Some years ago Ian did a preview looking at the ADP of the players on each team. It’s an interesting idea – because we’re a dynasty league teams will be in different places of a cycle – and the idea was to look at how teams were set up to win now. So I thought I’d repeat it, but with a twist.
In Ian’s analysis he used ADP, but ADP has a couple of problems to my mind – we’re not a redraft league, so we don’t have picks for all players, only rookies, and they can’t be easily equated to salaries. Picks assume an equal value between 1 and 2, 2 and 3 and so on. But if you have a clear top two with a wafer thin difference in value and then a gap to a tier with players 3-5 then this isn’t really reflected. ADP theoretically smooths this a little, as players 1 and 2 should have ADPs around 1.5 and 3-5 around 4, but it still retains the core problem of valuing each pick 1 more than the one before, so the gap between 1.5 and 4 is still an arbitrary 2.5 picks with no recognition that a pick value isn’t a flat amount.
AAV on the other hand says how much of a fixed budget someone is willing to spend on a player. So the difference between 1 and 2 in that ranking could be a couple of cents, while 3-5 is more like a couple of dollars. Also, critically, it’s a currency we use for our salary cap, so it opens up some additional fun options.
Whether it’s ADP or AAV, both methodologies have some similar problems, that I’ll just touch on:
– Not every league runs IDP, and many that do won’t have a full defensive, or will use different defensive scoring. So defensive value isn’t really indicative in the way that offensive is. An example of this, is that only 2 of the top 10 CBs by ADP are even rostered in our league. Because only two CBs have ADP values.
– 2QB leagues are increasingly popular, these inflate the value of QBs significantly, but they do so across the board, so it should balance out on a team-by-team comparison. It does however mean that AAV values for QBs are inflated and so comparison of salary to AAV is less useful at this position.
Anyway, enough of the boring stuff, let’s have a look at how it shakes out.
I could list top AAV by position, but easier just to link you to the AAV info in MFL (note, this link is correct, the one on the MFL homepage is for 2021).
You can access the googledoc with all the data in here, it is a live doc, pulling via the API, so figures may not exactly match.
So, onto the good stuff, who’s got the most valuable team?
| Team | Value | Offense Value |
|---|---|---|
| Dyna Hard | $905.79 | $857.71 |
| Kelkowski | $768.82 | $707.27 |
| Brees | $720.65 | $671.62 |
| Champions | $705.15 | $664.05 |
| Losers | $647.24 | $634.16 |
| Sadness | $638.76 | $610.51 |
| Bombermen | $579.40 | $524.22 |
| The Infamous Two | $557.52 | $494.21 |
| Dungeoneers | $557.19 | $548.19 |
| Hawkeman | $449.11 | $421.77 |
Let’s start with a positive – the average spend in the dynabowl on offence is $400.20 so I adjusted AAV’s for offence based on that, and everyone’s AAV beats that baseline value, so everyone’s got some value there. Rookie contracts help a lot with that, for example Breece Hall(!) is somehow the top AAV on MFL, and his 20 dollar salary for this year against his AAV is 31 (before rescaling to the baseline of $400), so his salary to AAV rating is 944%. More on that sort of thing in a bit.
Chris is a clear leader here, lead by a receiver group with a total AAV of almost 400 on their own ($397.60), by far the most valuable group in the league, ahead of Ben’s receivers ($308.95). Neil’s bottom placed ranking can largely be traced to this same position group as his receivers value up at only $102.41, significantly behind the next worst in Mike ($174.93) and the Commish ($168.28).
The top RB group belongs to Ian ($280.18) but there’s a cluster of closely matched 2nd placed groups of Pete ($234.88), Chris ($234.52) and Mike ($231.08) and Ben ($225.40). People in auction drafts just don’t like Jonathan Taylor as much as you’d think. The lowest valued RB groups belong to T2 ($122.14) and the Commish ($137.51).
Ian, Pete and Neil have more valuable RB groups than WR groups, where for everyone else it’s the reverse.
It’s closer in the QB group – Max at $158.36 has the most valuable group, just ahead of the Losers ($153.32) and Chris ($149.40). While the Commish has the most valuable TE group ($98.01). While there’s a couple of others who are close, Neil is the only GM who’s QB group is more valuable that one of the two big skill position groups (his aforementioned WR group). Unsurprisingly, everyone’s TEs are their least valuable group.
Defence, as previously alluded to, receives an average spend of $165 in salary. In AAV, the highest total defensive value belonged to T2 at $62. So, yeah, that pretty much makes the point about IDP in our league vs others. The figures are all in the sheet, but I’m not going to waste time on trying to draw any conclusions.
