Two of the projects that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time working on are the Draft Dashboard (DD) and the Range of Outcomes app (ROO). Both tools are focused on helping redraft managers maximize their chances of winning in the coming season.

The 2021 version of the DD was recently released. In a nutshell, it’s a drafting tool that helps users to keep track of all pertinent information in a draft by organizing and summarizing information in a way that facilitates efficient and confident decision-making. The tool centers on using RotoViz tiers to track the quality of available players while at the same time considering league-specific settings, and the makeup of other teams in the draft. This allows the tool to guide a user’s drafting process. The tool comes equipped with an intensive user guide and I recorded a tutorial on using it last year.

The ROO uses historical data and player-specific results from recent seasons to visualize a realistic set of expectations for a player’s upcoming season. Said differently, the tool reviews a player’s recent production to match him to players from historical seasons. The fantasy output of these matching players in their subsequent seasons can then be plotted in a distribution that gives users an idea of what can be reasonably expected from a player. For example, the image below plots the per-game PPR distribution of Alvin Kamara’s matches.

The highest number of matching players scored approximately 12.5 to 17.5 points. More importantly, the distribution is right-skewed. This means that more of his matches outscored the densest part of his distribution. Last summer, I wrote about why distributions matter and how we should think about upside, but suffice it to say we want players with right-skewed distributions that are heavily concentrated above the densest part of their distribution. In that article, I overviewed historical distribution scores (HDS) which are a way to encapsulate a player’s distribution into a single number.

Practice Makes Perfect

With the above in mind, I used the mock draft capability of the DD to build a high-upside team with probability on its side.

Draft Settings

Number of Teams: 12

Rosters: 1QB, 2RB, 2WR, 1TE, 2FLEX (RB/WR/TE), 1DST, 1K, 10 BENCH

League Scoring: PPR/TE Premium

League Provider: FFPC

Draft Pick: 9

To account for these league-specifics, I entered the following into the settings tab of the DD:

While we do love Zero-RB at RotoViz, I wanted to illustrate what a more balanced team might look like. I did so by allocating my team preferences in a fairly equal fashion.

Finally, I opted to draft against teams that used a mixed bag of approaches.

Round 1

My first pick of the draft presented an interesting dilemma. There were two Tier 1 RBs available and a single Tier 1 TE. Given the abundance of top-level players at WR, there was no need to consider the position in my selected approach.