2024 Rankings Release — Redraft Tiers + Underdog
Tiered redraft and (separate) importable Underdog rankings, and how to use them
There are always caveats with rankings. In the first sentences of last year’s release, I started with this type of caution, and immediately linked the year before to talk about how I’d discussed it then.
A big part of why I wait to release rankings is I want them to be as useful as possible. Put differently, I have some odd fear that if I release an early version and they go stale at some point, people will get way too much exposure to plays I wouldn’t even support. That’s something I need to get over, and I suspect I will in releasing best ball ranks earlier next year, but it does get to the fact that rankings are a tool, and typically a tool to draft off of. Most of you inherently get this, but I promise that whether you understand it or not, every set of rankings you’ve ever used for a draft has needed context on how it was compiled and how it should be used.
That context doesn’t always make it to the consumer — in part because very many aren’t going to seek out that context — and in those cases it could be said that the rankings are then misused, where their existence actually leads a drafter away from the decision the person or people who made the ranks would prefer in a given draft, for a given situation. This isn’t meant to be some kind of fear-mongering, because these minor “misuses” are ultimately not a big deal, and there’s not much that can be done for some people. Often the necessary context is just, “Pay attention to ADP,” or “Pay attention to your league settings so you can understand relative positional values.”
But rankings are a very powerful thing. I suspect a larger portion of my subscribers than most are actually looking for the meaning behind things, but for many fantasy players across the world — including some here — this is the only fantasy content they will interact with. I would absolutely defend laboring over accuracy here on those grounds. Some typo or misused stat in an Offseason Stealing Signals post is going to affect only the most engaged of my readers, who will likely catch that anyway, but even if they don’t, are likely to be consuming a lot of content to where that’s one small part of their decision-making process. By contrast, a mistake in the ranks would likely push dozens of people down the wrong path, directly tied to the decisions they make for their teams (and many of those specific subscribers may only have one or a couple teams).
Bear with me as I quote some past specific notes to talk through some more considerations here.
What I’m trying to accomplish
One of the realities of the current draft landscape in 2024 is ADPs are extremely siloed by site and type. Underdog is at the forefront of the advancement of the whole fantasy football game, and players there have driven up WR ADPs in a way that has many wondering, “What if it’s as simple as just drafting RBs?” as if there isn’t a whole lot more to it.
But even among sharp higher-stakes contests like over at FFPC, a real edge exists if you believe — like I do — that the Underdog ADPs merely approach equilibrium, not swing past it. That said, each site has its own quirks — someone like Diontae Johnson has been criminally underdrafted on Underdog all offseason (he’s finally starting to rise, but I’ve quite literally been calling him “four rounds undervalued” for months), but he’s just in an entirely different, more expensive tier on FFPC (closer to where I believe he belongs). While the difference between half PPR and PPR is probably more meaningful to him than most any other WR, I don’t think it’s so large to justify that ADP gap.
That is just the nuance between two sharp sites, and doesn’t even get to home leagues. We know the site you play those on — whether it’s CBS, ESPN, Yahoo — is going to have its own rankings and own ADPs. Significant values will exist, and I can’t possibly capture true market sentiment in these rankings for all the ways they will be used. One major element I also consider is the auction questions, and while my tier-based rankings are going to be helpful in that type of setting, the rankings within tiers are still meant to help you understand who I’d be willing to get into a bit of a bidding war over, and throw a couple extra bucks at, relative to others.
I also keep the redraft rankings separated by position because of how different league types can be. Overall rankings are extremely dependent on the specific format; Superflex or TE Premium are obvious examples of where the entire list of one position would elevate in the overall ranks, but even stuff like half PPR is going to influence how you’d consider grabbing players at different positions. That all falls under draft strategy to me, and I’ve written a ton about that already and have plenty more coming. I always, always, always get asked about overall rankings, and if you’re one of those people, I promise you that me making overall rankings would just be worse for your success than forcing you to consider some strategy.
I know this because when I look at other people’s rankings, I am easily influenced by the ordinal nature of it. “Oh, he likes ‘so and so’ over ‘so and so?’” Often, the individual wouldn’t even defend that take if pressed! The sharpest rankers are constantly tinkering, always willing to hear that kind of feedback that makes them reconsider a direct comparison that may not be consistent within their ranks. (And I promise you, I’ll be constantly tinkering, too.) When I say they won’t defend the take, what I mean is they can’t possibly feel strongly about the exact order they’ve ranked every player. There will be some strong opinions — typically those that differ significantly from ADP, will have been given the most thought — but there will also be some that are kind of hand-wavy. For example, the specific way I ranked the RB Dead Zone and later Dead Zone tiers this year was the hardest element for me, and took me a couple days to even tackle, because I’ve seen from many different sites how differently those players are ranked, and I frankly don’t even know at what point I’d prefer the boring, older volume plays over the younger guys with some pure upside. It might be said, and is probably true, that I would rather draft Chase Brown than Rachaad White if they were priced the same. But how do I capture that?
