Fantasy Football Draft Day Tips
It’s finally here! The time of year all of us fantasy football fanatics look forward to like we’re little kids waiting for Christmas. While some of us are already a handful to over 100 drafts in, especially the Dynasty and Bestball crowds, some of us may just now be digging in to see what’s what in the 2019 fantasy football landscape. If that’s you, here are few handy guidelines to work with from draft prep to in-draft strategy. The following are some helpful fantasy football draft tips for 2019, enjoy!
Most people are probably familiar with the Bruce Lee quote about being like water. This is a great philosophy that can be applied to many things in life. Its primary lesson is to be adaptable. After all, adaptability is the key reason a species can survive. A portion of the famous quote I find especially relevant to redraft and best ball formats is when Bruce says:
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
In every traditional style fantasy draft, we are assigned a draft position. That is our crack for making it through the process. If we come into our drafts rigid, forcing a particular strategy that we’ve read about on the internet or magazine, and the draft does not disclose itself to flow that way, then the results could be a disaster and you end up donating your entry fee to your league mates. This leads us to the first rule of drafting.
Be Adaptable
This is the most important rule of all. Don’t reach into lesser tiers forcing a position to fit a strategy, or even a need when there is still a great value at other positions on the board. Don’t talk yourself into drafting Marlon Mack over Antonio Brown in the second round because your desired strategy says you have to take 3 RBs in the first three rounds. Don’t pass on going QB earlier than you planned when guys like Kyler Murray falls into the 8-9th round, or Cam Newton or Dak Prescott is still there in the 10th. If you continue to build with the appropriate value in the early rounds, you will be able to fill in positions and needs later in the draft with players that can still return good value.
Have a Cheat Sheet
If you’re a seasoned player and can build your own projections, rankings, and tiers – do it and stick to them! If you’re not quite to that point, find rankings and projections you can rely on. I would recommend using an online source with rankings that are continually updated, rather than buying a magazine off the shelf that was written in June and is outdated by the time you walk into your draft party. Fantasy Data has their ranking posted here, which have their analysts rank each position. Looking at multiple analyst rankings in one spot is valuable because you can see different perspectives on a player. Not all of your league mates will be using the same cheat sheet or have the same opinions, so this is a way to calibrate a range of value for each player. Guys you like, look at the higher end of the range to see where you should probably take that guy if you want to have the best chance at landing them.
Do some research
Take a look at your cheat sheet and try to understand why players are ranked the way they are. If you don’t understand why someone is ranked so high or seems too low, get online and start Googling or doing Twitter searches to find out if you agree with the ranking. Do the same with any player or team you are unfamiliar with. I have a list of beat writers for all 32 teams pinned to my Twitter profile that can be an excellent resource. You can search the list by typing in the player name followed by a space and then list:majesstik1/ with the team abbreviation after the forward-slash (Note: OAK is preemptively listed as “LV” on there).
Have an Opinion
This is the most intuitive concept to consider – take players you want. Every year, you’ll read posts on Twitter or other forums of how great a certain player is and that we should totally be taking them no matter what. But, if we’ve done our homework properly, and we’re not feeling it, don’t draft that guy! What’s happens when you let someone else indirectly make a decision for you and they were wrong? You end up kicking yourself for it and saying “I should have trusted my gut”. You’re right, you should have. Win or lose, do it with players you want on your team(s).
Have a Plan
Something I like to do in my drafts is to prioritize some late-round guys heading into my draft. Either highlight them, bold them or circle them on your draft board and know what round you will likely be able to grab them in. When you do this, you can tentatively plan to have them on your roster and draft around that knowing you have a few aces up your sleeve for later. It’s not always reliable, so you do still need to take the best players you can get early, but there are several times I have come out of drafts this year knowing I will end up with Geronimo Allison or Dede Westbrook in the 10th round, Jack Doyle in the 12th round, or Jalen Richard or Jordan Reed in the 14th . Applying this concept, I know if we can judge opportunity cost earlier in the draft. If we don’t take an early TE and instead fill our roster with RBs and WRs, we have two late TEs to fall back on. If we grab 4 upper-tier RBs early, we know we can ignore the position and take our 5th RB in the 14th round.
