When you’ve been married for a long time, like I’ve been, you learn that you’re going to need to start making some tough choices. Because, while I like nothing more than spending quality time with my wife, telling my daughter that she did a perfect arabesque in ballet class (to be fair, she really may have, though I doubt it’s supposed to end with her falling on the floor), or endlessly trying to explain to my son that he doesn’t HAVE to swing at every pitch in Little League, there are days when I could use a little time to myself.
The problem is that there’s little free time as a parent, and any time away leaves your poor spouse on his or her own with your darling bundles of joy. So you need to figure out how important certain things are.
For example, my wife will be running the Chicago marathon this fall, and will be gone for four days with friends. I’m excited for her, and she deserves some time away. But, generous as she is, she has let me know that I should plan some time for myself. So it’s either going to be a golf weekend in Pebble Beach or a fantasy baseball draft weekend in Vegas next year (I went with Vegas – I mean, I can play golf here, right?).
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Of course, it doesn’t have to be that grand. After all, I did agree to watch Sex and the City 2 last weekend. That means I’ll either choose between forcing her to finally watch Reservoir Dogs or just going out with the guys to watch Monday Night Football one night. In contrast, when I completely forgot that I had agreed to pick up our son from school one day forcing my wife to totally rearrange her schedule, she booked one Saturday of reading on the couch where I wasn’t allowed to speak to her all day (I am dismayed that she viewed me not speaking to her as some sort of huge benefit), as opposed to a night out with the girls or me rewiring our house.
What my wife and I do – and what we all do in every day life – is create tiers. We have various choices that have similar value to us, and we know it in advance. Sure, I’d love to have the Vegas weekend, a golf outing, and a “get out of mowing the lawn” card that never expired. But the Chicago marathon allows me to choose just one thing from my top tier. That tier is certainly not in play just for sitting through Sex and the City 2, so I need to consider my next grouping.
And nowhere is tiering more important than in your fantasy football draft. As in the example above, creating tiers in fantasy football is simply a way of grouping similar-caliber players. Each tier should contain players who you believe will contribute around as much as the other players in the same tier, so that the marginal value of drafting one player in a tier over another is insignificant.
Overall Tiers
You can create tiers in two ways: overall tiers and positional tiers. For example, if you go to the expert consensus rankings, you see that roughly 400 ranked players are broken up into 14 separate tiers. As you get lower in the rankings, the tiers become larger, because while there’s a huge gap between someone like David Johnson and Jordy Nelson (just 10 spots apart but in different tiers), there’s very little difference between Coby Fleener and Kenny Stills (21 spots apart but in the same tier). Having overall tiers is a good way to have a 10,000 foot view on the type of talent that is still available at any point in your draft.
Position Tiers
But to really excel at your draft, you need to take the time to break down each position into its own separate tier (which you will also see in the expert consensus rankings if you sort by position). To illustrate how important positional tiers are, let’s say you’re sitting in the middle of Round 4, and there has been a massive run on wide receivers. You’re looking at the draft board and thinking to yourself, “whew, there are a ton of receivers off the board. I should probably grab one.” But a quick scan of your tiers shows you that there are seven receivers available in your current wide receiver tier. Conversely, there’s one last running back available from your second tier of that position. Rather than grab the next best available wide receiver, you know that it makes sense to take the running back first, because there will almost certainly be another wide receiver from your current tier left when your draft spot comes up next. That running back, though? He’ll likely be long gone.
Having positional tiers allows you to avoid falling down the rabbit hole and unnecessarily following a positional run. It takes a lot of the panic and guesswork out of those precious few seconds you have to make critical decisions, and allows you to easily recognize where the concentration of value is at any given point in your draft.
The best part is that tiers are largely personal preference – it’s all about how you feel in terms of which players you think fall into the same general level of production. So, take some time before your draft and group players together – whether it be by squiggly lines or color-coding – and take some of the stress out of drafting. Also, I’ll give my usual pro tip, which is if you do use color-coding and you’re color blind, like me, PLEASE do not put the red tier on top of the green tier. Longest. Draft. Ever.
As with using ADP, using tiers during your draft is a surefire way to ensure that you are maximizing value. Also, if you start incorporating them into your real life, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll have a much happier marriage, too!
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Dan Harris is a featured writer for FantasyPros. For more from Dan, check out his archive or follow him on Twitter at @danharris80.
