Fantasy Football Draft Strategy Deep Dive: Need a Hero
Ian Hartitz dives deep into four different fantasy football draft strategies to help managers to select winning lineups.
Fantasy football is an activity meant to help you forget about all of your problems and the atrocities in the world. Today's issues can and should be pushed to tomorrow because nothing is more important than proving to your friends and family that you are better than them in a game plagued by injury luck and nonsensical on-field outcomes in a sport with a ball that isn't even round.
Oh yeah, you should try to have fun, too. Definitely focus on that.
Anyway, a large part of dominating in fantasy football land is acing your draft. While it'd be awesome to simply land the players we love in every draft we complete, weird shit happens over the course of double-digit rounds against humans with varying levels of readiness and knowledge.
Because of this there are a few questions that you should ask yourself before making any given fantasy draft selection:
- What can I get now that I can't get later? This is essentially the nucleus of tier-based drafting, which still utilizes fantasy ranks BUT places the bigger emphasis on embracing groups of players in order to make the most out of each and every pick.
- Do I really need this position? Drafters who nab an elite QB or TE don't need to take another player at the position in more drafts than not; you can worry about that pesky bye week later. Additionally, heavy-RB/WR starts should accordingly attack the less-drafted position more frequently in the latter stages of any given draft.
- Who has the best-case upside scenario? Like the late great philosopher Reece Bobby once said: "If you ain't first, you're last." This mindset also applies to fantasy football … unless you're in a league with a brutal last-place punishment. In that case: "If you ain't first, just please for the love of God don't finish last."
As much as I wish I could sit here and say that every drafter should simply lean on a "Zero-RB" or "Robust-RB" strategy no matter what, that's simply not the case. Acing a fantasy draft involves taking a page out of the late great Bruce Lee's book and being like water.
This takes us to today's primary goal: What are some general strategies for drafters to build their team around without risking one pick messing everything up?
Make sure to check out Fantasy Life's Chris Allen's GREAT series on what to do from each specific selection as well as The Fantasy Life Show for mock drafts and strategy from different ranges of the draft.
As always: It's a great day to be great.
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Early-draft positions lend themselves nicely to Hero-RB builds
"Hero-RB" or "Anchor RB" is the strategy of landing a stud RB inside of the first few rounds before focusing on filling out the rest of your roster with your next five-plus picks.
Please don't confuse this with building around ANY RB—we only want to use early-round draft capital on the position if the RB in question boasts legit top-five upside thanks to a mix of elite talent and usage inside of a great offense.
There are roughly nine players at the position who I'm especially confident in leaning on with this archetype inside of the first three rounds. It's not a coincidence these are my top-nine highest-ranked RBs in half-PPR scoring:
- 49ers RB Christian McCaffrey (RB1, 1.5 overall ESPN ADP)
- Jets RB Breece Hall (RB2, 5.6)
- Falcons RB Bijan Robinson (RB3, 6.9)
- Eagles RB Saquon Barkley (RB4, 12)
- Colts RB Jonathan Taylor (RB5, 12.2)
- Lions RB Jahmyr Gibbs (RB6, 15.7)
- Chiefs RB Isiah Pacheco (RB9, 19.8)
- Jaguars RB Travis Etienne (RB10, 23.4)
- Dolphins RB De'Von Achane (RB12, 35)
It's more than doable to get one of the former three backs with a top-four pick inside fantasy drafts of most shapes and sizes, while there's also a decent chance to land one of the latter three backs at the Round 2-3 turn. Landing one of these options *with* multiple highly ranked WRs with your top-three selections has been my favorite strategy from an early-draft position all offseason, as this provides solid-enough floors at both spots to also focus on getting elite options at the onesies (QB/TE).
And if you don't get the opportunity to draft one of these players at a reasonable cost? Don't panic; make a strength at WR into a superpower instead of allowing other drafters to dictate what you do. Again: Be like water.
After all, there are far too many elite options at other positions in the early rounds to waste time taking someone you don't want.
Fantasy Life's 2024 Fantasy Football Draft Kit is LIVE (and free)! Click here to access all of the content you need to dominate your drafts this summer.
Round 4-5 is about when it's time to spend on an elite TE
Guys like Travis Kelce and Sam LaPorta boast ADPs inside the top-32 picks on both ESPN and Yahoo; drafters are probably going to need to burn a second or third-round pick to land either of fantasy's consensus top-two TEs this season.
While I won't deny these ballers deserve to be ranked one-two at the position, the gap between them and the rest of the "elite" TEs might be a bit too wide when it comes to overall ADP:
- Longtime stud Mark Andrews goes at the Round 4-5 turn in more home drafts than not despite joining Kelce and LaPorta as fantasy's only overall TE1s since 2016.
- Rising third-year talent Trey McBride is projected to lead all TEs in targets and carries a Round 5 ADP.
- Bills TE Dalton Kincaid should probably be considered the favorite to lead this ever-potent Josh Allen-led passing attack and typically goes off the board after 60-plus picks.