Understand Opportunity Cost
Have “Cut-offs”
“Cut-offs” are another strategy I’ll employ. Cut-offs are the last player on a draft board you are willing to take to fill out a position. Typically, this is done at the positions we only start one player at. Since wait on QB has gotten so popular, it’s pretty easy to use this strategy at that position. This year my QB1 cut-off is Dak Prescott. He has an ADP of QB19 currently, so if I hold out until the 11th round, I will target Dak there, and quickly follow that up with someone like Mitch Trubisky, Jimmy Garoppolo or Josh Allen in the next round. TE is another of the “onesie” positions that we can use this strategy with. As we mentioned earlier, Jack Doyle is falling into the 10-12th round range and has TE1 potential. He’s a good cut-off in that range to get a TE1, if we haven’t done any better earlier in the draft.
Watch the Draft Board
As we are “finding our way through it” in our drafts, we need to anticipate position runs as the draft progresses. This can give us an edge. It is typically easier the closer you are to either side of the turns in a snake style draft. If there are two teams with two picks between us and our next pick, and both have already drafted a TE or two, we can take that calculated risk that we can hold off on a TE and take another player we’re eyeing instead. Positional runs typically occur with the “onesie” positions – positions that only have 1 starter per week, like QB, TE, DST. In some cases, you might want to be ahead of the run and get a player from the first tier of that onesie position. If our draft board has a group of players we’re comfortable with waiting to see who makes it back around to us at our next pick, we can grab that QB ahead of the 2 guys after us who might not have one yet and trust we’ll probably see one of the players in that group we passed on come back to our next pick. If we’re at the ends of a snake draft, it’s usually better to be the one who starts a run, rather than getting caught at the tail-end of one – unless you’re targeting your cut-off.
Wait on selecting your D/ST
One position I am perfectly content to wait on this year is DST. The DST pool has so many sleepers this year. Teams like the Packers have added solid talent in the draft for the past couple of years and signed Adrian Amos, and Preston and Za’Darius Smith to help out at LB. Atlanta was a better defense when they had Deion Jones and Keanu Neal on the field. Both will start the year with a clean bill of health, and they let go of Marquand Manuel as the DC where Dan Quinn will take back over. San Francisco was depleted by injuries last year, but their young core got a lot of experience last year, and will be better because of it. The additions of Bosa, Ford, and Alexander will only help. These are more than likely going to be the 2nd DST we draft, so pairing them with another solid DST in the round or two before taking them is a good strategy this year.
Don’t draft a Kicker, Defense, or IDPs Unless You Have To
In redraft leagues where you’re not forced to take a K, DST, or IDP in your draft to fulfill position requirements imposed by the league rules or website constraints, then don’t take them. This is a stronger strategy the earlier in the off-season you draft. The idea behind it is that most of those guys are replaceable and you’re going to end up streaming those positions during the year anyway, so why waste roster space on them now? Take extra offensive players and use that as leverage in trades to try and produce a moderate upgrade to a position by throwing out a bunch of 2 for 1 trade proposals. It also gives you a buffer from preseason injuries, and might even give you the guy who takes over for an injured or suspended starter. If no trades or injuries work out, then wait until the night before waivers lock to handle your drop/adds and reconfigure your roster to meet requirements met for opening day so that no one in your league can scoop your buried treasure until after all the games are played.
The majority of these strategies will work for both redraft and best ball, the last strategy is not for Bestball though. The great thing about Bestball is we have 18 or 20 rounds to make our way through the cracks. There’s even less pressure to force a strategy or a “recommended” roster construction in this type of league. Another thing I like about Bestball is it’s a good way to do mock drafts all off-season and prepare for your home league drafts, since everyone playing best ball has some skin in the game, making them more reliable than doing free mocks on other sites. They’re also a way to spend $1 to $10 to find out if a particular strategy is going to work for you or not. However, the thing you can’t account for in Bestball drafts is the unpredictability of your league-mates in home league drafts. Guys with die-hard loyalties to players or teams that are willing to take “their guy” more than a round or two early, or the guy who is somehow in your head and sniping all your sleepers a round ahead of you. Just remember the key to it all is to be adaptable, so have fun with it all and “Be like water”!
