Excel draft template is back for 2024

As I've done for the past few years, I've updated my template in preparation for this year's drafts.

What is it?

An Excel-driven template to use during drafts, with easy-to-read color-coding that tracks by player ranking, position, and availability.

Why use it?

There are two problems I've had while drafting:

1. I have less trust in single-source rankings than in aggregations, so using just Yahoo's or Sleeper's streaming "here are the ranked remaining players" scroll while drafting doesn't really cut it.
2. I prefer to look a few rounds ahead to see who's been drafted and who hasn't.

Data source

The guys that created Fantasy Football Tiers did a great service: they've applied standard deviations to aggregated ADPs and projected stats to define groupings. I wanted to make it into a practical, useful tool during my drafts, since the site isn't well-suited to use as a live reference during a draft. It's definitely too hard to read/interpret under the pressure of the countdown clock.

I've used their aggregate data to identify player tiers. Each row represents a tier of consensus opinion, with the left-most name the most highly prized. Each name within a row is statistically more likely to perform similarly to one another than to the tiers above or below.

The idea is to just pick the left-most name that's on highest row on the list. There's no positional strategy implied, only a ranking of the best players for each scoring type (standard vs. half vs. full).

How to use it

The first tab shows you the tiers, with settings available in the top row for Scoring, Position and Team.

As each player is drafted, I find that player in the second ("Rankings") tab and put an "X" in the "Taken" column. This then shows me who's still available in the first tab.

Color-coded rankings, with CMC, Hill, JJ, and Puka already taken

This let me focus on the remaining players and their tiers. I find this much more useful than just looking at the top-bottom rankings of available players shown in the draft itself. I didn't entirely stick to that script, but it was really useful in guiding my thinking.

You can find the tool in the comments (I can't post a shortened URL). I'll update this weekly until the first game.