Fantasy Football Keeper Calculator

How it works

Keeper value is draft-capital arbitrage. Keeping a player isn't free — it costs you a pick in the keeper round your league charges. You profit exactly when the player's cost round is later than the round the market would draft him anyway. Keep a player at his market price and you've gained nothing; keep him two rounds below it and you've effectively stolen draft capital from the rest of your league.

The expected round comes from live average draft position (ADP) data by Fantasy Football Calculator: we take the player's overall ADP and divide by your league size, rounding up (expectedRound = ceil(adp / leagueSize)). You can override it if you think the market is wrong about your guy.

Two numbers come out per candidate:

• Round surplus = cost round − expected round. Positive means you're keeping him below market price.
• Point surplus = pick value of the expected round − pick value of the cost round, using a redraft pick-value curve. Because a whole round spans many picks, we sample the curve at each round's midpoint pick (pick 6 of a 12-team round) — the value of a typical pick in that round, not the best or worst one.

Worked example (12-team, half-PPR): Jahmyr Gibbs goes off the board in round 1 (mid-round-1 pick value ≈ 878 points on our curve). Your league lets you keep him for a 3rd-round pick (mid-round-3 value ≈ 470). Point surplus = 878 − 470 = +408, and round surplus = 3 − 1 = +2 — a clear KEEP. That's roughly two full rounds of free draft capital: you spend a 3rd and get back a player the market prices as a 1st.

The verdict tags follow the round surplus: KEEP at a full round of surplus or more, TOSS-UP between break-even and one round, and PASS at break-even or worse — if a keeper costs the same round he'd be drafted in, just re-draft him (or someone better).

One honest caveat: players outside the current ADP tables aren't being drafted in 12-team mock drafts at all. We treat their expected round as round 18, which means they're only worth keeping at a very late-round cost. The pick-value curve itself is a disclosed heuristic (an exponential decay fit in the Draft Sharks / JJ Zachariason tradition), not market data — treat point surplus as a ranking device, not gospel.

FAQ

What if my league uses auction keepers?

Auction keeper math runs on dollars and inflation, not rounds. Use the auction inflation calculator to price keepers against your league's budget instead.

My league's keeper cost escalates each year. Does that change anything?

Not for this year's decision — enter this year's cost round. But if you're weighing a keeper you could roll into next season, remember that a round of escalation eats about a round of surplus per year.

Why does the expected round change when I switch scoring formats?

Each format has its own ADP table — pass catchers go earlier in PPR, workhorse backs earlier in standard. The calculator re-prefills expected rounds from the format you select (your manual overrides are kept).