It seems like just yesterday that we were gearing up for another fantasy football draft, but here we are on the other side of the season. That doesn’t mean it is time to stop talking about fantasy football, of course. Rather, we need to audit our way of thinking to see what worked and what didn’t, that way we are prepared to dominate our leagues in seven months. Today, I’ll be breaking down five common strategies and how they worked for fantasy owners in 2018.
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Zero Running Backs
The blueprint for this strategy is to wait until after the 6th round to draft your first running back. At that point, opinions differ on whether you should load up with high upside pieces or merely acquire a few safe pass-catching backs. For the sake of review, I’ll show you the ADPs RBs who were drafted in Rounds 7 to Round 10 compared to their actual performance ranking in half-PPR leagues since those are the most common players on Zero RB rosters.
Fails
Rashaad Penny (ADP RB 32 to reality RB64)
Isaiah Crowell (RB33 to RB31)
Chris Thompson (RB36 to RB60)
Peyton Barber (RB37 to RB27)
Duke Johnson (RB38 to RB40)
Ronald Jones (RB39 to RB95)
C.J. Anderson (RB41 to RB65)
Hits
Chris Carson (ADP RB34 to reality RB15)
Marlon Mack (RB35 to RB21)
Adrian Peterson (RB40 to RB18 )
James White (RB42 to RB8)
Nick Chubb (RB43 to RB16)
Aaron Jones (RB44 to RB23)
That might look pretty good to you, but consider that Marlon Mack was 20% owned in Week 5, Nick Chubb was 15% owned in Week 7 and Aaron Jones was 40% owned in Week 8. Chances are, if you drafted those three, you dropped them too. That leaves us with just 3 out of 13 running backs helping the teams who drafted them. You can point to the fact that they could have picked up James Conner (RB7) or Phillip Lindsay (RB12), and while that may be true, everyone else in your league had the same shot. Those players weren’t the targets of Zero RB proponents and the ones who were failed hard once again. Don’t hear me wrong, there were some early RB busts as always like Le’Veon Bell, Devonta Freeman and Leonard Fournette, but if you drafted one of the 14 RBs who went in the first two rounds, you had a 71% chance of grabbing a top 20 RB compared to just 23% in the 7th through 10th rounds.
Now, the point of drafting RBs late is to load up at wide receiver, tight end and quarterback and while that may have helped at tight end (if you avoided Rob Gronkowski for Travis Kelce or Zach Ertz), chances are that your quarterback canceled that out by disappointing you as you’ll see in a moment. The top two tiers of wide receivers succeeded at similar rates to the top end running backs with the 7th through 10th rounders struggling at similar rates as RBs, but there is one considerable difference between the two positions. Top end RBs, as always, were twice as useful in terms of value over replacement. That fact alone should convince you to avoid zero RBs for eternity.
Late Round Quarterbacks
While virtually the entire expert industry uses this strategy, it was JJ Zachariason of numberFire who was responsible for popularizing the idea that there are so many quality fantasy QBs that we ought to just wait until the end of the draft to snag our guy rather than wasting a mid-round, or (gulp) early pick for a QB. Let’s take a look at the five highest drafted QBs and how much they performed above the replacement level (VBD).
Aaron Rodgers – ADP 24th overall, VBD 43rd overall
Deshaun Watson – ADP 36th overall, VBD 31st overall
Tom Brady – ADP 44th overall, VBD below replacement level
Russell Wilson – ADP 48th overall, VBD 58th overall
Cam Newton – ADP 56th overall, VBD below replacement level
The research tells us the same thing every season without exception: Just wait on a quarterback. You could have picked up four of the five best fantasy QBs late in drafts: Patrick Mahomes (QB1), Matt Ryan (QB2), Ben Roethlisberger (QB3), Andrew Luck (QB5). Let’s stop making the same mistakes next year.
Last Round DSTs
In the preseason, one of our featured writers, Ryan Melosi, pointed out that of DSTs drafted top-five at the position over the past three seasons, only 20% have returned top-five value. In fact, only 52% have finished within the top 12 at the position while none have finished as the #1 DST. Historical results have made this strategy obvious, and in fact, you may want to go so far as to not even draft a running back next year (more on that in a moment). Let’s see if this year’s sample size demonstrated the same truths. Here are the top-five highest drafted D/STs:
Jacksonville (4 rounds before the last round), finished DST15
L.A. Rams (+3 rounds), finished DST2
Minnesota (+3 rounds), finished DST6
Philadelphia (+2 rounds), finished DST23
L.A. Chargers (+2 rounds), finished DST17
The Rams finished in the top-five but they were the only one in the top-five, keeping the trend of a 20% success rate for top-five drafted D/STs. Only one other finished in the top 12, dragging that 52% figure down another notch. In fact, even the Rams and Vikings were both dropped in plenty of leagues during their bye weeks or for better streamers. Next year, proceed with this rule in mind: Draft your D/ST for Week 1 and Week 1 only then figure the rest out later. Or you can just forgo drafting a D/ST at all…
Handcuff Running Backs
For the past few years, I’ve been arguing that if you draft more than a week before the first kickoff of the season, you should draft an extra backup running back instead of a D/ST (and kicker if your league still chooses to use one). In the summer of 2017, we were banging the drum for taking Kareem Hunt with your last pick (instead of that D/ST), then Spencer Ware got hurt and Hunt’s ADP shot up into the fourth round. He proceeded to finish as the RB4 and if you happened to draft early and take him instead of your DST, chances are that you made the playoffs easily.
Likewise, this season our name was James Conner. Even before the Le’Veon Bell holdout was even considered a possibility, he was the clear-cut top handcuff going undrafted so we loudly shouted from the rooftops (go back and listen to early August podcasts if you want proof) to draft Conner in every draft just in case Bell gets hurt or anything else happened. Low and behold, Conner morphed into a monster for fantasy owners.
Drafting backup RBs in the last round instead of D/STs isn’t the only line of thinking, however. Every year, plenty recommend drafting the direct backup to your star running back then hold onto him in case your starter gets injured. You have to clog up a roster spot and wait for an injury that may never happen though. The reason it doesn’t work, of course, is that when that injury does happen, the planned backup isn’t really the workhorse you thought he’d be. See John Kelly and the Rams, Justin Jackson and the Chargers, Kenneth Dixon and the Ravens then Royce Freeman and Devontae Booker. To put it plainly: don’t play the guessing game on backup RBs all season, but in the preseason, it is a great idea in the last round or two instead of drafting a D/ST and a kicker. If nothing happens by Week 1, drop them for your streaming D/ST and kicker and you lose less than a point in above replacement value.
Fade Injury Optimism
Scott Pianowski of Yahoo! Sports has been driving the point home for seasons that while there may be some occasional value to be found in drafting injured players, the risk far outweighs the upside so it is best to avoid them altogether. There were six players who were drafted within the top 100 picks this season despite injuries heading into the season. Doug Baldwin was the highest at 38th overall and WR15. He was followed by Carson Wentz (70th), Sony Michel (72nd), Alshon Jeffery (73rd), Rashaad Penny (79th) and Marlon Mack (96th). let’s see how they performed:
Doug Baldwin – ADP WR15, Outcome WR50
Sony Michel – ADP RB30, Outcome RB25
Rashaad Penny – ADP 31, Outcome RB59
Marlon Mack – ADP RB36, Outcome RB19
Alshon Jeffery – ADP WR30, Outcome WR26
Carson Wentz – ADP QB7, Outcome QB22
I don’t know about you, but I’ll be abiding by Scott’s advice next season and fading the optimism on already injured players even if their ADPs seem like a steal.
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