Revisiting the 7 pillars of good fantasy drafting

An important 2022 piece needs updating

Last year, as I tried to work through the most unpredictable August in my fantasy football memory, I spent a lot of time focused on the market, and how I felt it was misinterpreting and simplifying key points after a 2022 offseason that might go down as the most chaotic in league history. And on August 12, after an early preseason game where Treylon Burks didn’t play with starters — and was instead out there deep into the second half — the dam sort of broke.

I wrote a piece I titled, “The 7 pillars of 2022 drafts,” but that piece featured a long introduction that touched on a lot of stuff, including which offenses might break out, but then also Burks, and the strawman Ja’Marr Chase 2021 comparisons that were being made at the time, and about what we’re looking for from youth and upside in fantasy drafts.

And I want to look back on that and pull some quotes.

Treylon Burks’ early-season floor looks lower today than it did yesterday, after he didn’t start and played deep into his team’s first preseason game. But that is a very nuanced point that instead, for some analysts, feels like the whole ballgame.

Burks’ early-season floor isn’t even all that relevant to certain draft strategies. This whole post isn’t about him, but my response on him is, sure, you should try to get a better price. But there’s a long way to go until we even hit Week 1, he still has the most upside of anyone in his passing game, he has first-round draft capital, and all of that is absolutely part of the full-season equation. The Titans will be worse as a team if Burks isn’t a productive piece of their offense this season.

Burks didn’t go on to have a great 2022 season, but not because of role or anything from that early preseason usage being predictive, because he hit a routes run percentage of 97% of his team’s dropbacks by Week 3 (before getting injured in Week 4 and eventually missing six games).

Broadly, with August news, we should look for spots where the market is valuing the wrong things. The market overvalues projecting Week 1 role and undervalues talent and uncertainty already, so it’s no surprise this is a spot where the market is going to respond poorly to a shock to this type of profile, overly emphasizing the least-important elements of it. This is, in a nutshell, the case some analysts are making when they evoke Ja’Marr Chase’s August last year while discussing Burks; for the other side of this analytical debate, the Burks-Chase corollary has become a strawman through which to make the very obvious point that Chase was a completely different tier of prospect in a totally different situation than Burks. The nuance is lost.

Because of the 2022 landscape, there’s almost not time to make all of these points. It is harder, and it takes more time, to dig into shocks to the range of outcomes for a player like Burks. The market right now isn’t adjusting appropriately.

These points apply here in 2023 to Jaxon Smith-Njigba, in spades, but also to Breece Hall, and to Rhamondre Stevenson, and to Travis Etienne, and to Rashod Bateman and Quentin Johnston and Kyle Pitts probably and just so, so many players. In an increasingly efficient draft market, the biggest edge lies here, where the market is still undervaluing talent and uncertainty, valuing players in a scared manner, afraid to make mistakes.

One of the biggest lessons to learn in fantasy football is that you are not going to build a roster without holes. If you go back to the best fantasy teams you’ve ever built, and you look at the final roster that won that championship for you, and then you go back to the draft results on that league history page, you will see more turnover than you expect. Even for the best teams you’ve ever had. (At least unless you are friends of the podcast Pat Kerrane or Go Bills or the various winners of huge contests, where yeah, this probably doesn’t apply to you as cleanly.)

Draft strategy and overall approach are about understanding that getting certain things right is how you win. It’s probably a fallacy that when we look back in hindsight, it’s the busts we blame for losing. Busts don’t cause you to lose; lack of breakout upside pieces does. It feels like in fantasy you can just stack a bunch of tiny edges and built a superteam, but that’s simply not how this game is played.

That doesn’t mean “safe” picks don’t have their place. I did one-on-one calls with three Signals subs yesterday, and in talking through some of the specific league types they are in and the decisions they’ll have, I had moments of actively advocating to these individuals to do things like avoid taking Kyle Pitts because the league type and structure set up so nicely — and that individual had a rough time with Pitts’ inconsistency last year — that a more stable TE play with maybe a little “overall TE1” upside was a fine way to play it. I’ve talked through with other subscribers how they could build boring “guaranteed RB touches” into their auction plan (the key was not to pay for it, but sure, if you’re able to get Rachaad White or James Conner for $6 to help bridge your early-season RB scoring in a format where the opportunity cost of that $6 is different than the opportunity cost associated with a selection in a traditional snake draft, then yeah, that works).

But when we talk about structure and strategy around here, we’re talking about ways to build in the best combination — either in quantity or quality — of potential league-winners. The rankings reflect that; some of the players I am lower on still have interesting profiles, but that combination of cost and upside profiles will always be the driving factor of whether I’m above or below market on anyone.

But as I thought through all of these things last year, and I considered the Treylon Burks example, and I consider how that exact type of situation — and that exact type of market thinking — is impacting 2023 fantasy drafts, I came to this decision.

What I want and need to do the most, more than any other content I’ve offered or will offer this offseason, is to drive home some tentpoles we can use for stability. Here are what I would call the pillars of 2022 drafts.

And if I can say so myself, I think those pillars were pretty incredible. I think they did a great job of helping drive home what the foundational principles we’re striving for around here are — in any fantasy draft, from a home league to the highest stakes stuff you’ll see me discuss — and then once that foundation is set, giving you the freedom to adjust in individual spots, as you saw fit, to build the right roster for your specific league type.

So let’s review those today, starting with a topic I’ve hit on plenty in this intro already.