How to avoid bad fantasy football draft picks and dooming your roster from the start

New York Times

15-07-2025

I'll bet you didn't know that Indiana Jones holds the key to fantasy football glory. Or, at least he's part of an instructive metaphor on how to avoid dooming your roster with poor picks.
Remember that sequence at the end of 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' where he's sent through a series of lethal challenges to retrieve the Holy Grail? After dodging spinning blades of death, he must navigate a room with a false floor so he doesn't plummet to his demise, then, faced with a plethora of similar objects, he must 'choose wisely' to secure the Grail. Make the wrong selection? Shrivel into skeleton dust. (Which is essentially the same effect as managers spending an early pick on Kyle Pitts … )
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What this cinematic climax illustrates is that the path to claiming your prize (the Grail/your championship) is not as simple as following a marked path and picking the shiniest object you see. So we're here to tell you that blindly selecting your roster based on the overall player rankings of your fantasy draft platform, or even a preferred pundit, is a great way to ensure your team plummets into a bottomless abyss, or what I like to call The Draft Chasms of Doom™.
Player rankings seem a clean enough way of organizing your potential selections, but they obscure a crucial element that ultimately decides your fantasy fate, namely points. While players may rank, say, No. 4 and 5 in the quarterback rankings, No. 5 may project to produce significantly fewer points than No. 4. So, while you may think you're getting the next best player at a position, you could be walking off a projected points cliff because you're bypassing better alternatives that provide a bigger advantage over their positional peers.
To state the obvious: In fantasy football, you are trying to score more points than your opponent each week. But the way those weekly scores accumulate is what really matters. You should really think of each position as a mini-battle with your weekly opponent. Each of those mini-battles aggregates to the final score. So the real path to weekly success and fantasy football domination is maximizing the point differential at the positions that you win, while minimizing the differential at positions you lose.
Unless you're drafting against a group with the collective IQ of Derek Zoolander, you're not landing the top projected players at every position. But by paying attention to big drops in projected points, you can create the biggest possible scoring advantage at each position in your starting lineup.
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Using Jake Ciely's 2025 player projections, we'll show you where to find the biggest drops in projected points at each of the four main positions. Meanwhile, Jake explains what his projections are seeing and provides advice on how to avoid those Draft Chasms of Doom. (Should you spring for one of the top-four QBs or wait late?) But if you want to get into the weeds on some fantasy football philosophy and why these draft drop zones are so critically important, read on.
While rankings provide a draft map of sorts, what's really important is the gap in production between players at a position. That gap is ultimately what defines league-winning players, particularly when measured against their average draft position.
Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen finished No. 1 and 2 among quarterback scoring in 2024, but Jackson put up 434.4 points to Allen's 385. Applying an advanced mathematical concept I like to call 'subtraction,' Jackson provided more than a 50-point edge over the next-best QB last season.
Given every team must start a quarterback, in a 12-team league, that margin grows to a whopping 146 between Jackson's season and the No. 12 scoring QB (Justin Herbert). However, that assumes each of the 12 teams featured one of the top 12 QBs and one or more teams didn't have two QBs in that group, with one on the bench. Thus that 146-point gap between Jackson and Herbert (or 8.6 points over 17 weeks) represents the minimum advantage created by having Jackson facing the team with the worst QB in their fantasy league. In the words of Larry David, that's pret-ty, pret-ty, pretty good.
Even going against the No. 2 QB in Allen, Jackson's team would have about a 3-point weekly edge. The more advantages like that you can create at each position, the more likely you are to win each week.
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Of course, selecting all the top performers at each position is impossible in almost any draft format, especially in a snake draft. So to maximize your advantages, you have to identify potential values (by weighing projected points against average draft positions and positional scarcity) while not getting forced to fill a position with a sub-optimal starter.
The latter is what we're focused on with our Draft Chasms of Doom. For example, using Jake's player projections (and assuming they're prophesied to become reality at the end of the 2025 season), whoever drafts Brock Bowers (223.2 projected points) will have a 4-plus point-per-game advantage at tight end over half of the teams in a 12-team league. But you're going to need to take Bowers in the early second round based on FantasyPros' consensus ADP (for half-point PPR, which is what Jake's projections use). There are running backs like Devon Achane (ADP 15), Jonathan Taylor (20) and Josh Jacobs (23) being drafted around that slot. Meanwhile, George Kittle is getting drafted in Round 4 and offers a 3.1 ppg edge on half the TEs in that league. Which is the better pick: Snag Bowers early or wait for Kittle and instead take one of Ciely's Top 10 RBs in Round 2? Glad you asked.
The key terms here are 'scarcity' and 'marginal advantage.' The first refers to how many players at a position group are truly valuable relative to players at a replacement level. (Consult Jake's VORP rankings in the customizable cheat sheet and you'll see how each position group stacks up in terms of scarcity.) The second refers to the edge you can create for yourself by picking one player over another, basically the Bowers/Kittle example above. Marginal advantage is also important because it illustrates why players who put up more overall points across a season might not be the most helpful players for your team.
These terms are important because of a key restriction placed on your team each week: Your starting lineup.
While QBs may produce the most overall fantasy points of all players in a given season – Jackson outscored the top non-QB, Saquon Barkley, by 95.6 points in half PPR formats in 2024 – running backs and wide receivers are far more valuable. Why? You need more of them in your starting lineup. (Assuming you play in a one-QB league, obviously.)
