The best way to play home leagues in 2023

Some thoughts building on yesterday's draft strategy piece

Yesterday, I laid out some of my key draft strategy considerations for 2023. After finishing that piece up, I was driving to my in-laws’ for a barbecue and had some time in the car to crystallize some thoughts, as one does. And during that time, a realization dawned on me that answered one of my most frequently asked questions for the 2023 season.

Reader Dan posed it to me last week, and I promised him I’d get back to it in a future column:

The only reason I consider deviating from your rankings / targets (on rare occasion) is because I feel sometimes that your rankings are geared towards higher stakes / larger field leagues, rather than the traditional 12-team home league. For example, I find that your rankings are more likely to prioritize higher ceiling / lower floor type players (e.g. the rookie WRs last year), and deemphasize the small hit and small miss players (e.g. the Terry McLaurins of the world). 

In smaller field leagues, I feel as though small hit-small miss players are a bit more valuable.

Do you have any suggestions as to how to approach your upcoming rankings from the viewpoint of a 12-team home league?

This is a fantastic question from a couple of different angles, and it’s one I’ve never really had a great answer to in the past. I do see the concern, particularly in leagues where the young guys are incredibly cheap, and you could feasibly build an entire roster out of these high-upside plays that might take some time to hit in-season, or might not hit at all.

This applies even more strongly for leagues like Dan describes where it’s a “smaller field,” which is to say shallower benches and more names available on the waiver wire. So many of you guys ask about that element, and so often as we discuss I realize there are going to be rookie WRs near the back end of the WR Window that are going to go undrafted in some of these leagues. Many of you played in leagues last where where Garrett Wilson wasn’t even selected, for example.

In a similar vein, I’ve gotten this question posed from a strategy perspective, where the idea is more like, “Is Zero RB even necessary in a home league?” because of the WR value that can be had. And quite frequently, my answer has been, “No, but you still probably don’t want to load up on the riskier RB position early, so it’s a subtle shift not a gargantuan one.” But as I know I’ve written, in my own home leagues, I’ve definitely trended toward more of an Anchor RB philosophy, and with a higher likelihood of targeting an elite TE, because I have mostly agreed with those of you who feel more “detours” should be welcomed in the strategy for these leagues (as opposed to drafts where you can get boxed out of WR depth earlier, and also in some cases those drafts are part of the higher-stakes, larger tournaments, where extreme upside can carry extreme payoffs that aren’t part of the equation in a 12-team home league, as Dan notes).

But even that idea of an Anchor RB and an elite TE and trying to bake in more detours hasn’t been a perfect answer, in my eyes. Luckily, while the 2023 landscape has changed the strategy in higher-stakes and tournaments quite a bit, it provides an answer to these home league questions, addressing the key concerns and offering a really nice blueprint for how to accomplish all of our goals in these types of drafts.

I often struggle with conviction, spending a lot of time contemplating the relative merits of various options. I don’t even think of this as paralysis by analysis; I see it more as narrowing in on the probabilistic range of the bet I’m making, and the truth is simply that more often than not, your options fall into a gray area.

But there are times where things fit better, as those of you who play in SuperFlex leagues know. Last year, I couldn’t help but coming back to the belief that SuperFlex offered a really nice strategic blueprint, because QB was the position where it made sense to be paying up more than any other, and you could most leverage that reality in SuperFlex (the elite QB upside was one of the 7 Pillars, and that bullet couldn’t have more accurately described the 2022 season and subsequent QB ADP rise here in 2023). One of my favorite parts of the 2022 season was hearing from so many of you later in the year that the double-elite-QB strategy carried you guys to huge SF seasons, even in some cases despite key skill player issues. It was a cheat code.

I’m not saying things will play out the same for your casual single-QB home leagues this year. What I am saying is I feel a similar level of confidence about a particular approach as I did with the double-elite-QB SuperFlex stuff last year.

Why WR-WR is your PPR blueprint

The biggest reason for my response to the home league issues posed by Dan above being Anchor RB and/or elite TE over the past few years is that in the heart of the RB Dead Zone, WR has felt like the strongest play maybe 80% of the time, as I said yesterday. In truth, in these home leagues where RBs get pushed up even higher, WR has maybe felt like the strongest play 95% of the time in that Round 4-6 range.

