Fantasy Draft Prep Part IV - Lessons Learned

(Posted August 23, 2021)

And…..we’re back! We hope you have been enjoying our fantasy draft preparation series. Drafting season starts in earnest this week, so it’s time to get serious. I know that I need to, with my own draft prep. Today, the Pigskin Papers is going to hit on a few fantasy lessons gleaned from 30+ years of playing this game. Again, the focus here is on season-long redraft leagues. Here we go. 

1. Use tiers to construct your draft board. There is a reason that industry experts consistently push this advice. Newsflash #1: You aren’t going to get all the guys you want. Why? Because a lot of the guys you want are guys other people also want. Most of us tend to want the best players and unless you’re in an 8 team league the competition for popular players as well as popular breakouts and sleepers is fierce. Newsflash #2: When dozens of players are organized into a single numerical ranking at a position, the differential between each spot in that ranking is going to vary, and there are going to be places where the dropoff (in terms of expected fantasy production) from one player to the next is going to be sizeable, and those cliffs can be almost anywhere on the list. Organizing your draft sheets into tiers at each position is helpful because you can focus on where the drop-offs are, and how much quality depth there is before the drop. You can then use this to your advantage when you draft, and focus on pods of players that you would be comfortable with at a given level (with a preference for your favorites), rather than locking in too hard on a few specific names. 

Let’s try to illustrate this. Right now I see the top WR tier as five players (D. Adams through D. Hopkins) and my Tier 2 has another 6 WRs (A.J. Brown through T. McLaurin) and then Tier 3 has a dozen or so WRs. If I felt like I wanted to construct my team making sure I have one of those top 11 WRs from the first two tiers, with a clear preference for either Tyreek Hill or Justin Jefferson if I can get one of them, that’s an easier strategy to work with and to then expand to other areas of my draft than just saying I’ve got to get Tyreek Hill or Justin Jefferson as my WR1. And knowing that my Tier 3 is fairly deep and loaded with “WR 1s” also gives me the ability to shift gears if the asking price on the top 11 guys is too steep - for example, I could go in with the strategy noted above, with a fallback of, “or if I can’t execute that then I want 2 WRs from Tier 3”. This dynamic becomes more important as the draft goes along and you move down the tiers at each position, where the drop-offs matter more because they can differentiate between players you can reliably start on a weekly basis, and players you can’t. When runs happen at a position, you can easily calculate how many guys are left in a tier and whether you’re likely to be able to get one of them in light of when you pick next, or in an auction, based on your remaining salary cap and how you plan to spend it. Tiers are very useful tools, so use them.

2. The term “Starting NFL Running Back” has a little too much allure. What do the Cardinals, Bills, Ravens, Eagles, and possibly Patriots, have in common? The answer is that their leader in rushing TDs is probably going to be a QB, and in some cases their leading rusher too. And by midseason that could also be true of the Bears and 49ers, for the duration of the season. I’m not saying don’t draft any RBs on these teams, or that none of them have value, but temper your expectations. I can very confidently predict that there will not be an RB from any of these teams that finishes the season as an RB1 in a 10 or 12 team league, and that's because the presence of a rushing star at QB puts a ceiling on the team’s RBs - starters included. This could also be a bit of a damper on Alvin Kamara if Taysom Hill gets a lot of snaps at QB in the red zone.  Plus, “starting RB” on a terrible team can be tricky also, since game scripts often result in bad teams abandoning the run while they play catch-up, all of which leads us to….

3. Avoid “dead zone” teams. It is generally true that there can be a lot of fantasy value on a bad NFL team. Bad NFL teams, and especially those with bad defenses, are often chasing points and can pile up yardage and TDs in catch-up mode and garbage time. We’ve seen tons of examples of this over time, and I expect the Bengals (for example) to be that type of team this year as they continue to improve. But sometimes, an NFL team is just a fantasy graveyard, and hopefully we can see these teams coming. Such was the case with the 2020 NY Jets, who went 2-14 and finished dead last in total offense for the second straight season. Smart drafters could have seen that coming - the team was coming off of a dismal 2019 season, still had the same inept coaching staff, and hadn’t really added a lot of weapons or changed its approach on offense. Do we have a team like this in 2021? I think we do. I plan to stay as far away from the Houston Texans as I can. Could Brandin Cooks be a serviceable WR? Maybe. Could David Johnson catch 75 passes and score 8 TDs this year? Maybe. But my guess is that the Texans will be a train wreck, and I want no part of any of their offensive players, at almost any price.

4. You’re probably going to draft players you didn’t really want, or that you will regret drafting - know this going in and try to learn from it rather than just kicking yourself all season. This often happens because a veteran player who once was a star is sliding and starts to look like a real value. This is especially true in auction drafts where you can end up stuck with someone just by putting in a single bid on him. Last year, I ended up with Le’Veon Bell in my auction, for what looked like a bargain in the low $20s, and my bid was mostly an attempt to drive up the price a little. And I know lots of people who took Bell in snake drafts once he got to where he appeared to be a value. I had no intention of drafting him, much less any Jet (see above, and all you Jet fans, relax, things will be better this year). And yet, there he was on my team, stinking up the joint. Not only did he end up missing a bunch of games early with injury, and then sucking, but he ended up sucking for two teams and was hard to drop because of the opportunity he had on both teams. The lesson is that if you really don’t want a guy, don’t go anywhere near him unless the draft price (in salary cap dollars, or draft rounds) is so small that you won’t care if the player busts. 

Good luck to all with your drafts.