The Skunk Fantasy Football Draft Guide - Preseason Prep and Draft Day Advice
NOTE: I'm well aware that this post and other preseason rankings and draft prep posts are going to be published way too late for actual draft season. I decided to start this blog not long before the NFL season began, and in order to devote the time and attention I believed were necessary to publish content of quality, I knew I'd miss the draft season. While this info won't help anybody with an actual 2017 draft, it's a way for me to get my thoughts out there in a more formal and public way. If you're going to write about fantasy sports, you have to be willing to own your opinions, good or bad. I'll refer to all my pre-draft posts later in the season to see how I did with rankings and predictions and so forth, and hopefully will gain some useful insights and learn some things for next year.
Unless you've made it to your league's championship match-up, the most exciting time of any fantasy football season is often the draft itself. Why can't every day feel like draft day? Before a draft, there's a palpable feeling of nervous excitement. Anything could happen and optimism abounds. Then the draft begins, and all your top targets start flying off the board and when your name comes up, you look down at your cheat sheet or computer screen and suddenly there's nobody left you like...and it's only the late 1st round.
We've all felt that sinking feeling during the early portion of a draft when all our hopes and dreams suddenly seem shattered into a million tiny pieces because "our guy" was gone before our turn to pick, or our ideal strategy was ruined by a run on the WR or RB positions. On the other hand, sometimes there are drafts when there's one player you really covet but can't imagine he'll still be there when it's your turn to pick. Then suddenly, your name is up and the WR you had rated #5 overall is still waiting for you there at #11. Drafts are strange that way, and sometimes the choices of our competitors are even stranger. I've already seen Leonard Fournette as a 1st round pick in one of my PPR drafts, ahead of Jordy Nelson, Melvin Gordon, and others I personally had rated much higher.
Even if a draft doesn't go exactly as you might have planned (or actually did plan, depending on your level of fantasy neurosis), there are some general strategies and advice that can help you avoid a complete disaster and leave your draft feeling more positive and confident about the team you've assembled. I divide these into two categories: Preseason Prep and Draft Day. Preseason prep is easily the larger of the two categories, with many sub-categories of its own.
PRESEASON PREP
The entire preseason is our time to gather information and research about players that will ultimately help us to form our final opinions on what a player may be worth in the upcoming year. Prior-year stats, early draft ADP trends, and offseason news reports (when every player announces they're in the "best shape of their life") can provide valuable little insights into how the rest of the fantasy world is shaping their perceptions of a player's value, but preseason planning can start even before the preseason officially begins. Let's look at some of the steps we can all take during the preseason to prepare ourselves for draft day.
End of Season Notes
Near the end of each regular season, I like to write some notes about players I want to remember leading up to drafts the following season. Maybe a rookie or second-year player appeared to take a leap forward over his last few games. Perhaps a solid veteran turned in a sub-par season but looked as good as ever to you and you expect a bounce back year. Write down any random thought that comes to your head. Keep a list of guys you think could break out the following year. The online community may forget about some of them, but if you take your own notes, then you won't. End-of-season stats play a heavy role in determining a player's value the following season, but sometimes the yearly stats don't tell the whole story.
One player I took note of near the end of last year was Jay Ajayi. Heading into 2016, I've seen Ajayi rated as high as #7 overall in a PPR Top-200. I personally rated him #12 at just the RB position because of how his 2016 season finished. Ajayi gained fantasy notoriety for his multiple 200-yard performances once taking over for the injured Arian Foster as the Dolphins starting tailback, but over Ajayi's last 8 starts, a full half of an NFL season, he averaged just barely over 60 rushing yards per game and scored only two TD's. And even those below-average stats included yet another 200-yard rushing performance in Week 15. The numbers tell us that Ajayi was simply not a productive fantasy RB for the second half of 2016, yet his overall season line of 1272 yards and 8 TD's in his 12 starts (and extrapolating that to a full 16-game season) is all that most folks will look at when determining where to rank him for 2017. The opportunity is there for him to be a very good fantasy RB for 2017, but some of the numbers suggest he could be a disappointment at his late 1st/early 2nd round ADP if he resembles the player he was for the second half of last year more than the player he was for those first 5 starts.
