The RotoWire Online Championship is an NFBC league with a $350 entry fee, 12-team, 5x5 leagues and a $100K grand prize. A substantial portion of your entry fee goes toward the overall prize pool - you win only $1,500 for first place in your individual league - so it's imperative to draft with the overall competition in mind. That means balance across all 10 categories as this is a no-trade format (for obvious reasons.) To that end, I ran some numbers from recent seasons to see how much one would need in each category to contend for the overall.
Here's the first table, giving us a sense of how high you'd have to score in every category to win the entire contest:
| Year (#of tms) | 2017 (1788) | % | 2016 (1632) | % | 2015 (1500) | % | AVG% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 16734.5 | 93.6% | 14668.5 | 89.9% | 13720.5 | 91.5% | 91.6% |
| 2nd | 16459 | 92.1% | 14637 | 89.7% | 13425.5 | 89.5% | 90.4% |
| 3rd | 16288 | 91.1% | 14623 | 89.6% | 13329 | 88.9% | 89.9% |
| 4th | 15923 | 89.1% | 14448 | 88.5% | 13087.5 | 87.3% | 88.3% |
| 5th | 15676 | 87.7% | 14106 | 86.4% | 13070 | 87.1% | 87.1% |
Last year had more teams than ever (1,788), and the winning team had an almost impossible 93.6 percent of the possible overall points. We've talked about aiming for 80 percent in the NFBC's smaller and higher stakes Main Event contest with roughly 500 people, but 80 percent doesn't get you anywhere close to the overall here. This is the season-long equivalent of a GPP.
You can see in previous seasons you didn't have to do quite that well, and there's even a precipitous drop last year from third to fourth and fourth to fifth, i.e., the first-place score might be an outlier.
I averaged the first place scores from the last three years, and it's still pretty high - 91.6% of all the category points. Let's use that as our target and take a look what it takes category by category to get there:
| 1788 Teams | 80% | 85% | 90% | 91.6% | 93.6% | 100% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avg. needed | 1430.4 | 1519.8 | 1609.2 | 1637.8 | 1673.6 | 1788 |
| HR | 340 | 346 | 353 | 356 | 360 | 406 |
| RBI | 1101 | 1114 | 1130 | 1136 | 1145 | 1249 |
| R | 1126 | 1139 | 1154 | 1160 | 1170 | 1258 |
| SB | 150 | 155 | 162 | 164 | 168 | 217 |
| AVG | 272.6 | 274.1 | 0.2759 | 0.2766 | 0.2776 | 297.9 |
| W | 99 | 101 | 103 | 104 | 106 | 131 |
| K | 1435 | 1460 | 1486 | 1495 | 1507 | 1688 |
| ERA | 3.735 | 3.68 | 3.606 | 3.573 | 3.534 | 3.102 |
| WHIP | 1.222 | 1.212 | 1.198 | 1.193 | 1.183 | 1.091 |
| SAVES | 91 | 94 | 99 | 100 | 102 | 132 |
In subsequent posts, I'll break down what it takes roster-wise to hit these numbers, but it's a tall order to get to that ~91.6 percent average to win the entire contest.
Note also how wide the gap is from 93.6 and 100, i.e., there's very little category bang for the buck on the tail end of the bell curve, so it's important not to overspend in any one category. For example, going from 346 homers (1520 points in the category) to 360 (1674) gets you 154 more points on just 14 more HR, but going from 360 to 406 homers gets you only 114 more points.