Remember that example above about the drop from Lamar Jackson to Herbert and the 8.6 point-per-game advantage it created for Jackson's teams last season? Do the same for Barkley – No. 1 RB with 338.8 points in 2024 – and the 'best worst' starting RB option last season – No. 24 Rachaad White, 174.1 points – and you get a gap of 164.7, or about 9.7 points per game on average. Even my English degree allows me to see that 9.7 is more than 8.6, which makes Barkley the more advantageous pick at his position.
This also holds for the No. 1 vs. No. 24 wide receivers (Ja'Marr Chase and Zay Flowers), which featured a 167-point gap (9.8 ppg). Translation: Running backs and wide receivers have higher positional value than quarterbacks, particularly when you consider you really should draw the 'best worst' option for RB and WR around 30 instead of 24 to account for starters at the Flex position, which is standard in most leagues. Plot out the position projections on a graph and you can see clearly how the value decreases as you go deeper down the rankings.
That 24-to-30 drop is particularly precipitous at running back, where last year Barkley's edge was almost 11.5 ppg over No. 30 RB Kareem Hunt. Scan Ciely's rankings this season and you'll note that you get to 'replacement level' running backs a lot faster (No. 44) than you do at wide receiver (No. 57). Based on that, you can provide a slight edge for running back value over wide receivers, but both are clearly greater than quarterbacks this season. Meanwhile, as alluded to earlier with Bowers and Kittle, tight ends provide a poignant example of how the Draft Chasms of Doom can impact your roster.
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Hopefully by now you can see where we're going with this. And hopefully you also have a Gatorade and Cliff Bar handy to reinvigorate yourself after reading all these words. (No one said dominating your draft came without sacrifice!)
Owning an advantage at one position is great, but you need to create advantages for as many position groups as possible. Take the top-ranked quarterback first overall and you're certainly not getting the top-ranked running back or wide receiver … or the second, or the third … and probably not even the 10th. This is what makes drafting a QB in the first round pure folly and why fantasy experts almost always wait until later rounds to draft their starting quarterback.
The gaps in player point production we've discussed above represent, in raw points, a player's value over a starting-caliber replacement player, a concept that fuels the Moneyball-related acronym VORP (Value Over Replacement Player). It's through this prism we can clearly see the wisdom of taking players before a big drop in value at a position group. Those big dips are Draft Chasms of Doom. And you can navigate them by evaluating players' projected value against their average draft position (ADP).
At quarterback in 2024, two QBs finished just behind No. 2 Josh Allen – Joe Burrow and Baker Mayfield, tied with 381.8 points. The advantage Josh Allen provided over those two QBs by scoring 3.2 more points over the full season? Almost non-existent. Now consider Allen was drafted somewhere between 22nd and 23rd on average – a second-round pick in a 12-team league. By contrast, Jackson was the fourth QB off the board, around No. 37 overall. Burrow and Mayfield? Around 65th and 152nd respectively.
Through that lens, while Allen returned solid value for a second-round pick, Jackson's value was significantly higher, even selected a little over two rounds later. And Mayfield's? Astronomical. Now you just need to see the future for 2025 and draft accordingly. That's where Jake's projections come in.
The differential between players' VORP values within a position is of vital importance because your draft can be unpredictable. When a position thins out quickly because someone drafts three QBs before Round 8, VORP can help you decide whether to continue the position run or pivot to another group and gain more value.
Let's close with a hypothetical example, giving ourselves the No. 4 pick in the draft and examining a key decision point around our third selection, which falls No. 27 overall.
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By ADP (per FantasyPros as of July 8), TE Trey McBride is the top player available at Pick 27 and would give us a nice edge at a position that thins quickly after the top four players. Based on Jake's projections, George Kittle is the better pick though and you can likely get him later (ADP 40). By waiting and selecting Kittle later, we can maximize the marginal advantage at another position while still creating a positional advantage at TE in a later round.
Now let's look at quarterbacks. With Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen likely off the board, the top remaining QBs in this range all figure to go before our next pick, with Jayden Daniels, Jalen Hurts and Joe Burrow all projected to go before Pick 44. This means we're approaching one of those big drops at quarterback (depending how you feel about Justin Fields and Baker Mayfield).
Meanwhile at RB, Alvin Kamara (97.97 VORP, which translates to a 122.4-point advantage over a replacement level RB) is still on the board and the top remaining WR is Tee Higgins, who holds a projected 83.4-point edge over a replacement receiver.
If we were to take Daniels (the top remaining QB, by Jake's projections) the best remaining RBs for our next pick would fall around the Chuba Hubbard range (72.35 VORP) and DK Metcalf (71.12 VORP) for receivers. As Hubbard illustrates, the drop in RBs is much, much steeper than WRs. So too from Daniels (47.2) to the next tier of QBs (Fields at 36.3 VORP). In this example, based on Jake's projections, you should take Kamara and look closely at Kittle coming back in Round 4. We'll find our quarterback in a later round, knowing we've seized an advantage over most teams at running back and, if you can take Kittle, tight end.
That's how the Chasms crumble, so to speak. Comprehending how this lens applies to draft strategy can keep you stepping smartly from one position to another, elevating your roster with your selections later this summer. Now, choose wisely and sip that sweet, sweet nectar of fantasy ambrosia at season's end.
To look closer at some Chasms of particular interest, read Jake Ciely's analysis at quarterback (now live), running back (Wednesday), wide receiver (Thursday) and tight end (Friday).
All scoring and draft selections based on a 12-team league with half-point PPR scoring.
VORP and Projected Points Rankings pulled from Jake Ciely's Custom Cheat Sheet.
ADP pulled from Fantasy Pros' half-point PPR listing as of July 8.
(Top illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Photos: Cooper Neill, Gregory Shamus, Wesley Hitt / Getty Images)