Keeper Calculator

A keeper is a purchase, not a gift. The instinct in every keeper league is to look at your best player and decide he is obviously worth holding. But you are not choosing between keeping him and having nothing — you are choosing between keeping him and spending that same pick on whoever is available there. That is the whole calculation on this page: your player's market value on one side, and the market value of a typical player at your cost slot on the other. An elite receiver at a fourth-round price is a bargain worth building a season around. The same receiver at a first-round price is just a first-round pick you have taken all the flexibility out of.

Where the cost figure comes from. Each round is converted to a single pick number — the middle of that round in a league your size — and we then look up which player is actually going around there in real drafts this week, and what the trade market says he is worth. That player's value becomes the price of the round, and we name him in the table so you can sanity-check it. It is a deliberately blunt method: draft position wobbles week to week, and if your keeper deadline is in February the summer's board will look different by August. Kickers and defenses are not priced by the trade market, so a round that lands on one of them falls through to the nearest priced player instead.

What the verdict does not know. It has no idea that your league lets you keep only two players, or that a keeper's cost escalates a round every year you hold him, or that the three managers picking before you all need a quarterback. Read a "let him go" as a prompt to think, not an order — sometimes the right move is keeping a fair-value player because the alternative is trusting your own draft-day nerves. Change the scoring and league-size toggles and watch the surplus move; a keeper who is marginal in a ten-team standard league is often comfortable in a fourteen-team full-point league. The value definitions are on the methodology page.