On the other hand, one player I made note of in a more positive way was WR Kelvin Benjamin. His 2016 season coming back from a torn ACL would largely be considered a letdown, especially seeing that Jordy Nelson came back last year from the same injury and put up his usual elite numbers at a more advanced age than Benjamin. Dig a little deeper though, and Benjamin's season really wasn't that bad at all. His total receptions, yards, and TD's weren't that far below his impressive 2014 rookie year. Heading into 2017 two full years removed from his ACL tear, and without Ted Ginn to siphon off some of Cam Newton's deep ball targets, I expect Benjamin to get back to his target hog and red zone threat status as Newton's unquestioned #1 outside receiver. I rated him in the top 15 at WR even though his overall 2016 stat line was around WR30 in PPR leagues. He's an even better play in non-PPR leagues this year because of the red zone talent and TD upside. I made note of Kelvin Benjamin at the end of 2016 so that I didn't forget to focus on his upside rather than just his overall 2016 production.
Research
Research is a very broad category that covers any number of different ways to accumulate information about players, but the point is just to accumulate information about players. The more you know, the easier draft decisions become. There's a long list of relevant research topics, but the most important piece of general advice surrounding research is to not let any single piece of data make all your decisions for you. Appreciating the opinions of a particular fantasy expert is great, but that doesn't mean you should draft strictly according to that person's preseason player rankings. The same is true of other things like season stat projections. I'll list a number of important things that I researched and used in my own decisions, with some comments about each:
2016 Stats and prior-year stats
- Season stats help provide a baseline of a player's production. Using those numbers, we can take other relevant information to help us project a player's improvement, decline, or to adjust a player's possible floor or ceiling to establish a range of outcomes. Sometimes, just knowing what a guy has done the past few years can help to make solid decisions on draft day. If you find yourself in the 4th or 5th round of a PPR draft and you're still looking for a solid WR2 after chasing a few RB or taking the plunge on Gronk, wouldn't it help to know that Golden Tate caught 99, 90, and 91 passes the last three seasons? He's not a sexy name amongst WR, but he'll catch a lot of balls and provide a solid weekly floor, which could allow you the flexibility to reach for a young boom/bust rookie WR like Corey Davis later in the draft. That's how knowing prior season stats can help.
Preseason role and game production
- The NFL preseason, the games anyway, don't mean a whole lot in real life. Training camp practices is where jobs are really won or lost, and the actual preseason games don't typically mean much except for rookies and journeymen looking to impress while fighting for roster spots or a higher position on the depth chart. Most players are just hoping to avoid injury and most teams play their projected starters very little to avoid them. Knowing if a player got snaps with the first-team offense on the field can be useful in helping to determine what a player's early-season role will be though. Look at a player like Kareem Hunt on the Chiefs. He was getting meaningful snaps with the first-team offense throughout the preseason, so his numbers (18 carries for 69 yards and passing game involvement) carried more meaning than somebody like Joe Williams from the 49ers, who rushed 25 times for 130 yards (5.2 yds/att), but was frequently doing so against opposing teams' 3rd-string defenses as his team's 3rd or 4th RB. If Spencer Ware hadn't injured his knee, Hunt would still have been a valuable handcuff worth a late-middle round pick, while Williams should never have been drafted as more than a late round flyer.
