FF Drafting 501

[nobody 2,717]

Okay first things first.  This is Fantasy Football Drafting 501 with a focus on snake drafts.  Drafting 502 covers auction drafts.

If you hold hard and fast rules that you can’t treat as generalities and also know when to break those rules like “never draft a QB before round 10,” this isn’t the class for you.  You need to go to Drafting 401.

If everything you read on this board is stupid and obvious, this class isn’t for you.  Go start a Drafting 701 PhD class.

If you quiver in fear at deviating from rankings and pre-draft lists, you don't need this class.  You’re good.  Just auto-draft.

[nobody 2,717]

Now with that, let’s review some basics that we are going to build on:

Drafting 101 – Have fun. Know your rules.  Know your starting lineup requirements.

Drafting 201 – Make Tiers. 

Drafting 301 – Use Average Draft Position to help target players.  Understand when ADP is stale given recent news, so you can get value.

Drafting 302 – Understand positional scarcity.

Drafting 401 - This is the Fundamental Theorem of Drafting – Draft the best player for your team that won’t be available on your next pick.  In other words – F dem rankings.

[nobody 2,717]

I’m going to pause here and review a key concept from Drafting 301.  Use Average Draft Position.  In this class, we need to understand where players are going to go, but to use ADP properly, an elite drafter needs to understand the concept of standard deviation.

If you’re looking at ADP numbers that don’t have standard deviation, you’re only getting half the story.  Standard Deviation is essentially a measure of variance or in other words how volatile something is.  In the case of ADP, it tells you how close to the ADP number you can expect a player to go.  If the standard deviation is low, that means a player is less likely to stray from his ADP.  If standard deviation is high, it is more likely that a player can go either much earlier or much later than his ADP.

For our purposes, we need to understand three concepts around Standard Deviation

1.      A player has a 68% chance of going at their ADP +/- the standard deviation, so if a player has an ADP of 100 with a standard deviation of 6, there is a 68% chance the player will go between 94 and 106.

2.      A player has a 95% chance of going at their ADP +/- twice the standard deviation, so in our example above, the player has a 95% chance of going between 88 and 112.

3.      In a uniform distribution which we will assume, there is a 50% chance the player goes right on his ADP or before.

We assume there is an equal chance the player will go later or earlier.

[nobody 2,717]

Okay, so now let’s get into the real meat of our class.  In this class, we’re going to discuss how to use the above tools we learned to build a team.

That means we want to maximize not just the points produced by one pick, but we are going to endeavor to identify key players that are undervalued to optimize the number of points we produce from the team as a whole.  To do that, we are going to shift our focus from looking at drafts round by round, and we must look at the draft wholistically.

Now it’s critical that we know our rules and our lineup requirements to do this like we learned in Drafting 101.  It’s critical that we make our tiers like we learned in Drafting 201 to identify players that we think are likely to perform similarly.

[nobody 2,717]

And now is when we make our team.  We’ll assume PPR and 12 teams.  Standard starting lineup.

Starting with our tiers, we should identify folks in those tiers that have outlying ADPs that are much later than the other players in that tier.

Example.  Tier may include Jeanty, Achane, Jonathan Taylor, Derrick Henry, and let’s say you are high on Hampton since Najee shot his eye out, or James Conner since all he ever does is put up top 10 numbers.   And this is just an example.  I’m not expecting you to necessarily agree, but I am expecting you to have your own opinions that may differ from established rankings, otherwise, like I said, you can auto-draft.

Well let’s look at the ADPs of the players in this tier:

	ADP	Std Dev
Ashton Jeanty	10.9	2.5
De'Von Achane	8.8	1.9
Joanthan Taylor	18.7	2.8
Derrick Henry	11.3	2.7
Omarion Hampton	41.6	5.7
James Conner	40.2	4.8

 

Well, I’ll be damned.  I can get two guys in this tier at pick 35 easily.  These guys now should become your pivot point players or anchor players.  We’re going to build a team now around our ability to get one of these guys at this value.

So, now we know in the 3^rd round we are getting a low end RB1.  Well now we can shape our team in rounds 1 and 2 (and potentially rounds 4 and 5) to complement the fact that we got what we think is a low end RB1 in the 3^rd.  What that means is we can favor wide receiver or maybe even other positions in the surrounding rounds if it is advantageous to do so. 

For example, in the 1^st round if we have a toss up between Amon-Ra and we’ll say Jeanty.  Well, we know we can get Omarion or Conner in the 3^rd so why not take Amon-Ra?  Then we can look at guys like Jonathan Taylor or Ladd McConkey in the 2^nd assuming we have those players ranked similarly.

We may already do this intuitively using tiering, but what I’m advocating is that we marry tiers to ADP and not just say "well there’s still a few guys left in this tier so I’ll do X.”  We're getting away from intuition and applying rigor to our process to use the combination of tiering and ADP to inform positional value in the rounds surrounding your anchor player.  In this way, we are looking at the draft as a whole as opposed to just round by round which may lead to a pick of Jeanty or Henry or Achane in the 1^st, Taylor in the 2^nd assuming no WR tiered similarly, and then we get to round 3 and we take a 3^rd RB or pass up amazing value?  Instead, we should anticipate getting the amazing value in round 3 and lean our picks in rounds 1 and 2 knowing that.

You would do this exercise for every tier.  In this way, you may identify two, three, maybe even 4 undervalued players in which you can build around.

