After my post last week, I didn’t get a lot of questions about specific free agency situations, but I did receive a couple of intriguing draft strategy questions I wanted to touch on today.
Let’s jump right into them.
From Christian:
“I'd love to hear your thoughts on the application of ZeroRB in a 2 WR, 2 RB, 1 FLEX format, instead of the 3 WR formats you frequently discuss which I've gathered are the most popular for large contests (haven't participated in any myself). Most of my leagues use only 2 WRs and I'm curious if you view that reduction in opportunity to leverage WR > RB as a simple shift (i.e. straight up increase your willingness to draft RBs earlier/more often and build less WR depth) or if the difference is not even significant enough to warrant a change in approach. Or maybe you land somewhere in between.”
I quickly touched on this at the end of my big draft strategy post last year that, as Christian points out, focusing largely on three-WR formats. I think that post is pretty evergreen and is one of the more important ones to give a read, for anyone who subbed after it published and didn’t see it last summer, and is interested in posts from the past that are still worth your time.
My first response to this question, which I get a lot, is to say that all leagues in 2022, with the shifting NFL landscape toward more open offenses, should have three starting WRs plus a flex. It’s something very much worth taking back to your league and in my mind is basically nonnegotiable in terms of how fantasy football should operate give the changes to the league as a whole over the past decade. I’d argue a system where you start four WRs and a flex would be more functional than one where you start only two.
Alas, two-WR leagues are still the default in some places because that’s how it was done a couple decades ago when seasonal fantasy football first took off in popularity, and people are resistant to change. At the end of the aforementioned post from last year, I noted, “In smaller starting lineups like when you can only start two WRs plus a flex or three WRs with no flex, you have more room for detours but still want adequate early WR depth.”
That doesn’t answer Christian’s question in full, but for anyone who hasn’t read the prior post, those detours refer to any picks that get away from a goal of WR depth that Christian referenced. But to Christian’s question, I do think there’s an element of straight up being willing to draft RBs earlier and take fewer WRs in the high-leverage rounds, and there’s a little more color I wanted to add as I’ve considered this question over the years.
The reduction from the potential to start four WRs to the potential to start only three isn’t just a reduction of one WR in a starting lineup as it relates to draft strategy. A big part of why Zero RB or Anchor RB or any WR-heavy strategy works is because of the total impact your WR group can have on your weekly scoring relative to your opponent. But that advantage is larger at each additional WR spot than the one before. Your opponents who draft multiple RBs early may still find themselves one productive WR who can match up with your WR1 on any given week, but their WR2 might be a little weaker than your WR2, their WR3 quite a bit weaker than your WR3, and when you get down to flex — if you’ve executed the strategy well by hitting on, say, six really good WRs from the early rounds and given yourself an ability to play four very strong options every week — you’ll have the biggest advantage over your opponent in the flex/WR4 matchup.
Thus, taking away the ability to play that fourth WR has a pretty huge impact on how a superstar WR team can win. It’s a pretty big advantage to your opponent who doesn’t have the adequate WR depth that if they can find one or perhaps two good WRs, they might not actually be giving up that many WR points on a weekly basis. Conversely, with fewer roster spots overall, the two RB slots are just taking up a higher proportion of the weekly matchup, and the points you may be sacrificing there have an outsized impact on who wins your week.
I made the mistake early on in my Zero RB journey of trying to apply it too heavily to leagues where I could only start three WRs, and the struggle I frequently hear about where you have very good WRs on your bench and you’re starting a subpar RB is real. This can have the biggest impact early in the season, where the benefits of antifragility — and how that gap in RB points between the RB rich and RB poor teams tends to shrink from draft day through the end of the season — haven’t yet manifested. I’ve had some teams that wound up very good by Week 10 or so, but because they got off to an 0-3 start, they have struggled to climb back to just somewhere on the playoff bubble. It’s a more precarious path to winning your league both because you’re going to have a tougher time earning that precious bye for the playoffs, and because even as you climb back you still never do get to fully realize the advantage of crushing the WR selections in your draft — their trade value is lessened, there wind up being better WR options on waivers, etc.
