The perfect fantasy football draft is a lofty ideal, but pulling it off is tricky business. It’s not just a matter of performing your routine without any slip-ups, sticking the landing, and getting perfect 10s from all the judges — even the hard-to-please Eastern European judge.

A nettlesome variable often blocks the path to a perfect draft: other people.

You can do hours upon hours of predraft planning. You can do a bunch of mock drafts (including ours, which is the best in the business). You can stay on top of all the NFL news. But once the draft starts, other people’s actions will determine your path. As much as we’d like to be proactive with the management of our fantasy football teams, drafting is more about reaction than action.

There is no magic set of instructions for a perfect, push-button draft. Each draft is a unique organism. I can’t tell you which specific position to draft in each round because that would make for an inefficient draft. Capitalizing on value is essential. Draft value is a moving target that will present itself in different places depending on your competitors’ decisions.

Still, we can position ourselves to have a perfect draft by following two guiding principles and recognizing positional value.

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Pat Fitzmaurice’s Perfect 2023 Fantasy Football Draft

Two Guiding Principles

Guiding principle No. 1: Try not to divorce yourself from the realities of the regular season.

Let’s start by acknowledging the inevitability of injuries. Football is a brutal game. The ship you build during the draft will almost surely encounter rough seas at some point, mostly due to injuries. Draft with the looming storm in mind. What would your starting lineup look like if you lost your top WR or RB to a long-term injury? Would you have enough left to weather the storm? Try to build a sturdy vessel that won’t capsize if you lose one of your top players.

Try to think about in-season management while drafting. Let’s use Jaylen Warren as an example. Many fantasy analysts trump Warren as a draft target because he was so efficient as a rookie last year. But it was efficiency in small doses, and there’s little reason to believe we’ll get a significantly bigger dose of Warren in 2023, barring an injury to Najee Harris. If you draft Warren, there’s a good chance you’ll drop him in the first two to three weeks of the season when a couple of your players get hurt, and you need to replace them with guys who are getting playing time.

General principle No. 2: Study your league settings and construct a draft strategy around them.

Roster settings, lineup settings and scoring settings should all factor into your approach to the draft. You have to decide, for instance, whether to draft a backup quarterback. If you’re playing in a 10-team league with 16 roster spots, it makes little sense to draft a backup QB because there will always be decent QBs available in the free-agent pool, and with few roster spots, it’s important to save those late-round darts for the RB position.

The most important league setting is the number of wide receivers you must start. If your league requires you to start two WRs each week, you don’t need to commit yourself to either a WR-heavy or RB-heavy strategy. But if a league requires you to start three WRs each week, wide receiver becomes the most important position on your team.

If your league’s lineup configuration is one QB, two RBs, three WRs, one TE, one flex, 37.5% of your starters (excluding defenses and kickers) will be wide receivers. That number jumps to 50% if you start a receiver in your flex spot. If you need to start three WRs each week, attack the position early in your draft. Generally, four of your first seven picks should be WRs. Your goal should be to have a decisive advantage over your competitors at wide receiver.

A Plan for Each Position

Here’s a basic plan for handling each of the four primary positions.

Quarterback: It used to be that drafting a QB early marked you as a tactical novice. Not anymore. Rushing production from the QB position is valuable, and the proliferation of running quarterbacks provides an incentive to get a top quarterback.

I want to land one of the top eight quarterbacks in my 1QB redraft leagues this year, but I won’t invest a second-round pick on one. I can’t bypass a high-impact RB or WR in favor of taking Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen or Jalen Hurts.

The sweet spot is the QB4-QB8 range: Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson, Justin Fields, Justin Herbert and Trevor Lawrence. These five quarterbacks typically come off the board from the late third to the late fifth round. The RBs and WRs who come off the board in that range aren’t nearly as appealing as the second-round RBs and WRs.

Running Back: You should make your heaviest investments in stable assets rather than unstable assets. Running backs are unstable assets.

Aside from kickers and defenses, RB is possibly the least predictable position in fantasy football. We routinely see running backs taken in the mid to late rounds of fantasy drafts emerge as impactful performers. It’s far less common to see wide receivers emerge from the middle and late rounds of fantasy drafts and make an impact.

Rather than pounding the RB position early in your draft, hunt for value and draft running backs opportunistically.

Wide Receiver: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking the WR position is deep. Yes, a lot of wide receivers get significant playing time. But in 2023, only 29 WRs played at least 10 games and averaged double-digit points in half-point point per reception (PPR) scoring, only 32 WRs drew at least 100 targets, only 26 WRs scored more than five touchdowns, and only 21 receivers hit the 1,000-yard mark.

Wide receiver is a more predictable position than the running back. In 2022, nine of the 12 wide receivers with ADPs in the WR1 range finished as WR1s in fantasy points per game (half-point PPR). Two of the other three — Mike Evans and Tee Higgins — finished 13th and 14th, respectively, in fantasy points per game among receivers who played at least nine games. The only receiver to be drafted in the WR1 range last year and finish outside the top 14 in fantasy points per game was Deebo Samuel, who finished 25th in fantasy points per game.

The high reliability of early-round wide receivers is a good reason to invest heavily in the position.

Tight End: Be flexible with this vexing position. Getting a top tight end can give you a big competitive advantage, but there’s an opportunity cost to drafting Travis Kelce in the first round or Mark Andrews in the second or third round. If you miss out on Kelce and Andrews, be willing to exercise patience at the position. Don’t pass up a potential difference-maker at running back or wide receiver to draft a middle-class tight end.

