← Research · Above Replacement
Every August the industry publishes rankings; every January nobody checks them. We did: preseason expert-consensus draft boards for eight seasons (2015, 2018, 2020–2025 — several recovered from the Internet Archive after their URLs were overwritten), scored against what players actually did, position by position.
| Position | Rank↔result correlation (pooled) | Read |
|---|---|---|
| WR | 0.58 | Reliable — trust the board |
| RB | 0.54 | Reliable — trust the board |
| TE | 0.42 | Decent, noisier |
| QB | 0.37 | Volatile but real (positive all 8 seasons, p = 0.008) |
| DST | −0.16 ± 0.12 | No signal (p = 0.73) |
Spend your early picks where the rankings work. WR and RB are the positions where preseason opinion most reliably converts to points — which, combined with the flex spot's extra demand, is the quantitative case for building drafts around them.
QB rankings are real but jumpy. The signal never inverted in eight seasons, but its strength swings year to year. Paying up is only defensible at the very top; the QB middle class returned less than late-round starters in our tests.
Drafting a defense early is paying for a coin flip. Preseason DST rankings showed no predictive power at all — the correlation's sign flips season to season and pools to indistinguishable-from-zero. Every draft slot spent on an "elite" defense before the final rounds buys nothing measurable. (In-season, defenses are predictable — one week ahead, from Vegas lines. See our streaming study.)
An earlier internal version of this analysis described DST as having an anti-signal (rankings inversely predictive). Proper significance testing killed that claim — the truth is "no signal," which is less fun and more useful. We publish the correction because the whole point of scoring rankings is that someone checks.
Methodology: preseason boards joined to end-of-season fantasy points under a fixed scoring rule; Spearman correlations within position, pooled across seasons; sign tests across seasons for robustness. The findings drive the position strategy inside the Above Replacement draft tool.