Fantasy football is more contingency-based than ever before
How to play league trends amid a sharpening FF market
There’s this mentality in fantasy football that is natural and understandable as sort of the first way most anyone thinks about their team. It’s this desire to find a player as the answer for each starting spot. Who is my RB1? Who is my TE?
This is a (mostly) flawed pursuit. Even if we achieve the goal of building the perfect fantasy football lineup in any particular format, it will in all likelihood be the perfect lineup only for a week or two. More clearly, what constitutes a perfect roster in Week 4 doesn’t equate to what constitutes a perfect roster in Week 17. Chaos is the rule.
But even a team that achieves this goal of stability among the starting lineup at all positions isn’t guaranteed to win if they are the wrong players. Every year, there are “must start” players whose ranges of outcomes on the weekly level are not actually that exciting. We’re not trying to get 10-15 points from each lineup spot; we’re trying to score the most points total, and guys who can put up 30 and 40 points in a week get you there, even when paired with 5-point “duds.”
This is why I’ve advocated for a different mindset, one that embraces uncertainty with individual lineup spots. Instead of looking for the player who will be our RB1 for the year, the question is instead, “What are my season-long goals and potential answers for the RB1 and RB2 slots?” We’re drafting a team, and each required slot in the starting lineup will be represented by a positional group on our team that should have some cohesion. Our RBs, our WRs — they are units.
Now at onesie positions like QB and TE, it’s a little more practical to just lock in a player. But even then, we’re essentially saying, “My answer is this elite option, and then to stream if he misses time.” But we’re also keeping our eye out if that elite option isn’t exactly elite for a period of time. And in deeper leagues, we’re more seriously considering getting a backup on our roster that provides either upside or some floor and stability in the case we ever need to use them. We’re essentially treating QB and TE like the positional units I described above, just with simpler answers in those cases.
This mindset gets back to the goals of structural drafting, and Zero RB and Zero RB adjacent structures, which are designed to extract the most value out of a draft while also acknowledging uncertainty. At their core, these strategies preach to get a lot of WR depth early, potentially even before you’ve filled your starting RB slots. The end result is a roster that has a WR group that because of its depth through the early rounds, is free to be loaded with the types of young upside swings that can define seasons. Also because of its depth, the WR group has answers to busts, injuries, or even just periods of poor play, to accomplish the goal of firepower in each starting WR slot plus typically any Flex spots.
From there, these types of rosters tend to be loaded with later-round RB options. Sometimes the types of Modified Zero RB rosters or Anchor RB rosters that hit an RB or two in the first couple rounds will provide access to potential Legendary Upside, as Pat Kerrane wrote about so well for NBC last year, but there will typically still be four or so RBs from the later rounds, after the RB Dead Zone, that help create the shape of the RB room. And the reason there is fairly simple — RB is the one position where an injury to a teammate can allow a player to gain 10 rounds of value, a la Darrell Henderson last year, while also being a position that after the top 10 or 15 options each season, we see a huge chunk of players that are frankly not that much better options than what you can get later. In terms of pure upside, the position tends to go flat in the dead zone through to the players like 2020 Henderson pre-Cam Akers injury, which is why Henderson immediately leapfrogged so many other RBs when the Akers injury occurred. And the types of players Henderson leapfrogged, with their limited ceilings, are also just not that much better than backs with limited upside cases later, like pass-catching specialists.
Anyway, thinking through the positions as units — and the problem we’re trying to solve for as a dynamic solution for each lineup spot — hopefully helps crystallize the underlying strategy. If you need more thoughts on this, I suggest going back to my draft strategy piece from 2021, because these are just examples of what I see as sound drafting that I want to use as a launching point for something that strikes me as very specific to the 2022 landscape.
One of the hardest things I’ve tried to grasp this year is what feels like a lack of depth at all positions. Because of how I think about fantasy football, I tend to feel this way about RB. Tight end this year is thin as well, with Darren Waller and George Kittle feeling more squeezed, and the next group of options typically never being great targets (the TE6-TE10 range), but this year including guys like Zach Ertz, whose ADP I don’t understand at all.
I’d argue the same sort of thing is true at WR. Outside the top three WRs, you get into a position early in the second round of drafts where someone like CeeDee Lamb is going as WR6 largely because there’s no one there to take the spot from him. In another year, he feels like a guy who should go off at the 2/3 turn.
This phenomenon doesn’t let up. In the middle of the third round and into the early fourth, I find myself looking at options I think we should be getting more of a discount on. I’d argue it’s part of why the Baker Mayfield trade sent D.J. Moore skyrocketing into the middle of the third, because drafters were pretty “meh” on anyone after A.J. Brown in the top half of that round, or perhaps Michael Pittman or Keenan Allen if those suit your fancy more.
People are mad that Gabriel Davis is going in the fourth, but veterans like Allen Robinson and Brandin Cooks go right behind him. In the sixth, Adam Thielen and Russell Gage come off the board, and Allen Lazard and Christian Kirk in the seventh. I can see some upside for some of these players, but we’re talking about a group of unimpressive or aging veterans where you’d have to see some major skills evolution or the reversal of negative trends that we just don’t tend to see at these stages of players’ careers, especially for the ones who haven’t really proven anything and considering what they’ve put out there to date. All I’m trying to say is while, yes, Davis’s price feels lofty, I almost can’t imagine making a case he should go behind these types.
By comparison to the earlier rounds, the rookie receivers do seem to be clear targets in their pocket later. We know rookies have upside, but everyone seems to have lost their damn minds or just forgotten it. What’s interesting is there are far more WRs I’m interested in this year into the double-digit rounds as well, including guys in deep leagues. I just finished up my Scott Fish Bowl draft and I’ve done it for years and never felt like I had the number of upside plays available to me in the 22nd and final round this year that I did this year. I wanted to make five or six more picks in a way that I couldn’t even consider some of my favorite super deep sleepers, which has always been one of my favorite parts of the format — closing the draft with complete Hail Marys.
Comparable players for me this year were guys like Ty Montgomery or Romeo Doubs, but I was staring at James White still there so I certainly couldn’t justify my absurd Montgomery pick. Instead, I closed my draft with Jonnu Smith and Will Fuller, who are guys I’d argue should be in consideration in shallower leagues. Every draft I do this year there seem to be more undrafted players for whom I can craft a pretty reasonable upside case than anything I can remember. I don’t think that’s by accident.
One of the things I most enjoy in fantasy football is thinking through how the league is evolving, and how that impacts our silly, little game. Drafters and draft trends tend to be heavily reliant on past data, which is fine to a degree, but I think the market falls short of applying past information to changing big-picture expectations for the future.
I think we’re seeing that this year more so than ever. Let’s reflect on the crazy 2022 offseason, specifically as it related to the WR position. Tyreek Hill, Davante Adams, and A.J. Brown were traded. Free agents got massive deals, most frequently highlighted by Christian Kirk’s contract with the Jaguars. We saw six wide receivers go in the top-20 picks, and they are frankly not even viewed as that exciting by fantasy drafters.