The psychology of drafting
What to think about when you're on the clock, and how to draft a winner
We talk about players, and we talk about strategies, but what about the very human element of sitting there at the crucial moment and making your selections?
I’ve been doing some of the one-on-one calls and the Signals Gold stuff, and it’s great to hear from so many people. One of the key reminders is how much you guys are trying to dial in before your drafts, and I’ve heard a refrain in these conversations like, “I’ll have at least one bad pick I regret in there” a couple of times. The goal of this piece would be to try to keep that from happening. Not to tell you specifically who to pick, but to get you thinking about ways you can build the best version of a team you’d like, no matter what the draft throws at you. Because we can’t plan for all eventualities; we don’t know what our leaguemates will do.
I’m a golfer — not a good one, although I broke 80 and separately made my first eagle this summer, so some of you who are going through the struggles of breaking 100, which I did for literally decades, can feel free to tell me to piss off with that assessment (I never thought I’d get my game to the level I had it this year, through years and years of struggles, so keep at it!) — and in golf one of the keys is committing to your shot. You figure out your distance, where the trouble lies (i.e. where your miss is), and you choose a club and decide what kind of shot you’re playing. That may seem kind of straightforward, but if you don’t practice it, you then spend your couple practice swings questioning if that was the right decision, and when you address the ball and make a swing on it, your uncertainty will destroy the whole shot.
When I was younger, someone bought me this collection of old Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly’s back page articles, and in one of them he tells the story of a blind golfer who was incredibly good. The man’s wife typically played with/caddied for him, and essentially lined him up for shots. As part of his research, Rick played a round with him and filled this role. As I remember it, Rick describes telling the man on a particular shot that he’s something like 175 yards out, over a body of water, and the blind man hits his shot right into the lake. He drops him down a new ball and the man puts it right on the green. When he talked about his experience with the wife later, she essentially told him, “Your mistake was telling him the lake was there,” explaining she would have kept that information from him so his swing thought was merely a normal 175-yard shot.
I think Reilly’s point was some weird thing about how a blind golfer may actually have advantages, but I bring it up because of the reality that all golfers know where sometimes if you focus too much on missing a hazard, you’re destined to go right into it. Again it’s an experience thing to calm that part of your mind down; for me, I just had to make that mistake so many times that I basically tired of it, and then I finally learned.
But the way to do it is this idea of committing to your shot. In golf, that’s often referred to as your “swing thought.” At the key moment, instead of second-guessing a bunch of stuff about the other path you might have gone on — some other club choice, or whatever — you commit to the path you’ve decided to go down. Thinking positively about the thing that’s happening, not negatively about some other option you didn’t choose.
Often a good swing thought is some technical thing that allows you to clear your mind of the more analytical stuff you considered when you made the shot decision. If I get a good swing thought down where there’s something working that I can focus on as I address my ball — often it’s something specific I feel with my front hip as I draw my club back — that helps me clear my mind of other distractions. I see the pond, I acknowledge the pond, I decide I need enough club to get over the pond, without needing to swing super hard, because that will just cause a mis-hit. I maybe think for a second in this instance that my miss is long or to either side, but not short, and tell myself in my practice swings I need to focus on good, solid contact, and not decelerate on my downswing to ensure I get through the ball… and then I clear all that shit out and focus on my front hip and make a committed shot.
When it goes wrong is when I start letting the other stuff take over. Maybe I get so focused on not decelerating that I swing way too hard trying to ensure I accelerate, which is how to guarantee disaster. Maybe I was between club distances, and I decided on the longer club to make sure I got over the lake, but I didn’t commit to that, and tried to hit some softer version of that longer club (that can just lead to decelerating!).
Hopefully those of you who aren’t golfers and for whom this stuff isn’t super relevant can still see the point (and hopefully my golfers in the audience are totally understanding). You guys are here because you prepare for your fantasy leagues. That alone gives you a leg up on your competition. You’re going to think through a lot of different possibilities, mock things out, and think through contingencies. The analogy does fall apart a little bit because you might be planning for something specific but you don’t always get to “commit to that shot” if another drafter takes your guy.
But where the analogy holds, for me at least, is you can’t spend your time on the clock thinking about the path you’re not going to take. If your time is winding down, and you can’t figure out which decision you like more, even after you’ve analyzed all the little parts, don’t let the last thing you consider be some negative thing you don’t want to miss out on. Instead, it needs to be a proactive commitment to the pick you actually want to take.
That’s your swing thought for your draft. And as part of that, I want to get at a few more specific things you should consider both before the moment of truth, and then to give you clarity on that “swing thought.”
So that’s the idea of this piece. As I’ve worked through some of these league-specific questions with the Signals Gold subs, a few common elements have arisen, and I decided it would be worthwhile to pull them all together into this post. At the end, I’ll share a couple recent Signals Gold subscriber drafts, where I’m just thrilled for those guys at what they accomplished. Many of you have told me before that you can tell I seem to really care that you guys do well, and that’s definitely true. The extension of that — and because I’m more worried to be driven by a fear of failure — is my biggest concern is you guys will draft teams where you think you’re following my advice, but it doesn’t really work out, and then those teams fail, and they weren’t even really what I’d wanted for you.
So that’s why I say I’m thrilled for those guys, because I’m sort of really happy for myself, too, in the sense that I know if those teams fail, I’ll be going down with them, and we’re all betting on analysis we agree makes these decisions good ones. That’s the goal; process over results kind of a thing. Let’s get our process right. That’s already a huge win, if we can accomplish it.
Respecting ADP to build monsters
The very first thing is this idea of respecting ADP. I get asked a ton about my ranks, especially the aggressive ones, and the idea is you should never really draft a guy ahead of ADP unless you don’t have another great option.
