Fantasy: Applying Value Based Drafting to IDPs – Part I
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I’ll be honest with you. When I sat down to draft in my first IDP league, I had no clue what I was doing. I understood general draft strategy for offensive players, but really didn’t know when to start drafting IDPs. So I just sat there with a list of IDP rankings I ripped out of a three-month old draft guide and did my best to not look like an idiot. I used this tactic over the next few seasons, and over time got better at figuring out how to value the IDPs. But is there a way to cut out all of the trial and error of drafting and establish real values for IDPs that enable us to compare them with their offensive counterparts?
Value Based Drafting (VBD) has been around since the mid-1990s when Joe Bryant of Footballguys.com popularized the concept as a method for figuring out a player’s overall value. The idea is simple in its complexity – don’t value a player by the points they score, but rather by how many points they score compared to other players at their position. Since Bryant developed the concept, VBD has been extensively used for offensive players. Yet, very little attention has been paid to applying this concept to the IDPs. I think it’s time for that to change.
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