There are a variety of ways to determine a fantasy football player's value. At its simplest, one can rank the players based on last year's stats. In 8- and 10-team leagues this is really all one needs to put together a competitive team. However, as one gets into deeper and deeper leagues, one needs to determine how valuable back-up RBs and 3rd WRs are. For this it isn't so easy.
One of the better ways is to review Average Draft Position charts derived from collections of mock drafts. After drafting your most important players at each position, the statistics of the remaining ones begin to look the same. ADPs allow you yo take advantage of the collective wisdom of hundreds of fantasy players participating mock drafts, you can discover things not readily apparent in the previous seasons' statistics.
What I'm going to try to do here is survey Fake Teams' readers to see what our collective intelligence brings. I'll roll out one of these every couple weeks and will keep a special page for it that can be reached via a link added to the Menu section.
The first is a survey that allows you to rank 30 RBs from best to worst. Click Here to take survey
These surveys will miss players who are considered likely to play important roles in the 2007 fantasy football season. My suggestion is to take that into consideration when ranking the player who is listed ahead of him. The best example would be the Vikings' Chester Taylor. Based solely on 2006's performance, Taylor is a top 10ish RB, but the presence of first-round pick Adrian Peterson has dropped his value into the late teens. Maybe.
{UPDATE] This has been moved-up the page in order to make it easier to get to. I will run some numbers over the weekend base don the responses.