Fantasy Football Draft: Your Guide to Drafting a Winning Team
By Jake Bridges
Fantasy Football Draft: Your Guide to Drafting a Winning Team
As the regular season approaches, the last two weeks of the preseason is the prime time for your fantasy football draft. Fantasy football is becoming more and more popular and there are people of all skill levels. There are people who just play it to be part of something with the guys at work and then there are people who mock draft in April and play preseason DFS. The average person really only pays attention to whats going on during the preseason and try to cram in as much information as possible in the days leading up to the draft. The purpose of this article is to be a one stop shop on how to prepare for a draft and then knock it out of the park on draft day.
Pre Draft Preparation
Just like trying to cram for a test, there is a point where you can get too much information. It is best to follow along throughout the off-season to get the information as it comes out. For those who don’t you will have some catching up to do. There are dozens of sites out there that put out all the content you can ask for. If you are looking to keep things simple just stick with the site your league is drafting with. If you are looking for some more in-depth content however, try this site. I recommend sticking to the articles about injury news, top 200 player rankings, sleepers/breakout candidates and keep an eye on how playing time goes in preseason games. This information should give you a good sense of what has happened in the off-season and what to expect going forward.
The best thing you can do to prepare for a draft in my opinion is mock drafts. There are a lot of different sites out there that offer mock drafts, but there is really only one out there that I would recommend because of its ability to customize just about anything and it’s ability to adapt it you your league settings. Also it takes rankings from experts thought the industry and uses their ranking so it is never the same outcome. you can also revert your pick and re-pick to see what will happen in different scenarios. Complete as many mock drafts as you can take here. Finally if you are playing fantasy football chances are you are a football fan, college or NFL. The biggest mistake new players make is also one that is easy to avoid and that’s having a bias towards your favorite team. Unless your team has a bona-fide superstar on it try to avoid picking more than one or two players from your team. Unless you happen to be a fan of the New England Patriots or Green Bay Packers, but that’s for another article (foreshadowing?).
Fantasy Football Draft: Knowing Your League
Now that you have a good back ground of information for the upcoming season it is now time to choose a league if you haven’t already. The most important thing you can do before your draft is know your leagues settings so you can draft accordingly. It is the simplest thing you can do to set yourself up for a draft. It may sound dumb, but it is something that is commonly overlooked especially in leagues with your friends. There are two major types of leagues, standard and PPR or points per reception. PPR is becoming the default setting for most leagues now-a-days and the simplest way to describe it is by using its name, you get a point for every reception. These leagues favor anyone who catches passes. Typically receivers are favored in this format but it will also affect the running back rankings, the backs that catch passes will be ranked higher in this format than they would in standard leagues.
Standard leagues used to be the norm but now they are getting harder to come by, but basically you only get points for yards gained and touchdowns. Running backs are usually favored in this formats because they get more touches than receivers normally and the more touches you get the more opportunity to score points you will have. Each league has its benefits, but if you are a beginner I would go with standard leagues and work your way up to PPR after you get a feel for how fantasy works. Just as important as knowing how your league is scored is know your roster spots. Some leagues go with two starting receivers and some go with three for example. You would want to draft more receivers in a league that starts three receivers so keep that in mind.
Fantasy Football Draft: Days Leading up to the Draft
Now that you have picked a league you are well on your way to my favorite part of fantasy football, the draft. The draft is a beast in it self and can’t be rather intimidating, especially if you have never done one before but if you are prepared you will have nothing to be afraid of. If you haven’t completed any mock drafts yet, I would do that now that you know your league settings. This way you can get a feel for how things play out. Unfortunately a lot of leagues wait until right before the draft to give you your pick number so doing a lot of drafts and altering your pick number will help you be that much more prepared. If you are in a home league with your friends or family this is the single most important thing you can do to separate yourself from them, because most people don’t take the time to do the mock drafts, especially alter the pick numbers you have. Most novice fantasy players read a magazine or two and come to the draft with a rankings list of some kind and draft from that. Rankings only give you a small picture of what is actually going on, and if the rankings list is from a magazine it is already outdated unless it was printed that day.
Mock drafts will show you trends and take into account injuries and projected playing times and players will be drafted accordingly if you use the one I recommended above.
At this point it would also benefit you to figure out what you are going to bring with you to help you draft, rather it be an overall rankings list or a ranking by position. Or maybe even a rankings list that you created, which is easier to do than it sounds. If you have done mock drafts you have probably found yourself drafting a lot of some player(s) and/or began to get a good idea of where players should go. Just take a rankings list from a site of choice and adapt it to your liking. Keep your custom rankings list to the top 50-60 if you are a beginner.
Early round rankings aren’t going to differ that much from site to site so unless you find yourself taking someone from the bottom and moving them to the top you will be fine. This list should be constantly scrubbed up until the draft to remove any players that may have got hurt, cut, traded or a player that has unexpectedly received more playing time and should be adjusted accordingly. Refer back to the site you got the original rankings from to see where that player(s) is/are being ranked by them and adjust accordingly. With how often rankings change, it is best to wait until the night before or the day of if possible to complete your personal rankings list if that is the direction you are going, or to print out your site of choice rankings list.
