Rankings updates, PPR overall top 50
Downloadable spreadsheet, Tableau dashboard, all of it
No matter how much I write that rankings suck, and I don’t love all fantasy content being boiled down to them, they will always be necessary. But as I’m always saying, it’s not even clear how to do rankings.
I’ve said that my rankings try to be agnostic of ADP, but that’s impossible. The second I rank one player over another, it becomes a question of whether I’d take him there. I’ve tried to update to reflect that actual “Where would you take him element?” a bit more, but then there are the special cases like Rashee Rice where I kept moving him up ahead of ADP, and then two days later I’d see him go in that range, and I’d get another question about how high I would be willing to move him up further. Now I have him in a range where the questions are all about how early is too early in home leagues, where he might go several rounds later?
Everything’s a unique case, right? Values are constantly changing. If I knew the exact purpose my rankings were being used for, I’d likely tailor them that direction (e.g. if you’re aggregating a bunch of ranks, it’s better for me to take stands on what I truly believe that will be smoothed out by the wisdom of the crowds, but if you’re drafting off them directly, it’s going to be a little different). It’s a difficult exercise.
Today, I tried to build out an overall top 50 of how I’d draft the players in a PPR, start-three-WRs league. I stopped at 50 because it became very situational at that point, and I explained what I’d be considering going from there. I chose that format because it’s most natural for me. If you start fewer WRs, or you’re in 0.5 PPR, things lean more toward RBs. I wrote a piece, the day after my 2024 draft strategy guide, that focused specifically on making those adjustments in two-WR or 0.5 PPR leagues (as well as auctions, Superflex, non-PPR formats, and Superflex auctions). You can find more specifics there.
Two final things before we get to the ranks. I’ve gotten a ton of great questions over the past week. As I’m really in bear down mode to get you guys all the promised content, I’ve answered almost none of them. I would love to do a mailbag sometime next week, but I’m really not sure if I’m going to be able to. I just basically want to apologize to anyone who has asked a good question; it means a lot to me to be able to help on the personal level, and if you do drop some more questions in the comments, it is super helpful if you can simplify them. If you’ve sent me a question that I didn’t reply to, I’d encourage you to submit it again (and obviously still no promises, but I’ll do my best).
Last thing is I’ll be doing a marathon drafting stream pretty much all day Tuesday with Shawn Siegele on the Stealing Signals YouTube channel. You should definitely come hang out, but even if you can’t make it, please go subscribe to the channel, it’s free and easy and super helpful for me. Have put a lot of work into it this summer, and the climbing subscriber numbers are huge.
I lied. One final thing. I’m going to do a separate list for you Superflex wackos.
Alright, let’s jump into an overall top 50, followed by links at the bottom to the updated tiers, a downloadable spreadsheet of the positional ranks (you guys have asked for a .csv but without a full overall ranking list I didn’t know how to do that, so I built a half measure), a Tableau dashboard of the tiers that’s pretty great (created by subscriber Jon who has a fantasy baseball Substack), and also an updated Underdog rankings doc.
Overall top 50
Because I always think in tiers, we’ll have those in the overall groupings. Most of these match the positional tier breaks.
Tier 1
1. Christian McCaffrey
2. Bijan Robinson
3. CeeDee Lamb
4. Breece Hall
5. Tyreek Hill
I’d go back and forth with 2-5, but I would keep CeeDee Lamb over Tyreek Hill and Bijan Robinson over Breece Hall, for reasons I elucidated in the Targets and Fades pieces. In certain rooms, I might be all RBs 1-3, and in others I might be Lamb 1.02 and Hill 1.03.