An Introduction to Time-Weighted ADP

Average Draft Position (otherwise referred to as ADP) is truly one of the cornerstone pieces of DLF. Run at the beginning of every month by the amazing Ryan McDowell, it’s comprised usually of six mock dynasty league start-up drafts containing 12 participants each: a total of 72 participants! It is a fantastic source of truth for player values for the dynasty community as a whole.

DLF ADP has been running for over three years, which means there’s a vast amount of data available for essentially every player in the NFL. Here at DLF, we love creating innovative new perspectives on data to find new ways to look at player values. I’d like to formally introduce: Time-Weighted ADP.

Before we delve into this new way of looking at ADP, let’s first discuss one intricacy of ADP and why I feel Time-Weighted ADP could help you think about player value in a more complete way. Anyone who’s looked at ADP has surely asked the following question about a player:

“Why is his ADP so high/low? I have him ranked at X”.

This question is exactly what sparked my interest in formulating Time-Weighted ADP. One of the main flaws of ADP is commonly known; it is an average of the who values the players the highest in each of the six drafts. It only takes one person in a draft to be in love with a player and take him higher than the general consensus would.

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This reason is why you see players shoot up in ADP very, very quickly like Alvin Kamara and take a long time to fall i.e. Sammy Watkins. Any player’s ADP is only comprised of six of the 72 people in these mock drafts. It doesn’t matter if Joe valued Watkins at 57 overall if Mark valued him at 32 overall. In a situation where you have one Mark and eleven Joe’s in each draft, Watkins’ value will be misrepresented as it pertains to the majority of dynasty owners. Additionally, the same people aren’t drafting each month, so it can create a false value swing simply due to the participants.

I realize this might sound like an extreme scenario, but think about your own leagues for a second. Have you ever tried to trade someone off your team and no one in your league values him at what the DLF ADP has him valued at? I know I certainly have. The opposite can occur as well when trying to acquire players and having to pay more than ADP would suggest. Every league has its own types of owners, which creates a mini-ecosystem, if you will, in which your dynasty team lives in. I urge you to keep this idea on the forefront of your mind as you read through the rest of this article.

Time-Weighted ADP is pretty much exactly what the name implies. To put it simply, it takes a player’s ADP over the course of time and applies different weightings to past ADP to come up with, in my opinion, a more complete player value. Much like the NFL, Time-Weighted ADP takes a “What have you done for me lately?” mentality, but “lately” can go a little farther back than just one month. Especially with DLF’s monthly ADP, it’s difficult to remember players that had success a year ago but haven’t seen that same success this past NFL season. Jordan Matthews anyone? The opposite is very much true as well. Devin Funchess at one point last year had an ADP of 181 and now sits at 55. Which one is the true Funchess and Matthews?

More conservative dynasty players might still value Matthews at least on par with Funchess. They don’t forget that he was a consistent WR2/3 for the better part of three years while Funchess had yet to do anything. However, more aggressive dynasty owners don’t necessarily care that Matthews produced in the past; after all, Funchess had the better season by far. I want to make it clear I’m not arguing a side here, but these might be negotiations that go on in your leagues and are good examples of what Time-Weighted ADP attempts to solve.

I want to take a moment to thank you, the reader, for being so active in the dynasty community and for reading the article up to this point. Without you, DLF ADP would not exist as such a vital resource, and I would not have been as passionate to find a new method. Without further ado, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of Time-Weighted ADP and how you can apply it to your leagues.

Time-Weighted ADP applies different weightings to each month of a player’s ADP, with more recent months being more heavily weighted than previous ones. The timeframe used is a three-year window, so players who have been in the league for three or more years get the same weightings to each of the past 36 months. The weightings, of course, adjust if a player has been in the league for less than three years. For these players, the more recent months matter slightly more than for players who have been in the league longer. For rookies that just entered the data this month, their Time-Weighted ADP is simply just their ADP. This should hopefully be intuitive – the less data we have on a player, the more the most recent data matters!

