2024 home league strategy guide

Draft day strategy, emphasizing leagues with softer ADPs

A couple years ago, not long after starting this newsletter, an issue quickly arose that I needed to address to make things more actionable for subscribers. My draft strategy work was focused on how to play fantasy in theory, as well as more challenging leagues like high stakes where you can run into some complex problems, like being faced with several other drafters who also understand the fragility of the RB position.

The question that quickly arose, repeatedly, was how did that strategy apply in leagues where RBs still flew off the board early and often? When there was less pressure to get adequate WR depth?

I’ve loosely referred to these types of leagues as “home leagues” in recent years, because that’s typically how home leagues operate, but as far as what that means for strategy and the scope of this piece, I’m talking about how to approach early-round strategy when those RB conditions tend to apply. Some of your home leagues may be sharper, and this probably isn’t explicitly for them. This also isn’t limited to home leagues; I have talked with people who are on secondary for-money sites than the ones I typically write about (like Underdog and FFPC), where WR values abound into the later single-digit and even early double-digit rounds, and the question becomes the same: When do I take early RBs so I don’t wind up with 10 WRs I love and no RBs?

Last year, the solution to this was a joy. I recently said it was one of the more accurate things I’ve ever written, and it’s funny that when I look back over the piece, I spent a paragraph in the intro talking about how “I often struggle with conviction,” but “there are times where things fit better,” and clarifying that I felt highly confident in this approach. Obviously, it’s cool that proved to be warranted.

A lot of how I set the stage last year is extremely relevant to this topic in 2024, but the approach unfortunately can’t be the same, because 2024 is different. Last year, I wrote about how important the Round 4-5 range was for drafters across all formats, particularly because we had a very unique set of RBs in the Dead Zone, a phenomenon that just doesn’t exist in the same way this year.

The day after writing about that Round 4-5 range last year, I realized that the Dead Zone RB targets meant that in home leagues, we could have our cake and eat it, too. I strongly suggest you go back and read both of those pieces if you’re new around here; there’s a lot of strategy that is evergreen and will help you understand the 2024 approach, even though it can’t be the same (I’ll also quote some of last year’s work below).

In the second piece, where I went into strategy for these softer formats, I opened the discussion with the type of reader question I referenced above, from “Dan,” who started his question with this: “The only reason I consider deviating from your rankings / targets (on rare occasion) is because I feel sometimes that your rankings are geared towards higher stakes / larger field leagues, rather than the traditional 12-team home league.” My answer started with “I do see the concern, particularly in leagues where the young guys are incredibly cheap, and you could feasibly build an entire roster out of these high-upside plays that might take some time to hit in-season, or might not hit at all.”

This question gets down to a concept I’ve referred to as “detours,” and if you’re unsure what that means, it’s essentially that our foundational draft philosophy should be getting enough WR depth early in almost every draft, and any non-WR pick in early rounds is a “detour” to that goal. Understanding detours is all about opportunity cost — what are you sacrificing in your main structural goals around WR — and that’s the major difference between “home leagues” and sharper formats.

I introduced that idea of detours in my 2021 strategy guide, and you can read more about that specific idea in the final section (this link will take you directly to that section). Again, if you’re new around here, many of your questions about why I’m so confident we need early WR depth are likely to be answered by reviewing these older pieces.

In home leagues, while WR depth should still be your mental framework, there’s so much less pressure that we’re essentially looking for detours. We’re trying to figure out the most thoughtful ways we can deviate in the early rounds to ensure we don’t have too many WRs. It’s almost not like a detour at all, of course — you’re looking for these “luxury” picks — but the reason I would still discuss it on these terms and still expect you to think of it on these terms is if you start to argue that’s where early WR depth is overblown, you can quickly lose the plot.