- Falcons TE Kyle Pitts is healthy, got a QB upgrade, and his primary competition now plays for the Dolphins—Round 6-7 ADP could look like a steal in a few short months.
- 49ers TE George Kittle might just be poised to finally get the sort of high-end target share his talents deserve depending on the outcome of the Brandon Aiyuk situation; either way he boasts the sort of single-week upside worth chasing in Round 5-plus.
Kelce and LaPorta might be superior options to these guys straight up, but does that improvement outweigh the opportunity cost of the RB or WR you're missing out on in Round 2 or 3 and instead settling for multiple rounds later? I don't believe it does.
As Peter Overzet mentioned on the Wednesday edition of The Fantasy Life Show: It can be helpful to think of 2 vs. 2 scenarios when accessing whether or not you should take a certain position in a specific round. Do you prefer Sam LaPorta and someone like Josh Jacobs vs. De'Von Achane and Mark Andrews in Rounds 3-4? We'll find out which combo was the correct one at some point in the next four months, but at least going through this thought process before spending a valuable top-five round pick allows us to be a bit more deliberate in what we're doing.
Of course, nailing later-round picks is an easy way to make up for any early-round mistakes – and one seems to be shining far brighter than the others at the moment.
Jayden Daniels is THE late-round QB of 2024
I wrote the following about Daniels in my Washington Commanders team preview back in May:
"High-volume rushing QBs simply don't have much of a habit of busting in fantasy football. 15 of 16 QBs to rack up 125-plus carries in a season ever went on to post top-12 numbers in fantasy points per game— including 11 top-five finishes. This is certainly something Kingsbury has plenty of experience with dating back to his time with Kyler Murray in Arizona: Only the Saints (s/o Taysom Hill) utilized more designed QB runs than the Cardinals during the 2019 to 2022 seasons.
Only four rookies have posted top-12 numbers at the position over the past 10 years (Justin Herbert, Dak Prescott, C.J. Stroud, Kyler Murray), but Daniels boasts the sort of Day 1 starting job and rushing upside to become the fifth.
Bottom line: Daniels doesn't have to be a particularly good real-life QB yet in order to be a fantasy stud in 2024. He deserves to go alongside Caleb Williams on the QB1 borderline and potentially profiles as THE late-round QB of this year should his ADP stay low enough."
Fast forward to present day … and Daniels carries affordable ADPs on each of ESPN (pick 121.7), Sleeper (112.7) and Yahoo (108.6). It's probably a good sign that someone is underpriced when their ADP is significantly lower on high-stakes sites like NFFC (100.8) and FFPC (75.7)—there's a reason why Fantasy Life Director of Analytics Dwain McFarland dubbed Daniels as his top QB target in 2024.
Most starting lineups will probably be close to filled out by the time Daniels goes off the board, so now it's time to chase that upside.
Handcuff RBs rule all in the later rounds
The top-five WR scorers from Week 17 last season were as follows:
With the exception of Reed, each of these guys were fairly sought after preseason commodities with top-30 positional ADPs.
Now let's check in on the top-scoring RBs from last year's Championship Sunday:
Williams was a waiver-wire darling, while Pacheco, Conner and especially Ford boasted ADPs outside the top-60 overall players this time last year. Hell, even Hall was usually a Round 3 or 4 pick due to his recovery from 2022's season-ending ACL injury.
This isn't a perfect science, but the moral of the story is pretty clear: It's far easier and more common to find LATE-round RB value than it is at WR due to the reality that backups at the former position are far more often truly just one injury away from assuming a newfound fantasy-relevant role compared to the latter.
Don't take this as gospel to fade every late-round WR. Talented rookies with paths to Day 1 roles like Keon Coleman, Rome Odunze and BrIan Thomas Jr. somehow carry ADPs outside the top-120 picks over at ESPN. Still, I'd like to think plenty of home leagues will be smarter than that, making the following later-round handcuff options truly enticing— particularly on rosters that already managed to land an elite QB/TE alongside five-plus quality WRs:
- Rams RB Blake Corum (pick 131.6 ADP on ESPN)
- Cardinals RB Trey Benson (138)
- Seahawks RB Zach Charbonnet (140.7)
- Falcons RB Tyler Allgeier (152.9)
- Vikings RB Ty Chandler (160.8)
- Patriots RB Antonio Gibson (162.2)
- Cowboys RB Rico Dowdle (165.1)
- Panthers RB Chuba Hubbard (165.9)
- Bills RB Ray Davis (N/A)
- Jets RB Braelon Allen (N/A)
Also note that I will happily draft any of these guys in place of a kicker and/or DST if my league doesn't require me to draft one. This even includes lesser handcuffs like Tank Bigsby, Audric Estime, Dameon Pierce and Bucky Irving, among others. Chase the upside of potentially already having a waiver-wire darling on your bench and worry about cutting someone to stream the most-streamable positions after preseason action has wrapped up.
Best of luck to everyone in their fantasy drafts this year! Remember: Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.
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