So if we try to pigeon-hole Zero RB, we run into this issue where we just want to keep taking WRs. We get to about Round 9 or Round 10 and still, the best move feels overwhelmingly like WR.

But that doesn’t change the fact that historically, starting with multiple RBs early in your draft stockpiles bust risk, and while the position is extremely important with high-end scoring potential, there isn’t as clean of a connection between ADP and the players who actually matter. We’ll get later-round producers emerging there, and producing — at least for stretches, but perhaps not for the whole season — at a level that matches the elites. You just don’t see that at WR, and while you could see it at QB and TE in the past, I’m not sure we’ll see it as much at those positions anymore, either. Overwhelmingly, RB is the position where you can “Frankenstein” a set of options to score in the range of, if not the very elites, then at least the second tier.

That’s a really key part of why the hit rates on stacking early RBs is so low. Many analysts miss the forest for the trees on this point, focusing so heavily on the value RB provides in-season, but misunderstanding that it’s more complex than that when considering the optimal ways to construct a roster. WRs early are the safer play. Most years, they are also the very best WRs. Sometimes, we get the Cooper Kupp and Deebo Samuel 2021 season where the top-end guys didn’t come through in a huge way, and the later WR Window guys were optimal, which made early RB more viable mostly because it naturally paired with that. Zero RB also had strong hit rates in the larger data samples of best ball tournaments that we have for that year, meaning that WR phenomenon mostly just opened up the early rounds to be any position, since the RB Dead Zone was the most important element to that season and you needed to be drafting WRs in that range, regardless of your start.

In addition to multiple early RBs being a tricky path, elite TE can sink your team as much as it can be the massive edge — my 7 Pillars analysis last year that at least one of the big three was likely to destroy worlds proved correct, but Travis Kelce being a cheat code paired with Kyle Pitts destroying not worlds, but rosters. If you went Anchor RB and elite TE in a home league and landed on Pitts and an early RB who wasn’t a smash, which I did in at least one of my home leagues, you more or less sacrificed your early picks to this goal of optimization, where, yes, you probably felt great about all of the WR depth you were still able to build from Round 3-8 or whatever, but without a Round 1 or Round 2 pick doing anything, you just had a weaker team than if you’d have taken elite WRs early.

And again, those elite WRs are the ones who offer security. Yes, injuries will happen. But year in and year out, we know who the elites are in advance. Nothing is black and white in fantasy, but the trend of the top-scoring WRs consistently being among the highest drafted is about as close as it gets, such that you almost have to be intentionally misleading yourself or others to try to ignore it. If you go to WR points per game from last year, the list is literally just Round 1 and Round 2 WRs — Kupp, Jefferson, Chase, Hill, Diggs, Adams, Brown, Lamb.

In years where it’s not, like in 2021, it’s still that very next group, and then also the top WRs are still up there. In 2021, Adams was the top WR drafted on average and finished WR2 behind Kupp. Jefferson finished WR4 from a WR7 ADP. Hill and Diggs were WR2 and WR3 on average and still finished top 10, but just weren’t Kupp-ian. I don’t need to belabor this point, but a quick look through fantasy history at guys like Antonio Brown and Julio Jones and Calvin Johnson and the late, great Demaryius Thomas and Brandon Marshall and Andre Johnson and on and on and on are all examples of guys who went high year after year and produced like it year after year, with a type of stability you just don’t see at RB.

This is why getting WR depth early is so important. It builds in ceiling and floor. And one of the key points I’m making is that while WR has always been the optimal play in the RB Dead Zone — and by leaps and bounds — it was also usually the correct play in the first two rounds as well. And so when you knew you could get that later WR depth in home leagues, while it made sense to take the riskier early swings on an Anchor RB and an elite TE, you were sacrificing something. Almost every year — even in years where a superstar like Kupp emerges from Round 4 — the WR depth from Round 3-8 is not of the same caliber as Round 1 and Round 2 WRs.

Having your cake and eating it, too

If you read yesterday’s piece, your wheels may be turning by now. You’re probably getting to the conclusion I got to yesterday, and why I built it up and am so excited to share it this morning, even as I have a million other things to write about (notes from every game are gonna gather dust for a day while I put off a Preseason Stealing Signals piece), and two Monday podcasts and a draft later to prep for.

