How much is a FFPC dynasty roster spot worth? Or how much should it be worth? Has anyone really tried to come up with a quantitative measure that can be actionable in some way when we are managing our dynasty rosters? We have trade calculators, rankings, projections, all customizable by league settings (for the most part). But roster spots are largely ignored. When a trade is made that involves a two-for-one player exchange, a roster spot has been cleared for one owner. Or perhaps two spots in a three-for-one, although those kinds of deals are rarer.
Here Is An Initial Crack At A Possible Framework Methodology To Assess This
This is going to be back-of-the-cocktail-napkin stuff. I believe this question of roster spot value is a major blind spot in the fantasy football (FF) dynasty community, and it will take a community research effort to ever really fine-tune this as an actionable metric, or alternatively to conclude that a roster spot is not inherently worth enough to worry about. I am simply going to present a very coarse and rough first dive into this. Maybe others will like it and do some deeper dives. That is the way the scientific method is supposed to work. Not that we’re doing science here, but the crowdsourcing of research can be a powerful tool. We’ll see if this develops into something.
My hypothesis would be more or less that roster spots are worth considerably more than zero. Especially in shallower leagues, like FFPC where we only carry 20 players in-season and only 16 in the offseason, including the kicker and defense. The rough estimates I’m going to present for roster spot value are likely to be significantly diluted in leagues with larger roster limits.
In a previous article, I introduced the concept of dynasty franchise value, which is loosely defined as the sum of individual player and draft pick values, or all keepable assets. These individual player values represent a combination of trade value and presumed career-to-go production advantage.
To give a quick example, I have Russell Wilson (QB – SEA) as being worth 35 points in this system, Juju Smith-Schuster (WR – PIT) as worth 19, and Tyler Higbee (TE – LAR) worth 8 in the FFPC SuperFlex format, which I should remind readers is also TE premium where they get 1.5 PPR. I recently traded that trio for Darren Waller (TE – LV) and a 2022 first-round pick. I have Waller worth 40 and the pick as 15-25. Some think I got blasted in this trade, others liked it. I don’t really GAF but I did manage to clear two roster spots here on a team that is coming off a championship in its inaugural 2020 season. If I manage to pick up the 2021 version of James Robinson (RB – JAX) in any waiver run this year, I had him worth 25 at the end of the 2020 season. I bumped him down to 12 after the Jaguars drafted Travis Etienne (RB – JAX).
Hitting A Home Run Off Waivers Seems Like The Ceiling Here
I don’t always land studs in waiver pickups (or in targeted throw-ins during trades), but when I do, the value profit is real and tangible and it strongly suggests that a roster spot should have a real and quantitative value much greater than zero. At least at the ceiling.
Don’t make me tell Chuck Norris jokes. Ok fine, when Chuck Norris goes swimming he doesn’t get wet, the water gets Chuck Norris. YW.
I cannot stress enough how stringent the FFPC roster limits are in regards to roster flexibility. If the ceiling in this exercise is 25, then the floor is maybe less than zero. I have 29 FFPC dynasty teams and as of my latest review of their strengths and weaknesses, I have only three or four squads that face really stiff cuts. I am doing pretty good overall, but in one league I am most likely going to be forced to cut perennially undervalued players like T.Y. Hilton (WR – IND), Jarvis Landry (WR – CLE), and a couple of others with value. It is a little dire.
I Will Be Cutting Players That Hold Trade And Production Value
I think I have to call that negative value if that scenario plays out. There is thankfully a lot of time still, and training camp is surely going to wreak havoc on depth charts as it always does. I am allowed to stash three players on IR come week one, so I haven’t lost anything on paper yet. But I feel comfortable saying the floor of a roster spot value estimate is a complete loss of a player and therefore equal to the (negative) value of that player before the cut.
