Fantasy Football Draft Strategy: Three Rules To Follow

I’m a walking contradiction when it comes to fantasy football drafting:

• Form your own opinions and don’t rely on experts...but rely on experts to form your own opinions.
• Be flexible...but make sure you know exactly what you’re going to do during every round.
• Draft for value...but reeeeeeeach for gems that you think will be gone by your next pick.

See what I’m saying? Looks as gross on paper as Donnie Avery’s knee looked at Foxboro...actually, the grossest thing about that was Devin McCourty and Brandon Meriweather pimping all over the world together as Avery writhed in pain beneath them, but I digress. (Laurent Robinson value increase alert.)

Anyway, I don’t have a profound explanation for how all those contradictions work together, but I’ll run through each in turn. (I’ll follow up soon with more thoughts on specific positions and players.)

Form your own opinions and don’t rely on experts...but rely on experts to form your own opinions.

I don’t take a training camp tour every year. I can’t even get the NFL Network because the building I live in is classified as “historic” (it’s not).

Even if I could watch everything firsthand, I’m no NFL scout, and I don’t pretend to be. I played high school football and lots of Madden, and I generally know what I’m seeing, but to pretend I’m a qualified NFL talent evaluator is naïve. Are you? (You’re not.)

But I do have access to an endless stream of news, stats, data, updates, and analysis through the interwebs. I liken being a good fantasy player to being a good CEO...you build a good team of folks you trust to do the grunt work; then you analyze the information they provide; then you make (and own) the final call.

Absorb as much news and analysis as you can, and analyze that information as well as you can. But then, at some point, you have to develop your own opinions, ranks, and draft strategies. Only then will you reach true draft nirvana, young grasshopper.

Be flexible...but make sure you know exactly what you’re going to do during every round.

It’s one of the bona fide nugs of fantasy goodness you read everywhere: Be flexible in your draft. It’s true, but if you go in with your team too well-defined in your mind, you’re going to end up disappointed.

However, you also need to have a pretty, pretty, prrrettty, prrreettttty good idea of what’s going to be around when your picks come, and that comes from a combination of keeping an eye on average draft position (ADP) and mock drafting. (My ADP go-to is at Fantasy Football Calculator...but that may just be because it’s the first one The Googs gives me. Would love to hear of which ones you prefer.)

It’s been written about very well on this site before, but ADP is the average spot where a player’s being taken, and it’s a pretty dependable forecaster with a large enough sample size. Here’s a quick run of how to use ADP:

• Step one to is to determine your picks, i.e. pick 10 in a 12-team league gives you pick 10, 15, 34, 39, etc.
• Step two is identifying a range of players you might expect to be around at those picks. Pick 10 gives you RBs S-Jax, Ryan Mathews, Rashard Mendenhall; WRs Randy Moss, Reggie Wayne, Megatron, Miles Austin; and QBs Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees. Create ranges for each pick throughout your draft, and begin to identify different scenarios with which you’re most comfy, i.e. WR-RB-WR vs. WR-WR-RB vs. RB-WR-WR (sorry, not a QB early guy).
• Step three: Mock draft from your draft slot and try out the different combinations. Are you happier with Wayne, DeAngelo Williams, and a Steve Smith; S-Jax, Roddy White, and Beanie Wells; or what about Wayne, Megatron, Beanie? In which rounds do you need to jump on a position to avoid a positional weakness? Combining ADP knowledge with mock drafts helps you avoid surprises and develop contingency plan after contingency plan for the different turns your draft can take.

There’s no excuse for hitting a point in standard drafts at which you don’t have a qualified opinion of any of the players there and are just picking blindly.

You also need to use a little common sense and follow how the rest of the teams are shaping up. Say you decide to wait on a QB in the Jay Cutler-Kevin Kolb-Joe Flacco tier, and you think it’s a push between the three. It’s your pick at 6-3/63 overall, all three are left, and only two owners between your sixth and seventh-round picks need QBs.

Do the math and wait on the QB, and instead grab a guy like Pierre Garcon or C.J. Spiller to fill in a hole or add depth.

Draft for value...but reeeeeeeach for gems that you think will be gone by your next pick.

Knowing ADP and mock drafting is also critical to identifying value picks.

Brandon Jacobs has an ADP right now of 6-12/~72 overall. I’m not hot and heavy on Jacobs, but if he’s still there at my pick late in the seventh round on and I don’t have any other positional holes to fill, the value’s too good to pass up.

The one major drawback about drafting for value is that sometimes it causes owners to pick up guys they don’t like because of their "value.” Case in point, I’m not on the Malcom Floyd bandwagon and wouldn’t even draft him in the ninth round, regardless of his 6-8/~68 overall ADP.

Go into every draft with a list of non-draftables...you should look elsewhere no matter how far Braylon Edwards drops, because he’ll drop just as many balls this season...ba-dum-ching.

You also need to trust your preparation enough to reach on players you think will far outperform their draft slot/rank/projection/etc...if they’re unlikely to be there at your next pick.

Jermichael Finley (ADP 5.02/~50) is my top-ranked TE this year. Would I buy him in the third round? No, but I’m taking him in the fourth (ahead of Antonio Gates, Dallas Clark, and any other TE). I’ve mocked enough to know the odds of him making it back to me in the fifth round are slim (and to know some effective WR/RB/QB combos later in the draft to compensate for taking a TE so early).

The single most important thing to remember about fantasy football

Until you have the best players at each position and a bench full of starting players, you shouldn’t be satisfied with your team.

You should continually try to make your team better unless you’re in a league that doesn’t allow trades or severely limits moves (which I respect but don’t like). As soon as the draft is over, flag players on the wire that interest you; identify roster strengths and weaknesses of every team in your league; identify your “untradables” and try to piece together feasible and fair trade packages that might nab you a player you need to fill a weakness.

My favorite part of fantasy football, as anyone who’s ever been in a league with me can attest (and detest), is working out trades. More to come on that in the future, but please let me know if you have any trade questions/scenarios in the meantime. Never too early to hit the market!

And now, some things you probably missed this offseason/preseason

Brett Favre came back to the Vikings. Wes Welker’s knee is healthy. Sidney Rice had hip surgery and is out for half the season. Ben Tate is on the IR. There’s some stranger-than-fiction running back battle going on between Thomas Jones and Jamaal Charles in Kansas City. Mike Martz is installing an offense in Chicago. Sam Bradford was the No. 1 draft pick.

Nah, I’m joking—you already heard about all of those things.

Everything posted on this blog is my personal opinion, and absolutely right. Not just a Hat Rack, people.

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Not too late for a 2010 Draft Guide from HWWG for $5.