Yesterday, I made the case that for the first time in a long time, WRs aren’t the obvious selections in the heart of the RB Dead Zone, i.e. Rounds 4-6ish. That the interesting youth profiles at the position are still nice to hit in Rounds 7-9ish, because they carry similar upside to the Rounds 4-6 types, which isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the way it will play out, but close. Dan hits on this in his question from the top where he emphasizes the floor and “small hit, small miss” profile of someone like Terry McLaurin, and that floor is absolutely there, specifically in terms of routes and also probably things like first reads that will often go to the established veteran until there’s a reason not to. Also, specifically early in the season when so many rookies are part-time players.

[The floor difference is real, acknowledged, but also you don’t win fantasy leagues with small wins and floor picks. I’ve written this many times and different ways before, but trying to parse out which players in your build will give you upside and which will give you floor will work if you pick all the right upside players, and it’s super easy in hindsight — especially when you’ve hit on, say, one upside player, to look back and wish you just had more floor plays built around that player. But none of that is actionable before you build your team. If you know all the right upside players, you’re going to win no matter what you build around them. The point of not taking floor players is that’s putting too much certainty on the upside picks, that you’ve identified the league winners. In other words, you don’t take floor picks to maximize your chances to find the upside players, because you only get 16 or 18 picks or whatever, and you only get 8 or 10 or whatever in the really important rounds where almost all of the stars live. Now there’s a whole broader discussion about what a floor guy or upside guy is, and where the gray area lies in all those ranges and where a 2022 Josh Jacobs fits, but setting that aside and starting from an agreed-upon idea that a guy like McLaurin is more of a floor pick, I would just strongly caution against trying to seek too many of those guys into any build, even home leagues. That doesn’t mean I’m saying never to draft McLaurin, but this is more or less the whole key to fantasy football — understanding uncertainty, prioritizing high-end outcomes over floor, and maximizing quantity of upside bullets. And let’s be clear, sometimes when you do that, your team can suck. I do think the ways that we talk about doing it around here typically raise the floor of the roster as well, where you’re either in contention to win or else in contention for the playoffs and hoping to get lucky, and rarely way out of the running unless you just hit a bunch of injuries and tough breaks. But we’re playing against 11 other people; you can’t win ‘em all.]

That aside out of the way, let’s get our momentum back, building to the draft strategy to dominate home leagues. As I was saying, 2023 is unique in that the heart of the RB Dead Zone offers legitimate alternatives to WR. And in the past, home league strategy couldn’t be, “Take a WR every round,” so we had to pick the best spots to detour, and that meant taking on early RB risk.

But in 2023, that pocket of Dead Zone backs I mentioned — sandwiched between my two Big Tier Breaks in my rankings — as well as where the Big Tier Breaks fall at QB and TE, gives us the freedom to make our detours in lower-leverage rounds.

It used to be that you couldn’t really justify a Dead Zone back, so your detours kind of had to be early. But now we can have our cake and eat it, too — if we hit elite, high-end WRs where they make the most sense in the early rounds, our RB picks in the Dead Zone aren’t going to be as killer to our roster’s floor if they bust. And then, because the young WRs at the back of the WR Window linger so late, and some of them might not even be drafted, we can circle back to WR and build out the requisite upside depth in the George Pickens, Jahan Dotson, Treylon Burks, Jordan Addison, Quentin Johnston, Zay Flowers, Rashod Bateman tier. Maybe you stop off a little earlier for Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who is going way lower on some home league sites than higher-stakes places, because he’s super fun.

That might look something like this:

• Round 1: WR

• Round 2: WR

• Round 3: WR/RB/QB/TE (a top tier QB or Mark Andrews would be in play, which would bring WR back into play in Round 7)

• Round 4: RB (hoping for Breece Hall, Jahmyr Gibbs, or Travis Etienne)

• Round 5: QB/RB/TE (might need to hit that second QB tier here)

• Round 6-7: QB/RB/TE (QB will probably hit the Big Tier Break first, and TEs in the T.J. Hockenson to Dallas Goedert range could go before this point in some leagues or fall to Round 8 in others, but these rounds do become nice for layering in the Dead Zone RBs between the Big Tier Breaks, like injury-upside bets J.K. Dobbins and Javonte Williams, or a fallback plan in James Cook who isn’t really a Dead Zone RB but should probably be going higher than he is and is becoming a big target for me)

• