignificant pre-draft trades to swap draft positions. In this way, you can put yourself in a position to make it easier to get the players that will make a real difference.

For instance, if you have the 3-5 picks in your draft, you may be better off trading draft positions with teams 6-8 or even 12. You can probably pick up an extra 3rd or 4th round selection from one of those teams to make that switch, which would skew the trade even further in your favor. Just remember that whatever trade you make, you want to do your best to maximize those first three draft picks.