Moving Away From The Two RB Theory in Fantasy Football

In the first part of Putting Together a Draft Strategy, we outlined why it was important to make a draft strategy in fantasy football and covered the basics, such as scoring, player positions, and knowing who’s in your league.

In this second part, we’ll take a look at how you start putting that all together and forming your own draft strategy.

In the past, it was common knowledge that you automatically spent your two first picks on running backs, and sometimes even your third. But, these days, that notion is quickly losing momentum, as teams are passing more and shifting to running back tandems while some fantasy football leagues utilize different scoring options that tend not to favor the running back position as heavily.

Let’s go back five years ago and look at a typical draft strategy.

In 2004, most teams still featured systems that utilized its primary running back for the overwhelming majority of the carries as long as he was healthy. Running backs racked up yards and points on a consistent basis, so it only made sense to draft them with your top two or three picks. Here’s an example of a 10-team league I was in and how the top eight picks for the owners picking 1-4 played out.

Team 1 – Priest Holmes, Travis Henry
Team 2 – LaDainian Tomlinson, Domanick Williams
Team 3 – Deuce McAllister, Kevan Barlow
Team 4 – Clinton Portis, Fred Taylor

Altogether, 14 of the first 20 picks were running backs in that draft, and only one quarterback was selected in that time. It should be noted that aside from Manning, who had his record-setting season in 2004, the top fantasy player in this league was Daunte Culpepper, who was a third-round selection. None of the teams mentioned above went on to win the league.

To expand on the old theory, a typical draft may look like this (in ascending order);
RB-RB-QB/WR-RB-WR/QB-RB or
RB-RB-RB-QB-WR-RB.

These days, that strategy wouldn’t work as well.

Finding good and durable running backs who get 300 carries in the first two rounds is a challenge as teams start using two and even three-RB systems. This is a nightmare for fantasy football owners but for the actual players themselves, it’s a good thing.

It keeps the players healthier and fresher and means those guys are more likely to produce down the stretch and in the playoffs. For us, it means we must alter our draft strategy accordingly and start looking at alternative options in the first few rounds.

Now let’s take a look at the draft results from a 10-team league I was in last fall. Again, we’ll examine the top four picks, followed by their second-round picks:

Team 1 – LaDainian Tomlinson, Willie Parker
Team 2 – Adrian Peterson, Tony Romo
Team 3 – Tom Brady, Larry Johnson
Team 4 – Randy Moss, Laurence Maroney

Notice that two of the top four picks in the draft were spent on non-running back positions. Obviously, we know now that Brady was a poor selection there because of the injury, but heading into the season with 40-plus touchdown potential, taking the New England Patriots quarterback with the third pick was justified. Overall, 12 of the first 20 picks were running backs in this draft, and it should be noted that none of those teams won the league.

The thing people tend to forget is that quarterbacks touch the ball on nearly every offensive snap, which means they have the ball in their hands more than twice that of an average running back. It’s hard to score points when the ball isn’t in your hand.

So, what does a good draft strategy consist of?

Well, though the majority of this article has geared around breaking down the theory that taking running backs early and often is the way to go, you generally want to select one in one of the first two rounds. Failure to do will simply leave you without much selection of players at that position. Here are some examples of draft strategies I’ve used in the past two years:

RB-QB-WR-RB-WR-RB
QB-RB-WR-RB-WR-RB
QB-RB-RB-WR-WR-WR

Two of those strategies produced league winners and the third produced a runner-up finish. You may notice that those include the first six rounds of a draft yet don’t make any mention of tight ends of team defenses. In the third part of this series, we’ll take an in-depth look at why that is and exactly which players and positions you should be targeting in specific rounds of the draft.

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