In many cases, the value should probably be zero, as in weeks where you are just dropping a kicker to pick up another kicker, for example. But if I haven’t hammered this enough, what do you do if you don’t have flexibility in your roster to make room for a bye-week fill-in at QB, TE, K, or DEF? If you have first-world problems and your roster is loaded, this becomes a realistic possibility. I would never recommend carrying just one QB or just one TE, and frankly sometimes consider how much I want to hold onto a kicker such as Justin Tucker (K – BAL) or Harrison Butker (K – KC) and whether I could afford to roster two kickers through one bye week. Or maybe I have the 2019 New England Patriots D/ST unit and don’t want to drop them.
Would You Rather Take A Zero At A Position Or Pick Someone Up?
I see stacked championship-caliber teams make the decision to take a zero rather often and by active and sharp owners. Who are you going to cut? On a week-to-week basis, and depending on what the standings look like, maybe it makes sense to just punt rather than give up a player with value. I see it all the time. It is far less than ideal but a legitimate quandary.
Speculative plays are an interesting twist here. In addition to being able to manage bye weeks, I want to be able to stash a couple of players and hold onto them with their longer-term development in mind. It is so difficult to accomplish that in this format. However, I think dynasty formats tend to really punish the inactive owner, and owners who don’t churn their rosters regularly find themselves holding the bag on older players whose values have tumbled. And they cut developmental players who ended up hitting. Why didn’t they keep them? Because they didn’t have the roster flexibility to do so.
I give my speculative players something in the neighborhood of three to seven value points in my system
It is almost insignificant and possibly within the margin of error of market consensus. You have to have the right buyer as they say. I can usually get something like a future second or third-round rookie pick for these kinds of players. Maybe less. I love to throw them in bigger deals, and I love to target similarly valued players coming back to me if they are “my guys.”
Let’s Define Some Parameters And Range Of Estimates Here
I’m not going to give any value to kickers or defense because you really should just drop them one-for-one when the time comes. So at its simplest, a roster spot should simply be 1/14 at one cutdown limit. That is ~7%. QBs score the most and many of these leagues I’m talking about are SuperFlex, like the Wilson trade I mentioned above. It is also TE premium. Maybe QB and TE roster spots are inherently more valuable. Maybe starters are inherently more valuable. If we assume that I am keeping a couple of spots open for the purpose of flexibility, then it might be plausible to define it as 1/12 instead of 1/14. At one extreme end of the range of estimates anyway. That would be ~8% before weight adjusting for other positions.
I think 5% is perhaps a good starting place for a rough estimate of a back-of-the-bench roster spot. I have several very strong and competitive teams where my lowest rated player has a value of ~10 and the franchise values are around a ~280 point average. This means that if my 5% estimate were to be used, the cheapest roster spot would be worth ~14 points, or more than my cheapest player who isn’t a kicker or defense.
Conclusions?
I feel comfortable saying that clearing a roster spot in this format is worth something in the neighborhood of five to ten Franchise Points. It can often be zero if a replacement player doesn’t hit, or it can be a very valuable one or two-week fill-in that allows your team to win matchups, which is more important than any market value on paper. So what can we say about this approach? This range is perhaps a decent estimate to drill into for further research.
I will be writing a piece soon regarding the hit rate of rookie picks in this format, which is a major component of the Speculative Player estimates in the table above. If I were going to take this a step further I would want to know more about the nature of a roster spot on a team that is neither stacked nor rebuilding, but rather stuck in the dynasty fantasy purgatory that is being a middle of the road, competitive team that is getting older. That is what I like to call a mediocre team. Rotting from the inside. I suspect these teams are full of players that have some production value still but their franchise player values are less than that of a roster spot, but they don’t know it. I’m looking at you, Melvin Gordon and Robby Anderson owners.
More answers are needed on this subject but I hope this triggers some ideas among the crowd.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to reach out to me to chat about fantasy football on Twitter @Ship_Chaser and follow along with me on my journey as I chase six-figure paydays! Look for my new articles soon!