Training camp reports and articles
- Fantasy news blurbs and training camp reports/articles can be annoying to sift through, but could yield very useful information. Amidst all the offseason puff pieces and "best shape of his life" nuggets you may find helpful quotes and insights. Here I go back to Kelvin Benjamin. In 2014, Benjamin was targeted heavily by Cam Newton; over 140 passes went his way. This was in spite of season-long concerns about Benjamin's conditioning and some issues with drops. Fast forward to this offseason, and various Panthers offseason reports featured quotes from coaches praising Benjamin's conditioning, and Cam Newton predicting Benjamin would have his best season yet. Sounds good, doesn't it? Just remember that these kinds of reports should never be the only reason you move a guy up or down a draft board, at least not more than one or two places, but when used in conjunction with other pieces of information, they can really help pin down your perception of a player's value. I liked Benjamin a lot before the Cam Newton quotes. Reading that just helped give me more confidence in my opinion. I ultimately ranked Benjamin ahead of other receivers I deemed very similar, like DeAndre Hopkins, Allen Robinson, and Alshon Jeffery.
Advanced/Other Stats
- There are a lot more advanced stats out there than ever before. Some aren't even that "advanced" but have become much more common in every day use than ever before. It wasn't that long ago that a receiver's targets were almost never mentioned, yet isn't knowing how many times the ball was thrown to a particular player a fairly good indication of his place in the receiving hierarchy? Especially in PPR, where every catch counts, every opportunity for a catch carries a certain implied value. Targets matter, much like average depth of target can help reveal if a player is used primarily as a deep threat or short-area possession receiver. For running backs, elusiveness ratings and yards before and after contact can help reveal if a player is effective at gaining extra yards and breaking tackles, or if his offensive line is good at creating those holes for him to run through. The point is that there's much more out there than just carries, catches, yards, and TD's, and mining the data can help provide some more in-depth analysis of a player's production.
Projected Strength of Schedule
- If you're comparing two players that seem about the same in your eyes, something like projected strength of schedule could assist in that decision. For example, if you're thinking about drafting Christian McCaffrey ahead of "safer" lead backs like Todd Gurley or Carlos Hyde, it may help to know that the Panthers are projected to face the softest opposing run defense schedule in the NFL, while the Rams and 49ers will face the most difficult. NFL defenses change year-to-year, and some teams may see dramatic improvement or decline against the run or pass. Before the season though, prior-year data is all we have to go by, so take the rankings with a grain of salt, but don't be afraid to let a big difference in strength of schedule sway your favor towards one player over another.
Build Your Own Rankings
Once you've nearly completed your research, or even while you're still gathering information, it can be very helpful to start building your own player rankings. The point is simply to use the information you have gathered to date to put the players available in your draft in some kind of order that makes sense to you. You don't even have to strictly follow your rankings during the actual draft if your needs change from round to round, but you do need to have a quick reference that represents all of your individual player thoughts, opinions, research, and hard work in a logical order. It's your draft, why take all your players based on someone else's rankings? Building player rankings from scratch can be an intimidating task, so go ahead and cheat by taking a list of preseason fantasy point projections off your league's website and start moving players around as you see fit.
There's two primary methods I use to help organize my own rankings. I'll address each in detail, and use some examples of how I used them ahead of my 2017 drafts.
Rank Players in Tiers
Using draft tiers is an excellent way to group together players you anticipate having similar value. You should try to establish a tier where you see an obvious drop-off between one player in your rankings, and the next player listed after him. Having well-developed tiers is especially useful when deciding between which positions to address when it's your turn to make a pick. It typically wouldn't make much sense to draft a WR from your 4th tier if a RB from your 2nd tier is still on the board. You want to be able to create some separation between the truly elite players at each position, the nearly elite, and each level moving down towards late round flyers. Generally, tiers will get larger as you move further down the ladder. I'll post my full tiers and rankings separately, but here's some examples of tiers I used.
RB Tier 1
David Johnson
Le'Veon Bell
RB Tier 2
Melvin Gordon
Devonta Freeman
LeSean McCoy
RB Tier 3
DeMarco Murray
Ezekiel Elliott (assuming in-season suspension)
Jordan Howard
Kareem Hunt
Lamar Miller
Leonard Fournette
Jay Ajayi
All else being equal (this also assumes a mostly healthy season), I can't imagine any other RB challenging David Johnson or Le'Veon Bell for top back in fantasy, so those two get their own tier.