The surest way to build a worse roster in practice than the one you think you have on paper is to be thin down your WR depth chart. It’s really that simple. People love to share screenshots of teams that hit on all the positions early and misunderstand that a relatively weak WR3, WR4, and beyond, is going to doom them through the course of a long NFL season. I’ll try to continue to prove that point here today, but I believe I have in past columns, and the shorthand without the proof is hopefully also helpful. It’s a foundational principle here, so if you’re interested in where I’m going, I have to suggest you internalize that. When I wrote up “The 7 pillars of 2022 drafts” a few years ago, “Get WR depth early” was one of them, and while I put it sixth on the list, I started the explanation of that point with, “This is always the game.” (The first five pillars were more focused on the 2022 landscape.)

So this is the whole point that we’re trying to figure out in this column. Around here, we all accept that WR depth is the foundational principle. But the issue in home leagues is you don’t feel pressure to achieve that goal. The conversation then centers on how to use those detours, those non-WR luxury picks.

---

Some more on what worked in 2023

When the RB Dead Zone is a real issue, the last thing you want to be doing — in a league where RBs are priced up — is taking RBs there. So your tradeoff is typically to take an RB early, because we do know there is legendary upside in elite RBs, when they hit.

Of course, that is also a risky endeavor, and an important point that’s developed in my work over the past few years is it’s not just about getting enough WRs before the WR Window closes in that Round 8-12 range — there’s a very real difference between builds where you get a true elite WR in the first couple rounds, or when you do something like open RB-TE and get your WR1 in Round 3.

In other words, you are losing some WR upside by not having true elites and just building a deep WR room later. This was integral to my excitement about getting good Dead Zone RB prices last year. I’m going to quote a huge portion of what I wrote last year that drives home this point:

The biggest reason for my response to the home league issues posed by Dan above being Anchor RB and/or elite TE over the past few years is that in the heart of the RB Dead Zone, WR has felt like the strongest play maybe 80% of the time, as I said yesterday. In truth, in these home leagues where RBs get pushed up even higher, WR has maybe felt like the strongest play 95% of the time in that Round 4-6 range.

So if we try to pigeon-hole Zero RB [in the early rounds], we run into this issue where we just want to keep taking WRs [even after the Dead Zone]. We get to about Round 9 or Round 10 and still, the best move feels overwhelmingly like WR.

But that doesn’t change the fact that historically, starting with multiple RBs early in your draft stockpiles bust risk, and while the position is extremely important with high-end scoring potential, there isn’t as clean of a connection between ADP and the players who actually matter. We’ll get later-round producers emerging there, and producing — at least for stretches, but perhaps not for the whole season — at a level that matches the elites [Note: In 2023, we did get later-round RBs producing at a rate that matched or bested most of the elites almost for the whole season, in guys like Raheem Mostert and, when-healthy, Kyren Williams]. You just don’t see that at WR, and while you could see it at QB and TE in the past, I’m not sure we’ll see it as much at those positions anymore, either. Overwhelmingly, RB is the position where you can “Frankenstein” a set of options to score in the range of, if not the very elites, then at least the second tier.

That’s a really key part of why the hit rates on stacking early RBs is so low. Many analysts miss the forest for the trees on this point, focusing so heavily on the value RB provides in-season, but misunderstanding that it’s more complex than that when considering the optimal ways to construct a roster. WRs early are the safer play. Most years, they are also the very best WRs. Sometimes, we get the Cooper Kupp and Deebo Samuel 2021 season where the top-end guys didn’t come through in a huge way, and the later WR Window guys were optimal, which made early RB more viable mostly because it naturally paired with that. Zero RB also had strong hit rates in the larger data samples of best ball tournaments that we have for that year, meaning that WR phenomenon mostly just opened up the early rounds to be any position, since the RB Dead Zone was the most important element to that season and you needed to be drafting WRs in that range, regardless of your start.

[Note: This is a nuanced point we’re further removed from so I want to emphasize it, but after 2021, people thought Elite RB was back in a major way, when in reality it just naturally paired with the far more important element of taking WRs in the Dead Zone, because people lean toward balance, so when they took Elite RBs, they more commonly went WRs in those key ranges. But what I noted here is even if they went WR early and stuck with a true Zero RB build, that worked well, too, which tends to argue the positive Elite RB stuff was more correlation than causation — correlated to the Dead Zone WRs — and then a larger sample of drafters doing that type of build than a true Zero RB build.]