Typically, I’ve allowed ADP to impact my rankings to some degree. If I’m out on a guy, I’ll move him down a tier from where he goes, so that it’s clear I’m out on him, but would still take him at a certain price. If I’m really out on a guy, he might get pushed down two tiers. The hope is people can try to use these as a direct draft list — which is the whole point of rankings — and I think that’s worked well in the past.
And yet, I described these concerns well last year.
My goal with these rankings is simple — in every single situation, in every possible draft, on any possible platform (all with varying ADPs), no matter how the picks have come in before you, when you get on the clock, I want the players at the top of the ranks at every position to be exactly those that I would be considering if I were doing the draft myself, such that every single time every one of you makes a decision it’s like I was sitting there talking through it with you. I’m serious; I don’t know why I’m wired this way, but it’s who I am. Besides, that’s not that high of a bar, right?
I really don’t mind being wrong so much; the stuff that really bugs me is when I convey the messages poorly in a way that people trying to listen to my advice aren’t even playing it the way I’d play it. When those people aren’t successful and I hear why, I take that a helluva lot more personally than when Atlanta throws the ball fewer times than Fred Flintstone’s team did, and I get to hear about how dumb I was for liking Kyle Pitts.
With ADPs across sites and formats being so inconsistent, this goal has gotten even tougher. I’ve always said to be sure you get a good price on every pick, because one of the biggest mistakes you can make is overconfidence in a play that has you push him up multiple rounds from where he should go. That takes value directly out of your build, and we’re often wrong anyway, so while you can certainly reach past ADP — I probably do it more than most — you don’t want to be reaching into Round 8 for a guy you expect to go in Round 12 simply because you’re a little worried he might go before then. You want to take that guy in Round 10 or 11 if you really need to secure him, depending where you sit on the board (If you’re near the Round 9/10 turn, I could see not trying to push him to late Round 11 if you really need him, is what I mean, so I might take him in early Round 10 in that case. That’s fine, if again he’s crucial to your build. The point is you don’t take him at the Round 7/8 turn.)
But because of the inconsistencies of ADPs across formats and sites, I needed to focus a little more on rankings these players in the tiers I think they belong, and a little less on market valuation. Again, that’s always super tough to dial in exactly, especially for players I think are mispriced by multiple tiers, and so this note wraps around to me being worried I’m not low enough on the fallers or high enough on the risers, in case there are formats out there where their prices are very different. I’m worried I’m still too low on Diontae and Rashee Rice despite probably being higher relative to almost any site. And to be clear, I’ve had specific conversations about a lot of different sites that have led me to believe that is very much true — prices are fluctuating wildly.
This is less true for my Underdog rankings, which by the way needed to be arranged ordinally as well. So for my Underdog rankings, you get a straight list, and I’m much more cognizant of current ADP in that list, particularly in the early rounds. Those are done based on the assumption you’re drafting more than one team, and you don’t want to get the same guy in a specific range every single time.
And yet, my rankings are still going to run that risk far more than others’, especially in the later rounds. There are just so many players I don’t even think are draftable, and there are several I think are pretty underpriced still, so in testing these ranks out in my slow drafts that are in the double-digit rounds, I did consistently see the same names at the top of the list. You still need to consider ADP and try to navigate exposures. I’ll be hopping on my YouTube later today to test drive these in some full live drafts, if you want to see me consider updates to my Underdog rankings in real time.
To wrap that back around, there are two rankings sets. I’ll keep a date where they were last updated on the documents, and I likely won’t update both regularly. One is a full PPR rankings set with targets and fades, which are a huge asset for helping understand the specific players I want to be taking and not taking, regardless of ADP on your sites. That is my main redraft rankings set, and I’ll continue to tinker with it all through August. I’m by no means satisfied with it, but I also want to just get it out and let you guys start to reflect on it. I encourage feedback!
The other rankings set is half PPR, but is for best ball specifically. You can hopefully see where I make some changes for half PPR, for those of you who routinely ask, and about where I’d slot in the different tiers. In the late rounds, my ranks become very tier-based, and I wouldn’t put a ton of weight into the specific rank as much as the other players at his position I have a player around.
