One of the most popular talking points each NFL offseason is the disproportionate production of rookies. Many rookies start the season slow and finish strong as they get acclimated to the NFL game. The disproportionate production is easy to show in terms of raw points per game scored, but it’s more difficult to quantify their true value to a team. When you include price and scoring variance, which are particularly important in best ball, how do the rookies stack up?
In this week’s Best Ball Mania IV (BBM4) Advance Rate Review, we’re going to be looking at current advance rates for all of the rookies. While this won’t be a full investigation of the value of rookies in best ball, it will be a first look to help us form a hypothesis to be tested at a later date. If the market is correctly pricing rookies, we should see mostly below average advance rates from them as a cohort right now. We’d then expect those advance rates to climb over the back half of the regular season as rookie scoring picks up.
Each visualization shows all rookies at a given position by their final Underdog ADP and current advance rate. The red dashed line denotes an average advance rate of 16.67%. Players with advance rates above that line are colored in green, players below the line in red. I will only include players drafted at least 100 times.
