Kevin Szafraniec analyzes the past six years of best ball ADP data in the Win Rate Explorer and compares it against wide receiver PPR scoring to find out how accurately drafters are predicting team depth charts prior to the season.
While reviewing best ball stacks in my previous article, I found that there was a pretty significant drop-off in success rates for stacks that feature wide receivers who were being drafted as the third and fourth options on their teams compared to the players who were being selected as WR1s and WR2s.
The simplest reason behind this decline is that WR3s and WR4s just aren’t as good as the players at the top of their depth charts. But that can’t be the complete explanation, because these players are also much cheaper. Of course, the fact that they are on the field less means the stack with the QB is less effective. That still doesn’t fully explain why they would perform below expectation — the implication of the win rate data is that it would be preferable to pair a QB with WRs from different teams who are being drafted in the same range (or avoid WRs altogether in this range).
But what if the fantasy community simply isn’t very good at projecting teams’ depth charts leading up to the season?
That is precisely what I am setting out to answer today. For this exercise, we will be using the past six years of ADP data from the Best Ball Win Rate Explorer and combining it with the PPR data from the RotoViz Screener for Weeks 1-17 of the 2020-2025 seasons. (One very important detail that we must take into account is that the Screener assigns players to the teams they were on when they finished the season, so there will be some discrepancies for players who switched teams at some point during the year.) In total, we have a sample that consists of 192 NFL teams and 1,312 WRs — 613 who carried an ADP in FFPC best ball slim leagues and 699 who went undrafted.
Before we get into the data, it is important to note that not all of the results come down to pure talent. Obviously, injuries will always play a part in any discussion. Additionally, best ball drafts aren’t always about projecting depth charts as much as they are about searching for upside and late-season breakouts. But the information is still actionable and should provide signal as to our ability as a community to properly predict how each season will shake out.
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