In Tier 2, I listed Gordon, Freeman, and McCoy. I think there's a clear drop-off between McCoy and my next ranked RB, DeMarco Murray, so that's where I drew the line between Tier 2 and 3. In Tier 2, I'm still expecting production that is relatively safe and comparable to that of similarly ranked WR. Starting with Murray though, I think backs start to show more flaws, red flags, and issues that prevent the same level of confidence. For Murray, it's age and the talent of his back-up Derrick Henry. LeSean McCoy is the same age as Murray, but has no true back-up worthy of stealing touches, so it seemed an obvious place to put that line between tiers. Tier 3 included the rest of my top 12; what I would consider the likeliest RB1 performers in a 12-team league.
WR Tier 1
Antonio Brown
Odell Beckham
Julio Jones
Mike Evans
Jordy Nelson
WR Tier 2
A.J. Green
Michael Thomas
Dez Bryant
Doug Baldwin
The WR in Tier 1 are the truly elite. They combine high weekly floors with week-winning ceilings and should be counted on to provide all the key ingredients to fantasy success: catches, yards, and TD's. These are sure-fire 1st round picks in PPR leagues and even most non-PPR leagues.
The players in the following tier, like those in the RB Tier 3, already start to show some flaws or concerns over one thing or another. For A.J. Green it's the play of QB Andy Dalton and health. For Michael Thomas, I believe the loss of Brandin Cooks will hurt this passing offense more than most people assume, and I'd like to see Thomas repeat his tremendous rookie season before considering him a Tier 1 elite. Dez Bryant has health concerns and we don't truly know if QB Dak Prescott can sustain a Tier 1 elite WR yet. In spite of his gaudy 2015 TD total, Doug Baldwin probably has the most limited TD upside of any WR1 candidate and I'm concerned about the state of the Seahawks offensive line and how that could impact offensive production this season.
That's a very brief overview of dividing players in tiers, but developing your own tiers is very useful in establishing general groups of players to draft from, rather than focusing on only specific individual players at different points of the draft.
DRAFT DAY
The scenario described in the first paragraph of this post is unfortunately all too common in fantasy drafts; that when your turn comes up in even the 1st or 2nd round and there are already no players you like or wanted, and you make a pick out of desperation or blindly following some preseason rankings. The draft has only just begun and already you feel defeated.
The reason this happens is that we tend to focus too much of our time and energy on figuring out who the perfect 1st round pick would be that we overlook the need to figure out everybody else we want to fill our roster with. We'll nitpick the tiniest differences in our rankings between David Johnson and Le'Veon Bell, or Antonio Brown and Julio Jones, as if that first name that we ink on our blank roster page is going to determine the fate of our entire season. Of course it's true that the first several rounds are extremely important, but I've found that the old saying "You can’t win your fantasy league in the early rounds, but you can lose it" doesn't always ring true. You CAN miss in the early rounds of a draft and still field a highly competitive or even league-winning team by finding strong values and useful contributors in the middle and late rounds.
To accomplish this, you need to achieve a depth of knowledge and research that goes well beyond the first 3 or 4 rounds of your draft, and you need to have a solid opinion about almost every player you would conceivably want to draft. You don't have to memorize stats or ADP figures and you don't even need to rank every single position in an ideal order of value, but you should at least be able to sum up your thoughts about a player in one or two quick sentences, based on all the little bits of information accumulated during the research process. "Due for a bigger role in a good offense. I like this guy this year" or "Already nursing a sore hammy in camp and free agent signings could impact his workload" are perfectly acceptable opinions on a player. Note that neither of them contains any stat projections or rankings. They're just a general opinion/feeling about a player's outlook for the season. Now imagine if those two players were side-by-side in ADP and expert rankings and you were deciding between the two in the 7th round when you need to fill a FLEX spot. Seems like an easy decision now, doesn't it? Take the guy you like and have a positive feeling about. Simply having an opinion about every player will help make those middle-round choices, very important picks in their own right, easier and often more satisfying decisions, and you'll typically leave your draft feeling more confident about the team you've put on paper.