So the way I apply my strategy in these types of leagues is to bite the bullet and usually take at least one early RB with this mindset that I still can’t trust the workload all year, but it’ll at least help me navigate the early part of the season and then my roster can still gain value later. If I nail the RB pick — which is always the lure of taking an RB early — and have backed it up with strong WRs, I’ll be in fantastic position.
Broadly, I’m treating that additional early RB pick as added risk but I’m still operating with the same overall team construction goals of very strong WRs, a good WR in the flex, and a lot of upside RBs filling out my depth chart there. I’ll also be more open to an elite QB or elite TE, which also have outsized impact on the weekly matchup. Taking this approach provides a little more security in early-season point-scoring, and there are still the big-picture benefits of the most antifragile approach you can take given the league settings.
From Ronald:
“I will be given the opportunity this year to choose what draft slot I would like to have (10 team standard). Would you still choose the top spot or would you select a lower spot…let’s say in the middle of the draft. Based on this article it sounds like at most you would select the second spot assuming 1.01 will go to Taylor and be very happy selecting CMC at 1.02.”
Setting aside the 10-team standard elements of this for just a moment, I definitely think as we sit here on April 1 that this is shaping up to be a year where the top two RBs are head and shoulders above a very crowded RB3 discussion. For me, in PPR leagues, the top tier of WRs comes in right behind them, and that top tier for me right now is three players: Cooper Kupp, Ja’Marr Chase, and Justin Jefferson. I think you can arrange them more or less however you please, but that they are also clear top options.
Things will change over the course of the summer, and thankfully there is time to see how things go, but some years we have these defined top tiers at certain positions, and I do think 2022 is one of those years. For a standard league, and especially given it’s 10 teams, my opinion right now is to just take the 1.01 and go with Jonathan Taylor. The arguments I made for Christian McCaffrey to be right there with Taylor are very strong in PPR, still applicable in 0.5 PPR, and tougher to make in standard. Standard is a TD-dependent format and Taylor’s unheard-of-in-the-modern-NFL green zone role from 2021, plus his youth, efficiency, and touch mix lean toward rushing production at the expense of massive receiving numbers, all point toward him being a fantastic top option in standard formats. I see the appeal to moving up a pick in the second round and getting off the turn, but I’d rather plant my flag and make my pick, especially in a 10-team league where picking on the turn means only 18 picks before you are back on the clock, as opposed to 22 picks in a 12-teamer.
In a traditional 12-team league with PPR settings, I’d probably select the 1.02 right now, but I’d also be considering the 1.05 and be comfortable ensuring myself one of those prime WRs plus a lot of solid second-round options. It will probably come as no surprise I’m going to be on Stefon Diggs and A.J. Brown again this year, and both could be options in the second round if you’re picking out of the 1.05 spot. Getting one of the very best WRs to pair with a second-round WR like that would be an incredible start in a PPR format.
Some quick prospect thoughts
I have been working on some fun research for the WR class that I’m very excited to share in a couple weeks after getting back from vacation. But for those of you itching for analytically-focused prospect research before then, I wanted to take a minute to shout out RotoViz’s rookie guide as well as all the great work on their site. RotoViz has been at the forefront of so many of the advancements in prospect research over the past decade, and these days it seems there are a ton of analysts with numbers-based prospect models out there, but that there is a ton of overlap in those models and who they like, with a ton of the core concepts that drive them like team-volume and age-adjusted production coming from that early work at RotoViz.
If you don’t have a RotoViz sub, I have to give a shoutout to my former RotoViz colleague and current Ship Chasing cohost Pat Kerrane, who has released some fantastic looks at the top of the WR class over at NBC Sports EDGE. From what he’s released so far, he hits on his top-five WRs in one piece and WRs 6-10 in the other. Each piece is only five players long because these are very in-depth looks at each of the ancillary elements that might provide context to a prospect’s production-based profile, and Pat does an incredible job of listing out what those things are and why and how much they should matter.
