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This is not exactly the article to read for a bold take. Instead it gives you, the fantasy football team owner, the best visualization of how impactful each position is from all others in terms of fantasy football win percentage and optimal draft standing.
Overall, WAR standings going back to 2015 are consistent with general hierarchy of position importance: RB > WR > TE > QB > DST > K. The graph below visualizes this by illustrating the prevalence (or density) of fantasy team win expectancy based on the top-50 performances of each position in 2018.
As you can see, a large spike for kickers between 60 and around 65 percent shows that a large majority of the top-50 kicker performances were less impactful than top-50 performances at all other positions. It’s pretty pathetic. On the other hand, top-50 RB performances gave fantasy teams close to averaging an 80 percent chance of winning a match-up and WRs weren’t far behind. After creating this graph for the past four years, the results were remarkably consistent as shown above in 2018.
This order of position importance can also be visualized by plotting each position’s earned draft pick standings for the first five rounds for 2018. In the gif below, 2018 WAR results for each position of the first five rounds are separated to illustrate the hierarchy of position importance:
2018 WAR Frequency of Position for First Five Rounds
Good to see kickers providing at least one delegate representative to make the list. No wonder they are draft day afterthoughts. Not only are individual kickers comically unreliable year-over-year, but even out of 32 teams only one was able to manage being worth a round five or better selection. But that one might be worth aiming your sights on.
While the hierarchy will surprise no one, this gives fantasy owners the first real visualization of the extent to which positions differ. RB’s simply ruled the first round in 2018, but as you can tell, there were outliers in other positions that might just require your attention on draft day.
For more on positional WAR results from 2018:
-El Jefe
