Why in fantasy football do the overall rankings of the players not match up with their projected points?

Question

If you go to a yahoo fantasy football league and look at the projected points they differ greatly from the players rank. For example adrian peterson of the vikings is the second ranked running back, but when you organize them by points he becomes like the seventh ranked. that makes no sense to me....

Answer 1

This is an age old question.  It is all about the relative value of a player.

Your goal is to ourscore you opponent.

Let's explain this with an example:

TEAM A

Player - fantasy points

Tony Romo = 30

Earnest Graham = 12

Terrell Owens = 21

TEAM B

Phillip Rivers = 27

Frank Gore = 25

Greg Jennings = 16

Here you can see that the QBs scored the most points (30 and 27).  However, you also see that the RB on Team B far outscored the RB on Team.  Once the WR come in at about the same level, you see that the team with the less impressive QB won the week 68 - 63.

The key is about point differential.  Sure Tom Brady makes great sense because he will score a lot of points.  The question you have to ask yourself is: "Will Brady and the RB I have to take later score more points than the RB I could take in the 1st round and the QB I can get later?"

Maybe you are better off taking a top RB early (who scores less points than the QBs) and then taking your QB later.  If the point differential is large between the top players at a position and the last players taken at a position, then you have a valuable position.  This is what happens with RBs.  Tomlinson and Peterson score so many more points than the 20th RB (which will start in most leagues) that you want to take those guys and then grab a QB later.  The Top QBs and the 10th QB (most leagues don't start 2 QBs) don't have as much of a fantasy point differential.

Another example is kickers.  They can score a lot of points.  However, there isn't much difference between the first kicker taken in a fanatsy draft and the 12th kicker taken.  That ends up making kickers not very valuable.

Things get interesting when you have diferent numbers of player that have to start or different scoring.  (i.e. start 2 QBs)  Rankings players by position is easy.  You just make stats and calculate points.  The hard part is blending different positions together in a manner that helps you build the best team.

Answer 2

Because QB's will dominate the projections, because they score more points. The reason they are not drafted as such is because there is not as much pt differential between the 4th qb and the 10th qb. But the 4th rb or wr to the 10th at their respective position is a greater dropoff. Only Manning and Brady are relative locks to put up huge numbers in most people's opinion.