Salary Cap Series - Player Rankings:
Quarterbacks
Running Backs
Wide Receivers
Kickers & Defenses

In our expanding fantasy football coverage, we have looked into the preseason values involved with salary cap league rankings.

In a salary cap league, you can’t just look at player projections. You must be able to identify the value of a player since you are forced to make hard decisions to keep your payroll under the cap. There are several things that have to be evaluated in order to discover a player’s true value in a salary cap league.

We formulated our numerical value based on two factors:

* Points Per Game projection provided by our Big Board
* Salary prices provided from Head2Head.com

We plugged those factors into our formula to produce what we like to call a “Salary Value” rating.

Our Salary Cap League Rankings have been divided by the players’ ranking by tiers in our Big Board, then ranked within that tier based off of the Salary Value ratings. It is important to find the players that will give you the most value for every million you spend on his salary. By dividing these rankings by Big Board tiers, you can identify good value at different salary and points per game levels. Our list will now help you identify these players with greater ease.

 

Geek’s Evaluation - Kickers:
There is not much statistical difference between the kickers in the Elite-2^nd tier of our Big Board. But there is a big difference between their salary prices. Since there isn’t much of a production difference, we say avoid any big name guys and stick to the players on our favorite’s list. There’s really no need to spend more money for a whopping 1 PPG increase. Save that $2 million and spend it elsewhere.

Geek’s Favorite Salary Kickers:
Daniel Murray (Iowa) - $4 million
San San Te (Rutgers) - $4.3 million
Josh Jasper (LSU) - $4.4 million
Devin Barclay (Ohio State) - $4.1 million
Richard Jackson (Clemson) - $4.5 million

Geek’s Evaluation - Defenses:
When you look at defenses you have to figure out how you will manage your team during the season. Are you willing to spend REAL MONEY on trades each week to swap out defenses for favorable match-ups? Or will you try to find a couple of teams with value and ride them for most of these season? If you play the weekly match-ups you’ll have to evaluate prices on a week-to-week basis. But if you want to selection someone while its free and try to ride them out, then we’ve got your info.

Like the QB position, there is more payoff for some of the higher salary defenses. North Carolina, Virginia Tech, and Florida all provide good value and are defenses that you could leave in for most of the season. But they all run close to $4-5 million more than the bottom three defenses on our favorite’s list. What route you take with your defenses will most likely be determined by what approach you take with QB-RB-WR.

Geek’s Favorite Salary Defenses:
North Carolina - $13.2 million
Virginia Tech - $13 million
Cincinnati - $8.9 million
Oregon State - $9.5 million
Kentucky - $8.8 million

Report Parameters:
Player Pool:  BCS + Notre Dame

Below are our Salary Rankings for both Kickers and Defenses (see tab at bottom to toggle between both):