Can you believe we’re already into week 9 of the NFL season? This year has passed insanely fast! Be sure to check the league settings for your trade deadline. I have some sleeper leagues ending this week. Most appear to be week 11 (Yahoo and CBS) or week 13 (ESPN). Don’t miss your last chance to make some trades. I’ll be back in week 10 and week 11 for the final push!
Note 1: The trends in the chart are compared to the week 7 readings, so they will be slightly larger than the typical week-to-week movement.
Reddit Adjusted Trade Value Charts with a twist
Nicknamed PeakedInHighSkool, I’ve been producing trade value charts on Reddit and my Patreon for several years, and I’m excited to be working with the amazing team here at The Athletic to create an exclusive bi-weekly edition.
I started the process of modeling fantasy football trade values in 2017 based on some negative complaints on Reddit (shocking I know). Linear position ranks appeared solid, but relationships between positions were somewhat skewed, particularly at the top and bottom of traditional charts. So I set about the tedious task of fixing these observed issues using crowdsourced data from Reddit. In case you’re unfamiliar with Reddit, there’s a weekly trades thread where users can post individual players, and other users will reply with your mom jokes about “appropriate” trades they’ve seen or think they’ll accept could become. There are often hundreds or thousands of answers of varying quality.
What I did (and still do) was go through and look for overlap between positions. Where people make a one-for-one trade of a running back for a wide receiver/tight end/quarterback and use those deals to adjust linear ranks relative to each other. I used these inputs to create an empirical model that defines the position value in terms of the running back value. I insert seed data (Expert Consensus Ranks) every week and create updated weekly trade value charts.
I’m really looking forward to working with the experienced Rangers here at The Athletic and using their exclusive ranks as the baseline for my model. You can’t find these anywhere else!
How to use these charts
My goal was to make this as user-friendly as possible. I did this by creating two different formats. The first is the embedded images, which are intended for specific formats. Second is an exclusive CSV file I’ve created for all The Athletic users to download and play with.
The left column is the player’s trade value. All players in that particular row have the same trade value. This is the best way to even look for one-to-one position swap trades (i.e. running back for wide receivers). If you’re looking at larger trades like a two-for-one trade, make sure you total the trade values on each side to ensure fairness. Usually the site that sells the most players has to overpay to get the right to consolidate and open a listing. Not all trades need to be perfectly even, but they should be relatively close together. The goal is to look for win-win trades and keep the league happy and healthy!
Back race
That gap between Tier 4 and Tier 5 feels even bigger now than it did in Week 7. It appears the Packers figured out how to move forward with Aaron Jones, which saved his plummeting value. Now it’s that time of year that I’m really trying to consolidate and move up a rank or two. Fill in the back with flyers like Kyren Williams, Rachaad White, or Isiah Pacheco. I’m looking for dart-throw running backs with a chance to jump into your lineup.
wide receiver
It’s good to see DeAndre Hopkins back on the field and crushing it as usual. He flew up the trade value table! The top two tiers of wide receivers feel a lot more secure than tier 3+, but there’s still a lot of upside potential in tiers 4-6. DJ Moore and Terry McLaurin tune in at the right time of year. Which means we may have missed their buy low window. I would try pairing each Tier 7+ wide receiver with a player to upgrade that player. The position feels very flat after level 6.
Close end
Only Travis Kelce and Mark Andrews are in the top 3 ranks. We need to scroll all the way down to Tier 5 (Kittle) to find another tight end on the trading chart. The guys in Tier 7 may have a chance to rise above the streaming conversation, but haven’t proved it yet. Level 9-11 boys are all a coin toss. Move them if you can get value.
Week 9 charts
Excel file
If you have any trading questions, write them in the comments and we will try to answer them!
(Top photo: Jeffrey Becker – USA TODAY Sports)