If tight ends fly off the board in your draft, you miss out on all the players from the top three or four tiers. You can justify dumpster-diving at TE if it means loading up on talent at the other positions. If you’re not satisfied with the tight end(s) you draft, you can work the waiver wire during the season, playing matchups and hoping to hit on a dependable TE option.

Approach to Round 1

There’s no point speaking in generalities about approaching the first round since it depends on your draft spot. This is my draft board for the first round:

1. Justin Jefferson (WR – MIN)
2. Ja’Marr Chase (WR – CIN)
3. Christian McCaffrey (RB – SF)
4. Cooper Kupp (WR – LAR)
5. Jonathan Taylor (RB – IND)
6. Bijan Robinson (RB – ATL)
7. Travis Kelce (TE – KC)
8. Tyreek Hill (WR – MIA)
9. CeeDee Lamb (WR – DAL)
10. Austin Ekeler (RB – LAC)
11. Stefon Diggs (RB – BUF)
12. A.J. Brown (WR – PHI)

If I can’t get one of the top three wide receivers but can get one of the top three running backs, I’ll go with a “Hero RB” approach, drafting one of those top running backs and then ignoring the position until the middle rounds.

Approach to Round 2

If I draft a running back in Round 2 (or if I draft TE Travis Kelce), I’m drafting the best available wide receiver in Round 2. I don’t want to fall behind at the all-important WR position.

If I draft a wide receiver in Round 1, I’ll consider a running back in Round 2 if Nick Chubb, Saquon Barkley, or Derrick Henry are available. But if WR Garrett Wilson is available to me in Round 2, I’m probably drafting him over any of those RBs. Wilson had a 1,100-yard season as a rookie playing with many terrible QBs. He should thrive this year in a pairing with QB Aaron Rodgers.

Approach to Rounds 3-6

In principle, I think the Zero RB approach is viable and savvy. In practice, I’m not entirely comfortable with it and prefer a Hero RB approach. In other words, I want to come out of the first six rounds with at least one running back.

As noted earlier, I’d also like to land one of the top eight quarterbacks, and since I’m not willing to draft a QB in the first two rounds, I’m probably going to draft someone from the QB4-QB8 range in this part of the draft.

But this draft portion is fertile ground for wide receivers, so I’ll draft two to four in this area. This part of the draft is sometimes called the “RB Dead Zone” because the hit rate for running backs drafted in Rounds 3-6 is notoriously poor. It’s another good reason to eschew RBs in this part of the draft and focus on other positions (especially WR).

My favorite WR targets in Rounds 3-6 (relative to cost): Chris Olave, Drake London, Christian Watson, Michael Pittman.

Dead Zone RBs I’m willing to consider in Rounds 3-6: Rhamondre Stevenson, Breece Hall, Najee Harris, Cam Akers, Aaron Jones, Jahmyr Gibbs.

Approach to Rounds 7-10

If I don’t have a QB yet, I’m getting one in this draft portion.

If I don’t have a TE yet, I’m (probably) getting one in this portion of the draft.

Favorite targets in these rounds at their ADPs:

QBs: Deshaun Watson (79), Dak Prescott (81)

RBs: Antonio Gibson (87), Rashaad Penny (102), De’Von Achane (104)

WRs: Jahan Dotson (90), Gabe Davis (100), Courtland Sutton (105)

TEs – Pat Freiermuth (93)

Approach to Rounds 11-18

Ah, yes … the dart-throwing rounds. Here are my favorite darts to throw in each round.

Round 11: Zay Flowers (WR – BAL). Rookie wide receivers with first-round NFL Draft capital are pretty good bets in fantasy. We saw it with Chris Olave (ADP: WR44) and Garrett Wilson (WR49) last year. We saw it in 2021 with Ja’Marr Chase (WR26) and Jaylen Waddle (WR46) and in 2020 with CeeDee Lamb (WR38) and Justin Jefferson (WR49).

Round 12: Kendre Miller (RB – NO). A toolsy rookie from TCU, Miller could get a chance to pop for the Saints if Alvin Kamara draws a suspension for an incident during the 2022 Pro Bowl weekend in Las Vegas.

Round 13: Tank Bigsby (RB -JAC). Rookie RBs tend to be good draft values, and Bigsby could be the thunder in Jacksonville to Travis Etienne‘s lightning.

Round 14: Alec Pierce (WR – IND). A 6-3 receiver with 4.41 speed, Pierce should mesh well with rookie QB Anthony Richardson and his big arm.

Round 15: Mike Gesicki (TE – NE). My favorite late-round TE target. After being marginalized in Miami last year, Gesicki should benefit from a reunion with his old head coach at Penn State, Bill O’Brien, who’s now the Patriots’ offensive coordinator.

Round 16: Chase Brown (RB – CIN). The indefatigable Brown averaged 27.3 carries a game last fall for the University of Illinois and could step into a workhorse role for the Bengals if anything were to happen to Joe Mixon.

Round 17: Isaiah Hodgins (WR – NYG). The Giants have a lot of small receivers on the roster, but the 6-4, 210-pound Hodgins is a king-sized red-zone target who had four TD catches over a five-game stretch last December.

Round 18: Chase Claypool (WR – CHI). He hasn’t put it all together yet, and now he’s playing for the run-heavy Bears, but Claypool has a 6-4, 238-pound frame and 4.42 speed. All tools and no toolbox? Perhaps, but those compelling traits make him worth a late-round flyer.

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