One major key to emphasize with this is that a lot of the players we draft are built around this idea that we are 8.3% to win our 12-team leagues when we start out, and we need upside. We need to be willing to take on risk to stack that upside. Risky strategies — or at least as defined by risk of ruin, or risk of looking stupid — are what much of what we do around here are built on (I’d argue these strategies, that do contain low floors at times, are not actually “risky” in a literal sense, but sound, and just high-variance).
But then when it comes to the actual drafting, we don’t emphasize that part enough. Sometimes we get overly conservative even! That’s what it is when you draft a guy you really like (or I have ranked very high) well above where you might otherwise be able to get him. You’re removing an ability for you to nail a perfect draft. The risky-but-higher-upside decision from a draft-building standpoint is to sometimes take a player ranked lower and push the player ranked higher, with the risk of losing out on him, so you keep open the possibility of getting both.
That risk is not as worth taking on if there’s no real benefit to pushing the player, to be clear. I got asked about my aggressive Rashee Rice ranking in the Signals Gold chat, and when would be too early to take him, and my answer to the idea of possibly taking him at 3.06 being “crazy” was:
I don't think it's crazy but I wouldn't recommend it. At 3.06, he's not so clearly a value that I need to lock him in there. If he goes before 4.07, I don't feel like someone else got an obvious value, just that they understood the deal (and did get probably a small value, since I ultimately think he belongs super high).
Now if all other targets you like are gone at 3.06, and it feels like who you'll get at 4.07 is no different than who you would otherwise take at 3.06, and you really want Rashee Rice, then go ahead.
The idea is if you have another pick, even one you like less but only slightly less, you keep open the possibility of really crushing your draft if you get a better Rice value. And ultimately you are trying to win a league of 12 and getting the perfect draft is a key way to help yourself get there. A lot of people think "it's not worth the risk" but all the things we're doing are inviting risk to try to hit upside, which includes this.
Do you sometimes wind up losing out on that player and you’re left with the guy you liked less? Yes, and that’s frustrating. Snipes happen. But we also shouldn’t be certain in our player takes. Presumably, the other player you took is one you also liked to some degree. You might just find you dodged a bullet not selecting Rice.
All of these things are playing the game through probabilities. My aggressive rankings don’t argue you should be too exact with the player takes, just that I think those guys are really nice bets to be making. But this will always be a value-based game.
Working back to front
I’ve written about this before, including all the way back in the RotoViz days, and it’s definitely engrained in everything I do. When I wrote the piece about how there will be RB scoring late this year, this is what I was doing. When I wrote you don’t need to take early QBs this year, this is what I was doing.
The question is simple. “What can I get, and what can’t I get, at the end of the draft?” The early rounds are full of optionality. Every player is a good pick on some level. We love to think about the upside of these guys, and say, “I gotta have [Player X] because he’s going to be a star this year.” And ultimately, a lot of fantasy leagues do just come down to who crushed the early rounds.
But a lot of them also come down to who crushed late. The huge tournaments come down to who crushed late. The league-winners are very often late, so long as the early guys you take aren’t total busts.
This idea of working back to front is to consider where the value pockets exist later, and then devising your early-round strategy based on what you want to be doing in the later rounds. This year, I have no concern over taking later-round RBs, and major concern about later-round TEs, for example. That’s helped drive me toward early TEs as my preferred detours in all formats, and away from too much early RB capital.
Whether in single-QB or Superflex, the question of early QB options every year is similar. “What can I get later?” This is a year with enough intriguing options in the middle rounds (Jayden Daniels, Caleb Williams, Trevor Lawrence) and also stopgap options and/or real upside in the late rounds (Justin Fields, Drake Maye, Bo Nix) to make QB strategy more fluid.
This is a major key to everything. If you’re on the clock and can’t decide what to do, think back to front for a second. When you get back on the clock in a few rounds, what will you wish you had taken here, because you’ll be happy to be taking something there that makes the pick here make more sense?
Micro decisions around value pockets
Let’s dig into the past two ideas but just within the context of a two-round situation. I wrote this next section at least a week ago, for a different piece, and just threw it into my notes doc when it ultimately didn’t fit (but it was part of why I circled back to this piece as a whole). So set aside the specific names, which may not be values you can still get in those spots (or maybe you never could).
Assume you’re on the clock a few picks away from the turn at like 5.08 and Ken Walker is there, but so are Zay Flowers, Tank Dell, and Tee Higgins. Walker’s the clear last of a tier for you, and you’re pretty sure he won’t come back in the sixth, but so are the WRs, and you’re thinking of that as a more important WR tier than Walker’s RB pick.
One thing that could happen here is you think, “I could take Flowers, but I know Walker’s not coming back, and then maybe I’ve sort of accelerated the chance the other two WRs go as well and I don’t have a great Round 6 option.” Another is, “I could take Walker, and in doing so, I send three WRs to the turn and might continue pushing the room toward more RB picks, even ever so slightly.”
I’ve framed it that way because one counterargument to taking Walker would be that you could just take WRs in that tier with both picks. But it’s not always that simple. In cases like this, deferring to the shrinking RB tier on your board, and also joining a run on RB picks more broadly within your draft, could influence other drafters one direction and help get a WR to fall through to the next round.
In other words, the home run outcome is that you get any two of these guys, and you’re still several picks from the turn, so there are a lot of scenarios where you don’t. Even if you don’t buy the “influence the room” element, it’s a numbers game — sending three WRs to the turn increases the likelihood one gets back, versus two. Yes, in the case where you send two you have secured one of those three already, but you’re seeing tier breaks coming at both positions, and trying to optimize for the best use of your fifth- and sixth-round picks in tandem.