[nobody 2,717]

To summarize, use your tiers married with ADP to anchor your draft to certain players in certain rounds and plan the picks in the surrounding rounds around that.  It will help you optimize your team.

What this means is, if you can find value and anchor to a specific position in a specific round, you can perhaps fit a QB or TE in those early rounds where you've been taught to never draft those positions.  Think about it.

[weepaws 3,223]

Don’t be afraid to start your own runs, adp is nice, but use your own ranking, or check out the Football Guru rankings for help, adp are great for offseason discussions, and mock drafts, but when it comes to a live draft , owners use their own thoughts and rankings and usually those do not equal out with the adp rankings, do not panic, hopefully you came prepared with three different cheat sheets per draft like I do, and don’t worry about qbs abd TEs until late , double digit rounds, build up starters at  depth at the most important slots, rb/Wr, round 11 -14 while you’re drafting qbs, Te, kickers, def those other are reaching for third string rb/wr, game over you’re the champ   

 

[nobody 2,717]

And most important lesson...  Unless you are new to the hobby, don't listen to weepaws advice.

[WhiteWonder 2,802]

I’ve been using a modified tier strategy for a long time. Round by round I list every player I would consider. There are some I just won’t be drafting so no need to list them. Round 2 will include everyone I list for round 2 plus every player still available from my round 1 list and so on… 

example:

Rd1: Bijan, Chase, Barkley, Gibbs, Jefferson, Lamb, St. Brown, Puka, Nabers, CMC, Jeanty, Achane

Rd2: Remaining Rd1, Henry, Taylor, Brown, London, McConkey, Bowers

Rd3: Remaining Rd2, Higgins, Wilson, JSN, Hill, Hall

Rd4: Remaining Rd3, Evans, Kamara, Metcalf

the lists will usually get smaller as the rounds go on because my targets are more focused in the mid rounds and I will have more and more spill over. Then they may get larger again as I need to consider positional needs and late round fliers. 

 

Making your own projections is obviously a waste of time. If you rank Bijan higher than Barkley, for example, it doesn’t matter how many yards and TDs you think each will have. 

and of course never marry yourself to any strategy. Generally I wait on QB but I have no set rule like waiting until a certain round. Going back to my round by round lists, there will be QB targets I have listed in the rounds I’m willing to take them in. It’s usually not the first 6-7 rounds though

[Candygram4Mongo 8]

On 8/19/2025 at 6:03 PM, nobody said:

And now is when we make our team.  We’ll assume PPR and 12 teams.  Standard starting lineup.

Starting with our tiers, we should identify folks in those tiers that have outlying ADPs that are much later than the other players in that tier.

Example.  Tier may include Jeanty, Achane, Jonathan Taylor, Derrick Henry, and let’s say you are high on Hampton since Najee shot his eye out, or James Conner since all he ever does is put up top 10 numbers.   And this is just an example.  I’m not expecting you to necessarily agree, but I am expecting you to have your own opinions that may differ from established rankings, otherwise, like I said, you can auto-draft.

Well let’s look at the ADPs of the players in this tier:

	ADP	Std Dev
Ashton Jeanty	10.9	2.5
De'Von Achane	8.8	1.9
Joanthan Taylor	18.7	2.8
Derrick Henry	11.3	2.7
Omarion Hampton	41.6	5.7
James Conner	40.2	4.8

 

Well, I’ll be damned.  I can get two guys in this tier at pick 35 easily.  These guys now should become your pivot point players or anchor players.  We’re going to build a team now around our ability to get one of these guys at this value.

So, now we know in the 3^rd round we are getting a low end RB1.  Well now we can shape our team in rounds 1 and 2 (and potentially rounds 4 and 5) to complement the fact that we got what we think is a low end RB1 in the 3^rd.  What that means is we can favor wide receiver or maybe even other positions in the surrounding rounds if it is advantageous to do so. 

For example, in the 1^st round if we have a toss up between Amon-Ra and we’ll say Jeanty.  Well, we know we can get Omarion or Conner in the 3^rd so why not take Amon-Ra?  Then we can look at guys like Jonathan Taylor or Ladd McConkey in the 2^nd assuming we have those players ranked similarly.

We may already do this intuitively using tiering, but what I’m advocating is that we marry tiers to ADP and not just say "well there’s still a few guys left in this tier so I’ll do X.”  We're getting away from intuition and applying rigor to our process to use the combination of tiering and ADP to inform positional value in the rounds surrounding your anchor player.  In this way, we are looking at the draft as a whole as opposed to just round by round which may lead to a pick of Jeanty or Henry or Achane in the 1^st, Taylor in the 2^nd assuming no WR tiered similarly, and then we get to round 3 and we take a 3^rd RB or pass up amazing value?  Instead, we should anticipate getting the amazing value in round 3 and lean our picks in rounds 1 and 2 knowing that.

You would do this exercise for every tier.  In this way, you may identify two, three, maybe even 4 undervalued players in which you can build around.

I feel like I’ve always done this from my gut, not mathematically.
 

I’m curious:

Where does one get the standard deviation values from?

[nobody 2,717]

Fantasyfootball calculator has it attached to their adp data.

https://fantasyfootballcalculator.com/adp/ppr

They also have a cool little tool that'll estimate the chances of a player falling to you...

https://fantasyfootballcalculator.com/scenario-calculator?format=ppr&num_teams=12&draft_pick=20