Fantasy Football Draft: Draft Strategy
There are many different strategies that have become popular recently such as ‘zero RB’. That is starting wide receiver heavy in the early rounds and going for high upside running backs in the middle and late rounds (I will explain the difference between early, middle and late rounds in a bit). That strategy requires you to pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the off-season and honestly a lot of luck. It was proven last year that this strategy is mainly based on how lucky you get with your running back selections making it not a reliable strategy. The strategy I am going to recommend for this article is BPA or Best Player Available. It’s a very simple concept, for the early rounds you follow along with your rankings list, crossing players off as they are drafted and when its your turn take the highest player on the list. Regardless of position, take the best player available in the early rounds and you can make up what you don’t have in the middle and late rounds.
What is the difference between the early, middle and late rounds? The easiest way to figure that out is take how many rounds your draft has and divide by three. The first third are your early rounds, the second third are your middle rounds and the last third are your late rounds.
Fantasy Football Draft: Round by Round Make-up
Early Rounds: As I stated before in the early rounds you should go strictly off your rankings list (whichever form you decided to use) and pick the best player available. Don’t worry about position or bye weeks because you can make that up later. The key of the early rounds is getting the best players available. There is one caveat to that, if you get to the fourth round and you have three running backs or three receivers go with the highest ranked person at the other position with your next pick. The chances of this happening are pretty small but it could happen, and don’t panic. The early rounds are also primarily focused on running backs and receivers but if its your pick and the highest rated player is a quarterback or tight end pull the trigger. There aren’t very many non running backs or receivers in the early round ranks and the ones that are appropriately placed barring injury. I will caution this year though, there is a sharp drop off in running back after the first few rounds so shoot to get one in the first few rounds but only if he is one or two players from the top available. Anything more than that isn’t worth reaching for.
Middle Rounds: This is where you will access your roster and see what you have. This is where you can start straying from your rankings a bit and start filling out the empty spots in your roster. If you ended up with more receivers than running backs lean towards running backs with your next few picks or vise-versa by picking the top ranked player at the position you have less of. This is also where you should start think about taking a quarterback or a tight end if you haven’t already got one. However don’t feel like you have to take one in the middle rounds, in other words don’t reach. The gap between the top players at each of those positions and the players you can get at the end of the draft isn’t worth reaching for just to fill out your roster.
Fantasy Football Draft: Late Round Targets
Late Rounds: If you haven’t got a quarterback or a tight end by now do so, and if you need both lean towards getting a tight end first. Don’t worry if people start drafting their second quarterback by now, that just means players of value will drop to you. This is also where you will want to look at your roster and see where the empty slots are and start addressing them. WARNING: save your defense and kicker positions for the last two rounds. People in your league will start picking them to fill out their roster don’t fall for it. Every person that picks a defense or a kicker before then means a player of value will fall to you. If you pick a defense or a kicker before the last two rounds a player of value will fall to another person in your league and you don’t want that.
The late rounds is also where you can disregard your rankings and shoot for high upside players, or players that you like. You can afford to take risks here because of how you attacked the earlier rounds, but make sure you fave filled out your roster first. Lastly if you waited to the late rounds to draft a quarterback and/or tight end think about picking up a back up. It isn’t necessary too and that is the only situation you need to draft back ups at those positions, but you certainly can if there is a player you like. Again drafting the way you did at the beginning gives you the freedom to do what you want in the later rounds.
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Draft Day Tips
The draft can be very intimidating to newcomers and stressful if you aren’t prepared so the best way to combat the stress and making picks out of panic is to prepare. Which this article has helped you do. Here are some other tips to make sure that your preparation doesn’t go to waste:
- Have no plan: By that I mean show up to the draft without a set plan, plan to be flexible. I promise you the draft isn’t going to go the way you want it, and if you go in with a plan that gets blown up you may start to panic. Your only plan should be to stick to BPA.
- Remain Calm: If there is a run at one position, don’t panic and think that you need to pick one too. The run will end and it means players at other positions will fall. Take the best player available every time.
- Pay Attention: This may sound dumb, but the only way to know who is getting picked is to pay attention. It also will show you who is picking who you will know later on who needs what. This will help you with a decision between two players because if you are looking at a RB and a WR but all the teams between you and your next pick have RB’s you know the RB you like will likely drop to you so pick the WR. The only way to know this is to pay attention.
- Don’t Stress Bye Weeks: Don’t let a bye week keep you from drafting a stud player. Between injuries and breakout players chances are by the time bye weeks hit your roster will look completely different.
Now that you have an idea of what you are doing, it is time to go out there and dominate your league. Today is National draft day; so sign up for a league, do your prep work and draft yourself a championship team.
Best of luck in your fantasy football draft and stay tuned to Fantasy CPR as we get you ready for all the NFL coverage in traditional leagues and DFS!