I struggled for quite some time when developing the weighting system to use for Time-Weighted ADP. Should a player’s last six months count for 50% of his value? 75%? 90%? I posted my first run through of Time-Weighted ADP on Twitter, and the feedback I got was fantastic. It got me to realize that there isn’t one ideal weighting system, and so I’ve developed a grouping of different types of dynasty players and applied different weightings to each group.

Below are the five different groups of Time-Weighted ADP, the general weightings applied to each timeframe, and a short description of each. The weightings below aren’t the exact, to the decimal ones used in the model (for simplicity sake) but they give a general overview of what’s going on in the model! Think about these like: “50% of value comes from the last 6 months of player ADP and 30% came from the last three months, so months four-six account for 20% of a player’s value”. Let’s delve into the different buckets of dynasty owners.

Ultra Conservative

30% Last 3 Months (L3M), 50% L6M, 75% L12M, 100% else – The Ultra Conservative dynasty owner is the slowest to adjust player values both positively and negatively. This owner has a hard time letting go of proven studs of yesteryear and doesn’t want to overpay for the “next greatest thing”. Sure, what you’ve done lately is nice, but this owner’s more concerned with a full body of work.

Conservative

45% L3M, 70% L6M, 91% L12M, 100% else – Sitting between the Ultra Conservative and Moderate dynasty owners, the Conservative owner cares mostly about the recent past but also does take a moment to think about the player’s historical value. Definitely not as slow to adjust to the market as the Ultra Conservative, this owner is willing to take chances but will likely not be the one reaching for recent breakouts.

Moderate

68% L3M, 90% L6M, 99% L12M, 100% else – This is the middle-man of dynasty owner types. The Moderate owner takes a balanced approach of looking at recent player value as well as understanding where a player’s value stood six months ago. Not very concerned with past years’ production, this owner does tend to react quickly to sudden swings in value, but not as much as the Aggressive or Ultra Aggressive owner.

Aggressive

100% player’s current ADP – The Aggressive owner uses a rather simplistic approach to player value, simply looking at this past month’s ADP. Monthly ADP is occasionally prone to large swings from month-to-month, so this owner can be difficult to predict. This owner is afraid to miss the boat on the new players and afraid to stay on the boat too long with the old players. If current month’s ADP is your lone source of truth for dynasty player values, then you likely fall under this bracket.

Ultra Aggressive

Uses % difference in prior month ADP and current month ADP to try to predict market movement in the future – The Ultra Aggressive dynasty owner can be very savvy – sometimes to a fault. This owner looks at the past two months of ADP and attempts to predict the market by adjusting player values accordingly. To illustrate this, as it can be hard to picture, this owner would have looked at Jimmy Garoppolo’s December 2017 ADP of 147 and his January 2018 ADP of 104 and projected a bump to roughly 92 in February. This would have been fairly accurate for this owner, as Jimmy G’s new February ADP sits at 87. This is a very aggressive strategy to try to predict market shifts, and hence this owner can be classified as Ultra Aggressive.

Hopefully one of these five categories resonates with you or perhaps reminds you of a specific league-mate of yours. It certainly is not the case that you will feel one specific way about every player. On one player, you might take a more conservative approach on whereas on another you might try to be ultra-aggressive in pursuing. Understanding the owners in your league and where they might fall in these buckets can be invaluable when trying to present them trade offers. I know for me personally, I probably fall mostly in Conservative or Moderate. Which strategy do you agree with most? Comment below or find me on twitter @FFzinger to let me know!

So without further delay, I present to you: The Top 200 Players and their February 2018 Time-Weighted ADP (sorted by Aggressive, aka February 2018 ADP). If any player’s Time-Weighted ADP looks surprising to you, I encourage you to look back at some of DLF’s ADP from the past year. All the data I used is right on the ADP pages!

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Michael Zingone

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