This article is part of our NFL Draft series.
If you're a fan of the NFL Draft and want to shorten your fantasy football offseason, PlayTheDraft.com has a free NFL Draft fantasy game that could strike your interest.
Have you ever suspected that you might know more than the so-called draft experts? PlayTheDraft gives you the chance to prove it, assembling a marketplace where players are exchanged like stocks, with the players' price correlating to their projected draft placement. If you play the market right, you'll increase the value of your player fund over time, buying undervalued players while selling off the players whose values have peaked.
Following the day-to-day news is important. You want to make sure you're in position to buy up the Byron Joneses and Breshad Perrimans of the world once they make waves with their workout numbers, because the price is going up tomorrow. Similarly, if you owned Randy Gregory early in the draft process, you would want to sell him off once the news of his failed drug test broke.
The final value of your fund is determined by the draft itself, when your player stocks are cashed in according to where that player is selected in the draft order. So for instance, if you bought stock in Blake Bortles back in February last year, your fund would have reaped a nice return after Bortles' draft stock surged all the way up to the third overall pick. With PlayTheDraft, you get rewarded not only for being correct, but also for being correct first. You can compete in a private league of friends or join one of the many public leagues assembled on the site.
I set up a PlayTheDraft fund Monday, joining the Senior Bowl-sponsored league. When you start a new fund, the site assigns you a group of player stocks to comprise your initial fund. You can choose to keep or sell any of the included players from that point. I was assigned Leonard Williams ($3,886,667), Alvin Dupree ($2,037,333), Andrus Peat ($1,608,667), Eric Kendricks ($1,311,000), Eli Harold ($1,142,000), Devin Smith ($970,667) and Nelson Agholor ($785,533) to start out.
I first took a look at Williams, who was easily my most expensive player. His dollar count checks in at second overall in PlayTheDraft's stock valuation, behind only Jameis Winston ($4,250,000), so I concluded there wasn't much growth potential in Williams' stock. Indeed, I think there's a good chance he falls to fourth overall in the draft order, so selling Williams was the easy move. With my $3,886,667 in new spending money, I chose to buy up a number of cheaper players whose stocks still had room to rise.
It didn't take me long to find my first target: Clemson DE/OLB Vic Beasley. With a dollar figure of $3,176,667, Beasley is the sixth-ranked player on the trading floor. Beasley will go higher than the sixth pick, so I know I'll make a profit down the road by adding him now. Plus, I saw his price was down $44,762 for the day, making him an obvious buy-low target.
Peat (20th), Kendricks (27th) and Smith (42nd) all struck me as maxed out, so I sold them off and aimed for bargain risers like Breshad Perriman ($1,211,000/33rd), Byron Jones ($836,333/48th), Devin Funchess ($738,933/59th), Danielle Hunter ($686,467/65th), Bryce Petty ($590,667/80th) and Garrett Grayson ($550,667/97th). I decided to stick with Dupree (13th), Harold (36th) and Agholor (56th) a while longer.
After one day, my fund value jumped from the default value of $12,000,000 up to $12,039,901 – a gain of $39,901. The value of your fund is recalculated each day when PlayTheDraft assigns adjusted values to the players. The pricing algorithm shifts prices each day depending on "consensus predictions" about which players will go where, so the prices theoretically mirror the changes in public opinion as they occur. The prices also seem affected by the ownership percentages of each player's stock. For example, my most-improved player stock was that of Dupree, whose value increase of $32,042 occurred alongside an ownership increase of 1.6 percent. My worst performing stock, on the other hand, was that of Vic Beasley, whose decrease of $32,917 came with an ownership decrease of 1.0 percent.
The $39,901 increase was a good gain, but as the Beasley example showed, not all of my investments profited overnight. Indeed, five of my 10 stocks actually lost value. The gains were fueled by Dupree (+32,042), Jones (+31,167), Agholor (+23,092), Petty (+14,958) and Grayson (+3,771), while Perriman, Funchess, Beasley, Harold and Hunter combined to lose $65,129. It takes a lot of foresight and attention to detail to effectively anticipate the player value shifts, so temporary losses are to be expected. Knowing whether and when to jump ship is key to avoid making those losses permanent.
Come the draft, I suspect we'll see Perriman and Jones go in the first 20 picks, Funchess somewhere in the first round, Hunter not long afterward, and then Petty and Grayson in the second and third rounds, respectively. Will those payouts be enough to catapult me to the top of the leaderboard? Maybe. Of course, I need to be as right as I think I am for the question to come up in the first place. Maybe you can do better.