I’ve long said you need to have an idea of the analytical profiles of the WR class especially, but one thing I want to discuss this year is this idea that because there is so much overlap in the various ones out there, you can find yourself in a bit of an echo chamber as the discussions on Twitter and elsewhere focus on small disagreements between models that otherwise have results that are all shaped similarly. This year, those disagreements might be about who the true No. 1 WR is among a group of three that look like the top tier — Garrett Wilson, Treylon Burks, and Drake London — but what happens with those disagreements is the overall shape of the class is sort of accepted as fact. One impact is a guy like, say, Kadarius Toney last year — who I was very much out on — can be perhaps too accepted as a future bust. Toney was a first-round draft pick who wound up as a very nice value in rookie drafts, and sharp people like Pat were willing to recognize the models are not going to be 100% accurate and I happen to know he scooped up Toney in the later second round of a few rookie drafts.
The broad idea of what prospects are good — specifically at WR where the data tends to help the most — can be summed up with this idea of “age-adjusted production.” It should be largely known by now that production begets production at wide receiver more so than athletic traits or film grades. And when it comes to production, it’s been known since the concept of market share was introduced at RotoViz that we needed to control for team volume, which has been looked at other ways like yards per team attempt, and the various models are going to do these things differently.
The industry has refined this analysis for years, and that’s good, but the basic factors that feed into these models — whether a player had a lot of receiving yardage and perhaps touchdowns relative to how much his team actually threw — is more or less the same. Some models might weight various elements of athletic profiles, maybe even bucketing the relevant ones by wide receiver type, which is often parsed by weight. Some might weight draft capital more heavily relative to those production metrics than others — and draft capital is always a massive part of the equation, the bedrock of the prospect analysis profile. Some might include positive adjustments for return production, or for playing alongside great teammates, or negative adjustments for a player not being an early declare, and the weights of those elements will change the results of each model or analysis.
But ultimately, any model worth its weight will come to a pretty similar conclusion to the others, because the class is the class, with draft capital being a huge driving force and huge gaps in hit rate when you’re talking about perhaps five first-round WRs and the guys another five spots down the list at WR11 or so. And when there are maybe 15-20 total WRs worth being interested in for fantasy, plus a few interesting flyers, you’re not talking about big numbers. You’re not even talking about a huge sample over multiple seasons, especially when you consider the various reasons guys can perform or whether we even have the right idea of what success at the NFL level looks like (we’re obviously looking for fantasy points, but those can obviously also fluctuate a ton based on any number of on-field or off-field reasons, many of which we’ll never really have the full picture of).
To be clear, I’m not saying we shouldn’t pay attention to the stuff that’s been shown to be predictive. Quite the opposite — that there are proven elements of prospect profiles that show to be predictive in players outperforming (age-adjusted production) or underperforming (overdrafted athletic traits like 40 time) draft capital is a small miracle and drives home how necessary it is to be aware of those factors when analyzing a class. Anything short of that is malpractice.
But from a game theory perspective, it makes a lot of sense in our current spot in the fantasy football world to not necessarily try to reinvent the wheel but instead consult several analytical resources while also understanding there will be overlap. The consulting of several resources should be specifically done by trying to parse what factors might be differentiators for some of the less-appealing names and what could be red flags for the guys every model loves. It used to be that a guy like Skyy Moore might go under the radar; 2022’s actual version of Moore might be so heavily hyped as every analyst’s favorite nonobvious guy that he’s become obvious, and there might be players with not much different hit probabilities you can find a full round later in your rookie draft. (You should still draft Skyy Moore everywhere. Dude looks awesome.)
That’s it for now. We’ll chat soon.
Ben…thank you for taking the time to clearly answer both of those questions. Along with your comments on the Wr’s…exactly what I’m looking for from your work! You provide that edge (advantage) to your readers that gives us that little extra that our league mates simply will not find perusing traditional websites that only provide rankings without indepth analysis…thank you!