How projections play in
In past years, I’ve written about how the information we have available to us leads us to formulate conclusions about the various teams. All of the team-based projection work I’m doing reflects this, and yet I’m trying to be open to questions like, “What if my Atlanta excitement — about how the Rams’ tendencies could port over to concentrated route and snap shares, and big expected point increases — is overconfident?”
We still have to make our bets based on the available information, but I’ve written in the past how many of the assumptions we make about offensive volume alone will be very wrong. In my 2022 release, I talked through how in doing the projections podcasts with Mike Leone, our team-level volume was scary close across the league, which becomes a bit of a concern due to what I’m describing.
I’ve written versions of most all of this before. The biggest thing I articulated more this season was the reality that the closeness of my team volume and in many cases player projections with Leone’s is an indication of how close projections are around the industry. I already knew projections heavily influenced ADP, but we’re not even getting a range that is reflective of chaotic outcomes. That’s an edge.
What types of players are targets
In that same writeup, I went on to say this. The player names are older, but the point very much shines through.
You want a rule of thumb? It could be said that in my Lazard and Kirk and Burks example above, that the Lazard and Kirk players who look like steals based on their projections are fades because of that, because the ADP market is baking in a little bit of an element where they are saying, “Ok, we still have to rank them close to their projection, but they need to go lower because there’s not much upside here.” The market, not the projection, is capturing those additional outcomes in that player’s range. But while the movement is directionally accurate, the player rarely moves down far enough from that baseline projection.
On the flip side, the players — like rookies — who are unknowns and thus can’t be projected to just be Ja’Marr Chase right out of the gate, often get drafted quite a bit higher than their projections. Fantasy analysts the industry over argue against them on the terms that their projected volume doesn’t line up with their ADP. The signal is the exact opposite. The market is telling you that these players have upside that can’t be quantified in an August projection, but could materialize.
How to use them
The Underdog ranks can be uploaded to the site directly (download the ranks as a .csv and then upload that .csv), but I’d encourage you to sort both by rankings and by ADP while on the clock and considering decisions. Always try to get the best prices in these huge-field best ball contests, as that’s integral to building a team with huge upside.
One more specific note: Alexander Mattison was the last player I ranked, and I essentially determined the players after him were undraftable for me, including some that have much higher ADPs. I’m not saying you can’t draft them, because several of those players could probably jump up quick with one positive camp report, but rather I wanted to say don’t put any weight into rankings after Mattison’s name.
For the redraft rankings, I do everything by tiers. In past years, I’ve used the term “Big tier break” right on the rankings to indicate spots where I think a window slams shut at different positions, and the upside bets get much worse. This year, I’ve added more terminology, to make it even more confusing. Over the past couple years, as concepts like the RB Dead Zone and WR Window have gotten more opaque, I’ve talked more about “transition tiers.”
I think we clearly see those in a couple spots this year, in fact at all positions. I’ve had a helluva time figuring out whether to put the “big tier break” before or after these “transition tiers” — I absolutely think there needs to be a big tier break in that range, but I think there are cases those players belong in the group above, and cases they belong in the group below.
In those cases, I’ve changed out the “big tier break” notation for “transition tier below” and “transition tier above” on either side of that tier. These indicate a big tier break takes place across that transition tier. If another big tier break is listed at the position, that’s a cleaner one at that spot, and it’s a separate dropoff (e.g. at TE, there’s a transition tier early, and a second big tier break after the tier that’s beyond the transition tier. That says I think the later-round TE profiles are multiple big tier breaks away from the early-round ones.
But also, I don’t want you to think the transitional tiers are an excuse to not get access to players in the higher tiers. The transitional tier profiles are, for me, significantly riskier. If forced, I’d put them with the lower tiers. I just see cases for those players, right now, where you can argue that window isn’t entirely closed, if you need depth at a position in a “break glass in case of emergency” way. Those transitional tiers are more meant to say, “OK, you already missed out on everything above this, well these guys are a bit better bets than everything below,” rather than as something to be planned for. Plan for the tiers above those. (Well, in some cases the transition tiers have targets whose ADPs are well below, and in those cases you can certainly plan for those specific players.)
As noted, and as with other years, you’ll need to use these positional tiers with some strategy about your specific league. But as your draft goes, you should be able to cross names off of this (either physically, if you print a copy, or more likely by just erasing on the digital copy if you make yourself an editable copy of the document before your draft) and then who is available in each tier, when you’re on the clock, should help guide your approach in those ranges. You’re always trying to get picks in before tiers close, but be mindful of the big tier breaks and how those impact things.
Alright, let’s get to the ranks. Links below the paywall.