In addition to multiple early RBs being a tricky path, elite TE can sink your team as much as it can be the massive edge — my 7 Pillars analysis last year [Note: this refers to 2022] that at least one of the big three was likely to destroy worlds proved correct, but Travis Kelce being a cheat code paired with Kyle Pitts destroying not worlds, but rosters. If you went Anchor RB and elite TE in a home league and landed on Pitts and an early RB who wasn’t a smash, which I did in at least one of my home leagues, you more or less sacrificed your early picks to this goal of optimization, where, yes, you probably felt great about all of the WR depth you were still able to build from Round 3-8 or whatever, but without a Round 1 or Round 2 pick doing anything, you just had a weaker team than if you’d have taken elite WRs early. [Note: This gets back to that idea of WRs in Rounds 1 and 2 being important. When using Rounds 1 and 2 on non-WR positions because you can get WR depth later, you run the risk of having a worse build overall than if you’d just gone full Zero RB and taken a ton of WRs starting in Round 1, because WRs remain the safer early picks.]

And again, those elite WRs are the ones who offer security. Yes, injuries will happen. But year in and year out, we know who the elites are in advance. Nothing is black and white in fantasy, but the trend of the top-scoring WRs consistently being among the highest drafted is about as close as it gets, such that you almost have to be intentionally misleading yourself or others to try to ignore it. If you go to WR points per game from last year, the list is literally just Round 1 and Round 2 WRs — Kupp, Jefferson, Chase, Hill, Diggs, Adams, Brown, Lamb.

So at the end there, you see me emphasizing this point about Round 1 and Round 2 WRs even more. There’s a lot to unpack in this writeup, but just to update that very last sentence — which refers to 2022 results — for 2023, there were five WRs who had between 20.4 and 23.8 PPR points per game, and then WR6 was Puka Nacua down at 17.6, so there was a meaningful gap down to the rest.

Those top five names were CeeDee Lamb, Tyreek Hill, Keenan Allen, Amon-Ra St. Brown, and Justin Jefferson. Allen was the only one who wasn’t a first round — or at the latest Round 1/2 turn — pick, and while he was mispriced early, analysts like myself hammered that point so much that he rose into the third round by the end of August. In one of my high stakes leagues that finished well, we took him at 3.02.

So Allen is maybe the outlier where there was a little value to be had — and obviously Nacua was the true outlier — but for the most part elite WR upside did again come from elite WR prices. Meanwhile, other than Christian McCaffrey, elite RB production came from the late rounds (Kyren and Mostert), or those Dead Zone backs who did play a major role in 2023. And again, we get into this correlation element I referenced within the quote above, where CMC was a great first-round pick, but the relative weakness of WRs in that Round 4/5 range and the strength of several first-round WRs on part with CMC meant that building with WRs early and Dead Zone RBs (while looking for that early balance) wound up a dominant way to do things (you also could have succeeded with CMC and then Breece and Etienne, obviously).

The two key sections of that 2023 home league piece were titled “Why WR-WR is your PPR blueprint,” and “Having your cake and eating it, too,” and emphasized that the best of both worlds element was getting access to the truly elite WRs while also having detours that made sense in the single-digit rounds — those Dead Zone RBs. We both got the truly elite WR upside, and also didn’t get too many WRs into our early draft plan, because we had RBs worth targeting that allowed us to achieve some of that necessary balance.

I wrote:

It used to be that you couldn’t really justify a Dead Zone back, so your detours kind of had to be early. But now we can have our cake and eat it, too — if we hit elite, high-end WRs where they make the most sense in the early rounds, our RB picks in the Dead Zone aren’t going to be as killer to our roster’s floor if they bust.

---

The “7 pillars” that are unique to 2024

I mentioned that past 7 Pillars piece, which was the way I framed things that offseason where in addition to the evergreen stuff like WR depth, I essentially tried to also talk about the unique tier breaks and value pockets in the 2022 landscape.

I did similar in 2023, and need to here for 2024. Most of these are things I’ve hit on this offseason already. Those key tentpole elements to successful 2024 drafts are as follows: