If you've been playing fantasy football in the same league with the same basic group of owners for several years, you probably already have some vague notions of how each owner drafts. Mike is an Eagles fan and always drafts some Eagles. Joe loves the rookie running backs. Pat always drafts a TE early. These are very good insights that can really help you in this year's draft.

However, a more detailed examination of past drafts in your league can really uncover some hidden tendencies and allow you to dominate your draft this year. Two of the most important factors in assessing past drafts are what round was the first QB, TE, K and D taken by each owner and how many players from each position did that owner take? This knowledge can give you a huge advantage as you are in the process of drafting. There are some owners who love to draft QBs or TEs early. This can help you in round 3 as you assess whether to take another RB or to take your top choice at QB. If an owner or two who pick before your next pick are known to like to draft QBs early, you may want to grab that QB in the 3rd round and wait on the next RB.

There are also some owners who only like to pick 1 TE, K and D. They don't want to waste roster space on these positions when they can use the waiver wire to grab bye week replacements. This helps you in the 14th round when the owner before your next pick has already drafted a TE and K. You can be pretty sure that he will not pick another TE or K, so your best bet would be to draft a D in that round, ahead of the owner picking his D.

The best way that I have found to gather all this past draft information is in a spreadsheet. I create the spreadsheet with a vertical axis of Owner and Year in columns A and B. I then add a horizontal axis of Draft Rounds 1-18 in row 1. Now comes the hard part, finding all the raw data. Luckily, if you have used the same online league management site for several years, you can usually find all the past data. If you use MyFantasyLeague.com, they almost always keep past year's league sites on their servers. Go to the web site and use the Find League Site function for your league's name and past years and look for the Draft Report. Start with the most recent draft year and then work back into the past. For each year, put the position taken in each round for each owner into your spreadsheet. An example is shown here:

So we can see one drawback right away. Due to league turnover, Owner 2 has only been in the league one year and Owners 3 and 4 have only been in the league two years. But that is a limitation that we cannot avoid.

A further complication to this spreadsheet can be introduced by noting the draft position each owner had in each year. This can help for the first couple of rounds and clarify some decisions. For example, did Owner 1 draft a WR in the first round in 2002 from the 7th slot or the 11th slot? It may help understand why they chose that position. However, since this examination is only helpful for the first couple of rounds and since we do not have that owner's (or even a general) preseason ranking of the players for those past years, there are too many uncontrollable variables to include draft position in our analysis.

First Round of Position

The next thing to do with the data is to keep track of what round the owner first drafted a QB, TE, K and D in each year's draft. We do not check on RBs and WRs because they are so often drafted in the early rounds that there isn't much gained from this information for those positions. Add the QB, TE, K and D positions to row 1 on the horizontal axis and enter the first round that position was drafted, as shown below:

We can tell by a glance that Owner 1 picked every position pretty early in 2002, but generally has picked QBs early and Ks late. However we still need a reference point to compare and define what is early and what is late. So we need to take the average for all four of these columns for every owner-year combination. This will give us a league average for what round the QB, TE, K and D are first drafted.

Doing this calculation shows us that the average round a QB was first drafted was 4.78, TE was 9.49, K was 15.05 and D was 12.95.

We can pick out some individual examples of an owner having a large difference from average in individual years, such as Owner 2 picking a QB late in 2003 and Owner 3 picking a K late in 2002. But a better analysis would be to also average each owner's pick rounds over the course of their time in the league. This will give us a better idea of how an owner drafts on average and will give us a better reference point to the overall league average at each position. I have decided that a straight average is not as useful as a weighted average because owners generally change how they may draft from year to year and the latest year is probably the best indicator of how they will draft this year. So I weight the most recent year at 60%. If we have 3 years worth of data, we can weigh year 2002 at 25% and year 2001 at 15%. If we only have 2 years worth of data, we can weight year 2002 at 40%. An example with these averages is shown below:

So now let's compare the league average to each owner's average. The League QB average is 4.78. I like to give a range of +- 1.5 rounds to consider an owner's average to be normal. So any owner who averages a QB pick of 3.28 and less or 6.28 and more is outside of the range and worth noting. We only have one year's worth of data for Owner 2, but it is still worth noting that he picked a QB in a higher round than the League Average. To make this more visible in the spreadsheet, I'm going to mark this field with a Green Background. I will use a Yellow background to indicate an owner who picks a position much earlier than the league average.
To summarize, we will us the following ranges to define normal for each position:

QB = 3.28 to 6.28
TE = 7.99 to 10.99
K = 13.55 to 16.55
D = 11.45 to 14.45

So using the color backgrounds to mark the averages not in the normal range, our spreadsheet looks like this:

So we can see that Owners 1 and 3 tend to pick DTs earlier than normal. If I reach a point in my draft where I am questioning whether a DT would make it through to my next pick, I should keep in mind whether these two owners are going to draft before my next turn.
Also, I can see that Owners 2 and 4 tend to wait a little bit longer than average to pick a QB. This will help me judge when I need to pick a QB if these two are picking before my next pick.

Quantity of Position

Another useful tool in reviewing past drafts is to examine the number of players at each position that each owner drafted. Some owners always grab 3 QBs. Some only grab 1 DT, but 2 K and 2 TE. Knowing this ahead of time can really help you in your draft as you have to make dynamic decisions on what positions will be drafted before your next pick.

To do this, I continue the use of the spreadsheet and add columns for each position quantity out to the right of the horizontal axis, like shown below:

As with the First Round Drafted columns, I use the same weighted average formula to assess how many players at each position an owner is likely to draft.

Right away we can see some interesting and informative trends: Owner 1 almost always only drafts 1 TE, K and D; Owner 3 always seems to grab 2 DTs, but only 1 TE and K; owner 4 has only drafted 1 K and DT each year, but drafted 2 TEs last year. This analysis of the TE, K, and DT quantities can really help you understand what each owner is likely to do near the end of your draft.

A more intriguing analysis is to look at the QB, RB and WR positions. We can see that owners generally draft 2-3 QBs, 5-6 RBs, and 5-6 WRs. But it is very useful to note that owner 1 picks less RBs and more WRs than average and that he picked 4 QBs last year. It is also interesting to note that Owner 4 has taken 3 QBs each year. That may give us some critical insight late in the draft when we need to decide to draft that young QB in the 15th or 16th round. If Owner 4 only has 2 QBs on his roster, it's a good bet that he will draft another QB soon.

There are two important things to note in using this technique.

1. As the Financial Industry puts so well, past results are not a guarantee of future performance. Owners can and do change their mind from year to year and adjust their draft style depending on how the draft goes. In fact, good owners should be adjusting their draft strategy to fit the current draft. But not all of them do and that's where this spreadsheet can really help you.
2. The wonderful Draft Dominator does have a Dynamic VBD "position look ahead" function in it already. But that function is based on average draft positions and does not take into account what the owners in your league have been doing for the last 3 or 4 years.

So take the time to build a spreadsheet like this charting the past draft strategies of your fellow owners and use that information to "steal" other owners picks during the draft and dominate your league!