So far, so good. But you can’t and won’t play all these players. So let’s go deeper. What about the starting line-ups?Based on a line-up of 1QB, 3RBs, 4WRs how do the teams value up? (figures rounded)
| Team | Starters | QB | RB | WR | TE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dyna Hard | $460 | $68 | $127 | $215 | $50 |
| Kelkowski | $416 | $78 | $174 | $149 | $15 |
| Brees | $440 | $40 | $147 | $230 | $23 |
| Champions | $427 | $56 | $140 | $215 | $14 |
| Losers | $431 | $80 | $144 | $188 | $19 |
| Sadness | $445 | $62 | $196 | $128 | $59 |
| Bombermen | $360 | $85 | $110 | $120 | $45 |
| Tamworth Two | $379 | $45 | $100 | $196 | $37 |
| Dungeoneers | $453 | $58 | $219 | $166 | $11 |
| Hawkeman | $300 | $55 | $135 | $84 | $26 |
What this highlights is how depth plays a part in total value. Chris’s WR group ($215) is not just not miles ahead now, it’s not even ahead. While it’s still a strong group (stars and scrubs is a legit strategy in Auction drafts), it’s only joint second alongside Max and behind Ben ($230). The gap from these three to 4th and 5th is only 20 dollars too.
Even more of a drop than Chris’ WRs are Ian’s RBs drop from the highest value group to third, behind Mike ($196) and Pete ($219). Who’ve topped the last two drafts, showing that rookie value.
Meanwhile, in terms of overall value… it’s actually pretty tight: Chris leads at 460, but 7 teams are above 414 dollars (90% of Chris’ value). Only Neil, once again let down by his receivers, T2 and the Commish are not in this group.
As I mentioned earlier, one big difference between ADP and AAV is that AAV allows us to compare what someone would pay for someone this year, with what we are paying for someone this year, so we can look at value – both best and worst – in this case, expressed in terms of salary as a percentage of AAV (i.e. lower is better value)
| Team | Value | RB value | WR value | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Squad | Starters | Starters | Starters | |
| Dyna Hard | 51.2% | 36.7% | 52.7% | 37.1% |
| Kelkowski | 59.4% | 56.5% | 34.0% | 92.1% |
| Brees | 47.6% | 36.1% | 29.2% | 53.7% |
| Champions | 47.7% | 40.1% | 49.8% | 45.4% |
| Losers | 58.3% | 53.4% | 62.3% | 78.5% |
| Sadness | 82.9% | 90.9% | 79.7% | 120.6% |
| Bombermen | 67.0% | 49.9% | 47.1% | 84.4% |
| Tamworth Two | 82.4% | 84.4% | 110.5% | 65.9% |
| Dungeoneers | 87.3% | 72.8% | 20.1% | 163.4% |
| Hawkeman | 93.2% | 85.3% | 79.4% | 127.9% |
OK, I’m going to start to try and say less as this is already quite long, but some highlights… T2 are the only team paying over 100% of their AAV for their RBs. It’s tough to do, but congrats. Benefitting from back to back 1st picks spent on RBs, the dungeoneers are paying a league-low 20.1%.
At receiver the opposite is true, the dungeoneers are paying a whopping 163.4% of the market values of their receiver. The Sadness are also paying over the odds at receiver and so are the Hurricanes, tough break when they’ve such a low value, but with others where you might be overpaying one or two individuals and driving total salary up (say hello DeAndre Hopkins) in Neil’s case it’s more that people don’t value what he has, so any sort of salary looks like an overpay.
Lastly, the Dungeoneers (87.3%) and Hurricanes (93.2%), led by those high cost receiver groups have the least discount on their offensive squad, though neither is overpaying vs AAV overall. Pete’s cheaper starting group (72.8%) means that he drops out of the top two for starters, replaced by the Sadness who go straight to number one with a bullet (90.9%).
At the other end of the scale, The Brees have the best value overall group and starting group just ahead of Chris by 0.6% for starters, while the Champions are only 0.1% behind in the total offence.
The two things that seem to have the biggest impacts on this are having young receivers who’ve got a good season or two under their belt but are, still on their rookie deal, (Lamb, Chase, Jefferson) or box-fresh rookie RBs (Harris, Walker). Although, as this last table shows, the best value is not always where you’d expect it (in fact, it almost never is):
| Team | MVP! MVP! MVP! | Least Valuable Player |
|---|---|---|
| Dyna Hard | Kenny Pickett | Jalen Raegor |
| Kelkowski | Jalen Hurts | Curtis Samuel |
| Brees | Trey Hendrickson | Darius Slayton |
| Champions | Jaquan Brisker(!) | Quintez Cephus |
| Losers | Justin Herbert | Anthony Schwartz |
| Sadness | Cole Holcomb | Trey Sermon |
| Bombermen | Demarcus Lawrence | DJ Chark (doo doo do do do do) |
| Tamworth Two | Justin Jefferson | Odell Beckham |
| Dungeoneers | Joe Burrow | DeAndre Hopkins |
| Hawkeman | Malik Willis | N’Keal Harry |
Of course, value is ultimately a measure of what people are willing to pay for a player, it’s not indicative of how they’ll actually perform. The wisdom of the crowd has C-Mac’s one working hamstring as a top two pick by ADP and the highest value player overall (in PPR formats), so I’m not sure how far to trust it anyway, but if nothing else, it offers an interesting insight into who’s got what would be considered the ‘best’ teams at this point and the best position groups. Meanwhile, should we pass a emergency rule that Chris and Neil should swap receiver groups?