If you've done the research and acquired as much information as you can, then the actual draft should be a breeze. Try to relax and have fun. If you're drafting live with friends, get involved with the banter and trash talk. Don't be the guy hiding behind his computer screen swearing at everybody else's picks because "that was my next pick". My general draft strategy is not to have a strategy.
A fantasy football draft is an exercise in chaos theory. Drafts cannot be predicted or scripted, so don’t waste time trying to project who all your opponents are going to select ahead of you. While I never approach any particular draft with a specific strategy, like starting WR/WR or the now-contrarian RB/RB, it helps to keep in mind some simple pieces of advice, most of which are inherently related: be flexible, don’t panic, and don’t lock onto only one specific player or strategy. Also, draft players you want to own and root for, or guys you simply like, sometimes even if it means reaching a round or two to get them.
Being flexible and not panicking in a draft is the most important thing you can do. Developing your own positional tiers is a great way to help yourself maintain flexibility in your draft. In most leagues, you know you need to draft a starting QB, two RB, 2-3 WR, a TE, and probably 1-2 Flex spots (D/ST and K should be your final two picks). There’s no rule that says they have to be drafted in any particular order. If you pick 10th of 12 in a PPR league and really hoped to get a Tier 1 WR like Jordy Nelson or Mike Evans, but the Tier 1 WR are all gone by the time you pick, you don’t have to stick with drafting a WR. There are fewer top-shelf RB choices in drafts these days, so if the Tier 1 WR cupboard is bare at #10 overall but you have a Tier 2 RB like Devonta Freeman or Melvin Gordon on the board, then switch gears and start your team with an elite RB first. RB values definitely drop off more quickly than WR, especially in PPR leagues, so getting one of the top RB’s available can help give you an advantage at that position over somebody who starts WR/WR and doesn’t get their first starting RB until the 3rd round or later. I’d be happy to start a draft with Devonta Freeman and a Tier 2 WR like Doug Baldwin than panicking into taking Michael Thomas in the 1st round and DeMarco Murray or a Tier 3 WR on the way back in round 2. Feel confident in following your tiers and rankings if you’ve done the research and have faith in your opinions.
Keep a Queue
There is one specific way to help maintain flexibility and avoid panic situations, and that is to keep a queue of players you want to draft when your turn comes. It’s especially important in the middle rounds when owners are all trying to fill their last important starting positions and flex spots. Seasons can be won and lost in the middle round just as easily as the first few rounds. Around the middle of the draft you’ll start to see more variation in picks being made. There will be fewer runs on specific positions as most QB and TE spots are addressed along with remaining RB and WR spots. It helps then to look at the makeup of your own roster, the quality and depth of players available at each position, relative to your rankings and tiers, and keep a short list of players you’d be comfortable taking at each position. Keep that list updated as players are taken. Then be flexible when your turn comes. If you see more WR depth remaining than viable RB depth, take your highest ranked/tier RB when your turn comes up, even if that player would occupy a FLEX spot when you may still have a starting WR position open. Very useful WR like Adam Thielen, Eric Decker, and Jeremy Maclin can possibly be found in the beginning of the middle rounds so go ahead and take a shot on Ty Montgomery if he’s there in the 5th/6th round or Danny Woodhead in a PPR, even if they’re the 3rd RB on your roster.
The only other piece of advice I will give about draft day is to remember that making the playoffs is obviously extremely important, but bringing your best possible team into the playoffs increases your chances of making a nice run towards your league’s Championship Week. In the later rounds of the draft, when starting spots are filled, look at drafting players with greater end-of-season upside over middling veterans. Pick up handcuffs and back-ups for your injury-risk guys, but also pick up a rookie RB or WR with upside, guys who could earn starting roles by the end of the year but may not carry much value early. Think Jordan Howard from last year, or someone like Chris Carson of Seattle or D’Onta Foreman of Houston this year.
