Fantasy Theory: Basic Draft Strategy - How do I go about drafting?

This is based on a question on the Rotoworld forums (http://forums.rotoworld.com/), and my answers there. The question was: "how do I go about drafting?" This article uses data from https://www.pro-football-reference.com/.

Draft values per position

If you plot the ADP before the season against the actual production during the season, you see something like this:

The pattern above is from 2018, but the patterns hold up for most other years. We'll go through the specific patterns for each position; these show which positions are generally drafted early or late, how mauch variance there is and where you can win something over the ADP.Group 1: RB/WR/TE

- I start with the Top WRs, even though you can see that the top RBs score slightly higher. WRs are generally safe to draft at the position where you get them in the sense that the ADP is generally a fairly good predictor for performance. Importantly, don’t get stuck with only lower round WRs.

Even stud receivers are drafted after the best RBs. This is due to the production of the top WRs, which in most formats is somewhat below RBs. Late round WRs are generally more boom/bust in individual games, or may take a long time to get into a productive streak.

- Top RBs however score more points than WRs. This is more or less consistent every year; therefore, the top-5 draft picks are generally RBs. However, some top RB picks actually bomb big time; they get injured early, or never sign their contract, or their O-line collapses, or whatever.

Note that after the top-5 there is quite a drop-off in terms of reliability. On the other hand, even low-pick RBs can still have considerable value if you are lucky (or presumably an infallible drafter). Some people even go zero-RB, meaning they don't start drafting RBs until later rounds (but then draft a large number of them).

- TEs generally score less than WRs and RBs, except for a very select group at the top

High value fantasy TE's are relatively sparse in the NFL, and usully commnd a premium in terms of draft value. Each year there a couple that rise to the top, but not always the same. Gronk was obviously great for a number of years, but not in 2018; Olsen was great for some years but not after 2016, etc. 

However, if you look closely at the group after pick 100, you see that some of these TEs performed much better than expected. In short, ADP is the most reliable for WRs and top RB/TEs; for lower RBs/TEs, not so much. Having some football knowledge is definitely a benefit when drafting TEs.

In order to compensate for injuries/ bombing/bye weeks, you need to over draft these three positions (RB/WR/TE), you will need especially WR and RB. Bye weeks play a role in this; I would advise however not to pay too much attention to the actual bye weeks because you’re going to restructure your team generally many times before hitting the bye weeks. Just to know that if you have 2 RB positions, it doesn’t hurt to draft 5 or more.

I’m not going to tell you an exact strategy (there is no one strategy), but personally I like to mix it up; get one WR and RB early, and keep drafting them throughout the other positions.

Group 2: QBs:

What you see here is that there is a large group of QBs that have similar performance by the end of the year. Don’t get me wrong, having a QB who scores 5 points more on a weekly basis is actually a large advantage (Mahomes got a lot of people into the playoffs) but it’s not easy to predict who will be the top dog. Therefore, some people try to get a QB early, and others in fact wait until pick 100 or later, even though these are the highest scoring positions.

Note that drafting a stud QB doesn't necessarily pay off, although each year people of course try. Last year it was Rodgers and Watson, in 2019 it will probably be Mahomes and maybe Ryan or Big Ben.

Group 3: K/Def

These are positions that are worth it to manage throughout the season, because during the season you will find that some Ds and Ks are a lot more valuable than others; however, they are almost impossible to predict before the season, so people generally pick them late, or not at all (even post draft you can generally still pick one up). Some people will draft even a backup D or K for bye weeks, but again you can always pick one up during the season.

Weirdly enough you see Ds are drafted earlier than Ks, even though there is more variance and predictability for Ks. If you want to put some effort into drafting either of them, the kickers generally have some year over year consistency; guys like Zuerlein, Tucker etc do have a little more value.

I generally pick my Kicker before my Defense; both I evaluate throughout the season. Actual streaming can be hard as it's not easy to predict these 2, but let's say you can be flexible.

Format: PPR, standard, .5 or custom?

When you look at the above, remember it really makes a difference how many teams you have, and what format you play:

- "standard" counts yards and TDs for both RBs and WRs. This values top RBs generally higher than WRs

- PPR is point per reception, and this aims to make top WRs as valuable as RBs. However, the receptions also count for RBs, so pass catching RBs (eg Kamara) also profit massively from this)- in order to counter the overvaluing of PPR a bit, many leagues now have .5 PPR as standard.There can also be custom formats, so put some effort into figuring that out.

Number of teams: 10, 12, 14 or more?

Regarding the number of teams (and size of the bench), again this may affect your draft:
- if you have 10 teams, and around 15 rounds of drafting, then the worst skill players will be around pick 130 (assuming everybody takes a K and D), so your lowest ranked players will still be fairly productive.- if you have 14 teams, then your lowest players will be around pick 175, and that is suddenly a different category. For RBs and WRs this makes a difference, and this in turn may affect your TE/QB strategy

Hope that helps 😊 Leave a comment!