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Top
Quarterback or Quarterback Tandem? One
of the questions that many fantasy football players ask themselves is when to draft their
quarterback. Many sites suggest waiting before drafting your quarterback because there is
generally good value in later rounds. In our Ultimate
Draft Strategy Article
we came to the conclusion that drafting Tom Brady or Peyton Manning in the first two
rounds will generally weaken you too much at other positions but Tony Romo and Drew Brees
could be good selections in the third or fourth round. Some owners like to draft their
quarterback in rounds five or six which is not our favorite strategy because many of those
disappoint. We discovered in our article on draft strategy that quarterbacks in the 13 to
16 range usually have very good value because many of them surprise and owners usually
wait before drafting their backup quarterbacks. There are some risky picks in that range
however so this made us thought: what if we selected two quarterbacks in that 13 to 16
range to increase our chances of finding a big sleeper and reduce the risk of being left
without a starter? In the following article we will compare the strategy of drafting a top
quarterback with a below average backup to the strategy of drafting two quarterbacks in
the 13 to 16 range. For
this analysis we used average draft position statistics since 2000. The first step is to
look at how many total points your best quarterback would have averaged in the past eight
seasons had you always gone with the strategy of drafting the third or fourth best
quarterback and a below average backup (19th to 24th best). There were twelve different
possibilities in each season (3 and 19, 3 and 20, 3 and 21 and so on…). The following
table shows the average number of points you could have expected from your best starting
quarterback in each season in a scoring system that gives 1 point per 20 yards, 4 pts per
TD pass and deducts 1 pt for each INT:
The
average points your best starting quarterback would have had is 295 over the last eight
years which is a decent increase from the 283 that the third and fourth quarterbacks
drafted average since 2000. The additional 12 points come from years in which the third or
fourth quarterback drafted disappointed and the quarterback you drafted to be your backup
outperformed him. We then did the same thing for the strategy of drafting any two
quarterbacks in the 13 to 16 range in each season. There were six possibilities in each
season (13 and 14, 13 and 15, 16 and 16 and so on…) so we have presented the yearly
averages as well as the average over eight seasons in the following table:
As
you can see the average over eight seasons is 280.7 points which is only 14.3 points
behind the strategy of drafting a top quarterback and a below average backup. More
importantly, the average points for the 13th to 16th quarterbacks drafted since 2000 is
240 which means that you increase the number of points you can expect from your starting
quarterback by 41 points simply by drafting a good backup. At this point it may seem that
the top quarterback strategy is better but an important element is that this season Brees
and Romo are being drafted in the third round while quarterbacks 13 to 16 are being
selected in rounds nine and ten. This means that you are only giving up 14.3 points on
average by selecting your quarterbacks in the ninth and tenth round as opposed to the
third and twelfth or thirteenth round. This seems like an interesting strategy but there
are a few more aspects that we need to consider before coming to a conclusion. |
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