Tiered Rankings

Positional Rankings are a great way to compile your rankings to decide when scarcity in a position is running short. However, in order to fully utilize these rankings, you must break them up into tiers. Here you can find my tiered positional rankings.

How did I come up with these ranks?

I first took my top 250 players list and sorted by position. I then broke the positions up into groups based on their numerical value only. Group A was players 1-20 (aka rounds 1 and 2 in a ten team league), Group B was players 21-40 (rounds 3 and 4), Group C was players 41-60 (rounds 5 and 6), Group D was players 61-100 (rounds 7-10), Group E was players 101-150 (rounds 11-15), Group F was players 151-200 (rounds 16-20) and Group G was players 201-250 (rounds 21-25). After dividing players up by numerical value, I went through and made any minor adjustments I thought were necessary to finalize the groups.

Why is this valuable?

Not only is it helpful on draft day to spot when a position is running dry, but it is a helpful tool to analyze your own player rankings. If two players that are considered to be fairly equal value have vastly different status in the groups then you know you need to fix something. In this exercise, I was using the rankings that I completed long enough ago that there has been a lot of movement since then. In this case, I did not make any changes to my list because this is just to demonstrate how valuable grouping your players can be. The only thing I did was to remove Taylor Tankersley because it does not appear he is the front runner for the closers job (he appeared at # 229 in my original rankings). Rankings will also help you not reach for players too early.

What do the groupings show?

These groups confirm many of the things I have been stressing all season long. The first thing that jumped out at me was the catcher scarcity. The whole year I have been stressing to not take your catcher too early. As you will see, that is backed up by the groups. The next is my 2B theory. Utley is the only player in Tier A, there is no one in Tier B, 2 2B in Tier C and then everyone else follows. It just goes to show that if you don’t draft Utley, you might as well wait as long as possible to get your 2B. The next note-able point is that the SS groupings are exactly as I would expect them to be. They are front heavy and then tail off significantly after group B. If you don’t get a SS from group C or higher, you are going to struggle from the SS position. Again, my waiting on 3B strategy was re-confirmed. There are 5 3B in group A and B combined, 0 in group C and then 10 in groups D and E. On the pitching side, Santana is the only Tier A starter and no RP appears before Tier C with a lot of value at the end of the draft in both the SP and RP groups.

I strongly suggest that you take your own rankings and break them up into tiers. It will not only help you on draft day but it will help you become a much more knowledgeable fantasy player. Grouping players is something that experts have been doing for a long time but many regular fantasy players don’t do because they don’t recognize its importance. It takes less than an hour and can help you get much more value out of your draft.

Again, the Groupings can be found here and as always, please post any questions or comments or feel free to email them to me.