6 days ago
Why you need to make ‘shooting for the stars' your go-to fantasy football draft strategy
How do we measure success in drafting our fantasy football players? Answering that question is a key to ranking and ultimately selecting them.
It's fantasy football podcast season for me. Given what I do here, I unplug once we get closer to the season. I want to develop my own player takes and theories that I investigate for proof of concept with the objective data. But right now, people are talking more generally about their ranking process, and I'm more interested in that than in the player takes.
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One of the smartest fantasy football podcasts is Underdog Fantasy's 'Fantasy Football with Josh and Hayden.' When smart people say something that runs contrary to your process, it makes you think. On a recent show, in discussing the value of DeVonta Smith, they cited his current ADP (they had his ADP at WR27) and their point, very reasonably, was that Smith is pretty much guaranteed to again be a top 24 WR and probably no worse than WR20; so that's a win.
But that's not how I rank. I have Smith at WR28 in my rankings, even though I agree he'll finish higher. In my write-up of Smith, I said he's a great WR4 in a Flex 10 build. He has a beneficial ceiling in the format, but there's no difference between Smith and Jordan Addison, who is WR36, so I'd wait for Addison.
Smith is stuck in the WR3 fantasy bucket. He can't escape his tier. He can't crush Addison in value just like Addison can't crush the other WRs with them in the third tier of WRs. I'm not looking to break even or generate some small profit in scoring when I draft a player. I want players who I think have a chance to escape their tier, which is why I'm in the minority in ranking Jakobi Meyers over Smith (and Addison). Meyers could escape the third tier because he could see 150 targets in his offense. It's tough to conceive of Smith getting much more than 100, and efficiency only goes so far in our game unless you are a big-time TD producer, which Smith is not.
So I would never proactively take Smith (absent a Jalen Hurts stack) over Addison because both are stuck in their tier, and Addison is drafted so much later that he has a WR4 price with a reasonable expectation of a WR3 return. I want my WR4 to have a WR5 or lower price (Rashod Bateman). I want the RB I pick around No. 30 at the position to have the chance to be an RB2 (Isiah Pacheco, for example).
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Why shoot for the moon when you can shoot for the stars, knowing you can fall short and still get the moon? Shooting for the stars means factoring in expected opportunity. Where Smith goes in drafts, multiple receivers are likely to lead their team's wide receivers in targets — DK Metcalf, Courtland Sutton, Jauan Jennings, Meyers and even Jerry Jeudy (whose QB situation petrifies me, but he's locked in as the WR1 on the Browns).
The same goes for RBs. Why would I take Omarion Hampton at RB17 when he's probably not going to get close to bell-cow touches and when there's a clearer path to that happening with later drafted RBs? For example, Joe Mixon, Quinshon Judkins (ignoring his potential legal issues), Pacheco, Tony Pollard, etc. I'm not necessarily telling you to agree with the players, but I hope you agree with my rankings process.
My weekly in-season 'Market Share Report' column is such a valuable tool because we see who is getting opportunities that defy their consensus ranking and who is falling well short of those key benchmarks — 30% of touches per offensive snap for RBs, 25% of team targets for wide receivers and 20% of targets for TEs.
It's hard to find players who can break out of their tiers. You'll be wrong more than you're right. But when you're wrong, you can still break even on the cost. I will eat a bug if a healthy Meyers and Jennings fall significantly short of their current ADPs, for example. You don't want to be right, technically. You want to be EMPHATICALLY right. Drafting just one or two players who escape their tiers can help you win your league.
(Photo of Jakobi Meyers: Matthew Hinton / Imagn Images)
