If the early rounds are where we lay the foundations for our team and decide on the strategies to follow, then the middle rounds are where we capitalize and start to take stands on certain players, fill out our stacks and find potential league-winners.
This article is the second of a three-part series looking at how to approach each third of the draft. Each article will provide strategy advice, positional allocation nuggets, and players to keep in mind.
Before considering how we approach the middle rounds, it’s essential to be mindful of how we’ve approached the early rounds. If you have four running backs by the start of round seven, it’s time to forget about them for most, if not all, of the rest of the draft. In every draft I do, I have three points that I’m keeping in mind when I get to the middle rounds:
- Stacks
- Strategy
- Positional Allocation
That’s not to say that these overrule factors like taking players who I really like or those who fall below their ADP for no good reason, but it does stay at the front of my mind for how I plan to react if a value pick pushes my team build into a risky area.
If the early rounds are where we lay the foundations for our team and decide on the strategies to follow, then the middle rounds are where we capitalize and start to take stands on certain players, fill out our stacks and find potential league-winners.
This article is the second of a three-part series looking at how to approach each third of the draft. Each article will provide strategy advice, positional allocation nuggets, and players to keep in mind.
Before considering how we approach the middle rounds, it’s essential to be mindful of how we’ve approached the early rounds. If you have four running backs by the start of round seven, it’s time to forget about them for most, if not all, of the rest of the draft. In every draft I do, I have three points that I’m keeping in mind when I get to the middle rounds:
- Stacks
- Strategy
- Positional Allocation
That’s not to say that these overrule factors like taking players who I really like or those who fall below their ADP for no good reason, but it does stay at the front of my mind for how I plan to react if a value pick pushes my team build into a risky area.
Stacks
If you liked Davante Adams enough to draft him, then it stands to reason that you’ve already decided that Derek Carr will have good fantasy weeks. While you might not have the confidence to choose Carr as your QB1, it makes sense to add Carr to your watchlist and select him if the opportunity arises. These middle rounds are where stacks are built out consistently, and we mustn’t reach heavily at this point. As Hayden Winks’s chart below shows, reaching twelve picks above ADP can be harmful, and 24 picks can be catastrophic to a team’s chances.
Meanwhile, taking advantage of players who fall past their ADP can lead to an increase in points. When stacking, I’ll often push my luck to complete a stack. If you’ve already drafted Davante Adams and Darren Waller, not many of your opponents will be desperate to draft Derek Carr at his ADP instead of looking for players to complement their own stacks. In these situations, if I’m between two players, one who will complete the stack and one who won’t, I’ll often take the gamble that the stackable player will come back at a value. If you’re wrong, you still have a nice correlation of some of the best parts of that offense to set your roster up well.
These middle rounds also provide an excellent area to double-dip on teams if you missed out on the elite pieces of the offense in the earlier rounds. The table below shows teams with multiple players available in the second third of drafts. The quantity of available stacks is a good reminder not to reach on other stacks when you can find your way to others plenty of the time.
Strategy
In the first part of this article, we talked about how starting heavy at certain positions has historically led to different win rates, for instance, on FFPC’s TE Premium format, if you don’t have a tight end before the end of round six, your team is already facing an uphill battle against below-average win rate’s. At this point in the draft, it’s time to look at what your roster is looking like and quickly decide what your needs are going forward.
If you’ve deployed a low-running back approach so far, then the good news is that we’re past the dreaded running back dead-zone, and now would be a good time to start stocking up. In 2020 Underdog drafters who took their RB3 after round six and drafted between four and eight in total saw an advance rate of between 21.0%-17.4%. In 2021 that number would drop slightly to an average of 17.1%, still above the average advance rate of 16.7%.
Leonard Fournette and James Conner were incredible league winners in 2021, while Antonio Gibson (ADP 91.3) had an advance rate of 32.5% in 2020, representing the fifth-highest running back and the only member of the top five to have an ADP outside of the top 20. In 2019 Austin Ekeler and Miles Sanders were the standout running backs in the middle rounds, and in 2018 it was Nick Chubb and James White. Year after year, the middle-tiers deliver some of the best running back values, and it’s an area of the draft where dependent on the strategy, I like to grab two or three when possible.
Positional Allocation
For some best ball drafters, the approach they prefer to take is strategy-agnostic. Team ‘Draft The Best Players’ rolls through the draft with no concern for historical win rates or my hyper fragileness. In truth, at the end of the day, there is nothing wrong with this tactic. In 2021’s Best Ball Mania II, the team that finished fifth and took home $100’000 avoided any major micro-strategies and took a balanced approach to their team.
This team isn’t a particularly sexy team on the surface, and if you tweeted it out post-draft in 2021, no doubt other fantasy managers would meet you with comments like “Where’s the stacks?”, “Skinny Patrick Mahomes?” or “Tight end doesn’t look very good.” What this roster does have going for it, though, is a balance that hasn’t forced it into an extreme build. By choosing two quarterbacks, seven receivers, seven backs, and two tight ends, the roster has a 2-7-7-2 build. This type of roster build resulted in an advance rate 0.4% above expectation and was one of the least popular constructions, with just 2.7% of entrants using it. It was hardly a tactic that paid off widely, but whereas this build can have middling results, extreme roster constructions that take nine or more running backs or receivers may have a high ceiling, but they also have low floors, which can scare users off. What the drafter lacked in stacks or popular strategies, they made up for by staying balanced in their roster construction and sticking close to ADP.
As we find ourselves in this middle third of the draft, it’s necessary to remember that every pick we make has a knock-on effect and while the next pick is the most important, remember that each pick is crucial in its own right.
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