PREMIUM

Best Ball Strategy: How to Approach the Middle Rounds (2023 Fantasy Football)

In the middle rounds of best-ball drafts, it’s critical that you come prepared with an optimal and flexible approach. Following up on a strong start coming out of the early rounds is critical to your success. The player pool isn’t as strong as at the beginning of the draft, but the difference in hitting on the right guys in the range can make or break your best-ball roster.

League-winners like Josh Jacobs, Miles Sanders, Rhamondre Stevenson, DeVonta Smith, Amon-Ra St. Brown, and Tyler Lockett all provided superior values and advance rates at their middle-round draft cost.

Let’s dive in.

Middle Round Best Ball Strategies

Let’s take a look at how you should approach the middle rounds of your best ball drafts.

The “Anything But Middling” Approach

At this point in the draft, you have already drafted a good chunk of your team. So your strategy may differ slightly depending on the foundation you built during the early portion of your draft. Ergo, if already roster three strong running backs (or at least ones you spent high draft capital on) no need to address the position.

However, the overarching approach to the middle rounds is going to remain static for the most part regardless of what you already did. The focus is still on drafting the “best player available” or BPA. Too many times drafters make the mistake of drafting for need in the middle-rounds – when the priority should be filling your roster will as many potential level jumpers or league-winners as humanly possible. Especially at the wide receiver position.

As I identified in the Best Ball WR Primer, the name of the game with wide receivers remains to scoop up value in the middle-to-later portions of drafts, with the position counting for the biggest part of your best-ball roster. Take advantage of WRs that fall in ADP, while other teams “reach” on running backs that they think they need.

Because you will be shocked how quickly the WR position drys up despite the false narrative that the position is deep every year. It’s not deep. If anything, it’s extremely diluted, which makes it that much more essential you draft the remaining wideouts toward the start of the middle rounds. You’ll feel (and perform) much better knowing that you aren’t trudging out WRs ranked outside the top 40 as your weekly WR3.

Wide receivers in the middle rounds are often the ones that tend to take massive leaps and vastly outperform their ADP. And when in doubt, just keep drafting WRs that have breakout potential. Chances are they all won’t hit…but all you need is one to hit big to reap the benefits. You’ll want at least eight or nine WRs overall with a minimum of three and up to four cracking your starting weekly lineup. Gravitate toward the pass-catchers in a high-powered offense with some target ambiguity versus the guy who has a more obvious high-end target floor in a bad offense.

The Follow-Up and Stacking

Tom Strachan wrote the FantasyPros Best Ball approach to middle rounds before the 2022 season, and his analysis is definitely worth highlighting as we head into 2023. We want to go beyond “just draft WRs” in the middle rounds to build the best squad. And Strachan’s first point is stacking.

Stack offenses when possible, but please don’t overreach – throwing ADP out the window to draft a guy a few rounds ahead for stacking purposes won’t help you in the long run. Because there are other teams in some tournament settings that will have the same exact stack but have a more well-rounded roster because they didn’t reach a half-round or full-round versus ADP.

Who you select in the early rounds will set the foundation for stacking in the middle rounds as you put offensive pieces from the same teams together. Draft Amon-Ra St. Brown in Round 2? Then you better be adding Jameson Williams into the queue for selection in Rounds 7 or 8.

But again, don’t overextend yourself. Chances are that if the majority of the drafters in your draft are actually stacking, the right pieces will fall back to you at value or even at a suppressed ADP. Practice discipline stacking.

Back to Running Backs

Once you’ve got some solid stacking forming and a plethora of breakout WRs to work from, I give you permission to dive back into the running back pool. Because after WRs, breakout RBs are the next target in the middle rounds. Specifically, once the drafts enter the late RB2 early RB3 range (RB20-RB38) or RBs with a top-40 ADP. That group presented the greatest hit rate for fantasy running backs to return a mid-range RB2 (RB17.2) finish as I found in my article from 2022 titled, How to Identify Sleeper & Late-Round Running Backs to Target.

