4th Annual Bonnaroo Draft - Polls Now Open

While quarantined, I've spent some time looking over this draft as it relates to the real Bonnaroo lineups from 2013-2020.

In my opinion, this draft is a pretty nice sampling of Inforoo. It's 20 people picking artists to play our dream festivals. While we individually disagree on many things, I'm not sure there is a better way to determine Inforoo value of an act / artist. We've done this draft 4 times now, and if anything I think the understanding of the value of an act has been refined after years of doing this.

That being said, I tried to find ways to determine how we could use this draft to quantitatively rank how good the real Bonnaroo Lineups have been since I've been going (2013). There are 100 ways to look at this, and I've now looked at it from a few different angles.

The way that I value an artist is to simply assign them a score based on where they were picked: Radiohead gets a score of 1. The lower the score, the better the act.

On the podcast that Tranter and I have been recording, I provided a ranking of the Bonnaroo Headliners since 2013 using this scoring system. The best Bonnaroo Top 3 since then is 2020, with Tame / Tool / Lizzo coming up with the lowest combined score of any headliner sets since 2013.

I wanted to take it a step further and go all the way down the draft. The last artist picked is worth 700 points.

Starting with a very simple exercise... where do the lineups stand when it comes to the total amount of acts drafted in the 4th Edition Inforoo Fantasy Draft?

2016: 44
2015: 42
2013: 41
2014 AND 2020: 39
2018: 34
2017: 32
2019: 29

A couple of notes when considering the above:

- Some of the early lineups had artists that would have been drafted if they were allowed: Tom Petty, Darkside, Neutral Milk Hotel, Slayer, etc.
- 2019 had the least amount of artists drafted? Wow.
- 2016 had the most amount of artists drafted? Wow.

This isn't a great way to look at how good the lineups were though, because what if 2016 had a ton of acts picked in rounds 30-35, but not as much in the first few rounds? So, I applied to weighted scores to each artist that was drafted that was on each of these Bonnaroo lineups. I looked at the total scores of each lineup and ranked them after 29 artists (the last artist of 2019, the lowest amount of artists in a year), and then I added up all the scores after 44 artists (2016 high mark). For every artist less than 44 for each lineup, I added in a placeholder of 700 points a a punishment for not having as many artists drafted.

In looking at it from both of those angles, the ranking came out nearly the same, with only two years being flipped. Here are the Bonnaroo lineups ranked according to this draft, which I believe to be the best "Inforoo Consensus" that we could possibly ask for at this point.

1. 2015
2. 2013
3. 2014

2016 and 2020 were the years that flipped based on the way I looked at it. And in both observations the scores were insanely close.

6. 2019
7. 2018
8. 2017

I also looked at what the scores of the best 5 artists of each lineup amounted to. Best 10, Best 15, Best 20. I looked at how many undrafted acts appear in each lineup's Top 3, 6, 9, 15, 21 and 30.

I'm not sure what information would be interesting to share or not. It's a lot.

One of my biggest takeaways is that 2014 had a few less undrafted acts than 2013 and 2015 up top, but when using this draft to rate the value of artists, there aren't any measurements where 2014 holds up with those 2 years. And this Draft could be used to make a compelling case to argue that 2015 was actually the best lineup in the last 8 years as opposed to 13 or 14 which is the common understanding.

Another thing that skews the data is the amount of artists from the low lines of 2013 that have absolutely exploded since then. Look as this hindsight Inforoo re-bill of 2013 lol