So linear drafting in fantasy football (and I’m sure you can extend this to baseball) vs snake. Martin’s complaint this year was that drafting early on in snake drafts disadvantages you because of the fact that you have to wait until pick 20, etc in order to get your next pick. Drafting late, was therefore some sort of advantage. This obviously goes to explain why myself and Joe always have the best teams because we end up around 1/2 every year then that gets translated into a 9/10 draft slot. It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’m just good at fantasy football, the system MUST be rigged.

Anyway, anyone with two brain cells can tell that linear drafting is horrendous, as it allows the early drafters to get the pick of the bunch at every position across the board. While 8, 9, 10th drafters just get the dregs.

To try to get to the root of the question, it is necessary to figure out the value of each draft slot. Is 1 + 20 better/worse/equal to 10+11? And how much better is drafting 1 + 11 + 21, compared to 10 + 20 + 30? In a draft of 15 rounds x 10 teams = 150 picks, I don’t like the notion of counting back from 150 down to 1. Antonio Brown (1st pick = 150) is not equal in reality to Odell Beckham (149) + the 10th best DEF (1). There’s some sort of gap between them.

My idea then, was to use the auction values of each player to determine their worth and thus the value of each pick based on their ranking by price. You therefore get something like:

Player	Average Price ($)
Antonio Brown	194
Odell Beckham	186
Julio Jones	178
Todd Gurley	170
Ezekiel Elliott	166
DeAndre Hopkins	158
David Johnson	154
AJ Green	154
Le’Veon Bell	150
Adrian Peterson	146

The chart is quite revealing straight away. The first 3 teams to draft all managed to accrue more valuable players than the rest of the league. There’s some areas of differentiation (Thom having the worst draft despite having the 4th pick) but generally you can see a trend of declining returns the closer we get to Alex’s pick. Martin actually managed to broach the $1000 mark (1003), while Alex’s team was worth (768). That’s a 23.4% difference by the way. Comparing the average top 3 value to the last 3 average value, there’s a difference of 18.6%. So drafting in the bottom 3 in a linear draft, disadvantages you by roughly 20% compared to those at the top.

Alex and Joe were perhaps able to outperform your expectations due to better knowledge, but you’re simply not able to compete with those getting to draft earlier.

If we put the exact same picks into a snake draft, we get a different picture -keeping all the pick orders the same but assigning players to different teams depending on the slot – so if you had 10th and 20th originally, we’ve changed that here to 10th and 11th in a normal snake draft and assigned whoever was picked at 11th to your team instead. its therefore Fsnake on the chart because its a Fake Snake. As you can see its a lot more even and spread out and tells you that in a normal snake draft, the difference between drafting 2nd compared to 9th is far closer.