Running backs that hit in this general range last season included: Josh Jacobs, Tony Pollard, Miles Sanders, Rhamondre Stevenson, Dameon Pierce, Devin Singletary, Kenneth Walker III, and Tyler Allgeier.

Keep in mind that the majority of RBs in this range can be found in my Tier 3. You can find the full-tiered rankings in my 2023 Best Ball Leagues Draft Primer for Running Backs. They are also listed below.

2023 Fantasy Football Rankings powered by FantasyProsECR (TM) – Expert Consensus Rankings

Ideally, after drafting at least one stud RB from the early rounds, Tier 3 is the next group of running backs that you target for upside. For more details on “what” to look for among late-round RBs, I’ve included below my final thoughts from my older article titled Erickson’s Running Back Season Recap & Advice for 2023.

Identify running backs with the potential to see/possess goal-line roles in high-scoring offenses. Pinpointing a team’s primary red-zone back is an easy way to hit on a fantasy running back.
If you are low on the “starter” you should naturally be higher on the No.2 RB in the same backfield.
Target impending free agent running backs. Biggest hits from 2022 include Josh Jacobs, Saquon Barkley, Tony Pollard, Miles Sanders, and Jamaal Williams.
Notable free agents at the end of the 2023 season include: Derrick Henry, Austin Ekeler, Chase Edmonds, Cordarrelle Patterson, Gus Edwards, D’Andre Swift, Jonathan Taylor, Cam Akers, J.K. Dobbins, A.J. Dillon, and Antonio Gibson.
Joe Mixon and Clyde Edwards-Helaire have club options in their contracts. Mixon has been heavily rumored to be a cap casualty.
Target running backs on quality offenses (cumulative offensive ADP deemed above average).
Aim for running backs on teams that have no clear-cut starter ie. ambiguous backfields. This is where breakout running backs are often found.
Volume is and remains king.
When in doubt, draft the guy who has a proven track record.
Do not prioritize running backs on offenses that have not yet proven to be above average while treading lightly on running backs that don’t have a lot of job security. With running backs, ask yourself: What would it take for RB “X” to lose the starting job?

The Onesie Positions

I discussed ad nauseam the advantage you can acquire by drafting an elite tight end or quarterback in the early portion of your draft. But chances are you aren’t doing both, and savvy drafters won’t let the elite onesie positions go by too frequently. There’s a chance you might need to address the position as the middle-rounds kick off.

At quarterback, this is more than acceptable. As noted in the Fantasy Football Best Ball Leagues Draft Primer: Quarterback, some of the best fantasy quarterback hits came from the QB15-21 range (Picks 115-165). I’d prefer the quarterback to be my fantasy QB2 on my roster, but it’s still okay to select your QB1 in this range and draft two later on. Especially if for some reason one of the elite QBs falls in ADP.

The last thing you want to do is punt the quarterback position entirely until the late rounds. That’s a no-go. After all, they score the most points, so you will want to make sure you have at least one elite option and one that has a high chance of being a backend QB1 or top-15 option. Relying too heavily on late-round QBs that turned into duds kills advance rates. Remember best ball isn’t the same as redraft, and therefore no waiver wire makes the late-round QB approach completely different. Get those two QBs drafted as early as Rounds 4-6 and no later than Rounds 11 or 12.

The tight end position is a different beast altogether despite being the other “onesie” position. I preached it all last season, that you want to stay out of the middle at tight end. And I am doing it again this season in the Best Ball Tight End Primer. The only two exceptions would be if a tight end I view in a higher tier falls into the middle rounds, or for stacking purposes. But even when it comes to stacking, I am not aggressively stacking middle-round tight ends and would just hope they fall past their ADP before selecting them. Don’t feel bad if you miss out on them, but be open to taking them if they become obvious value-stacking assets.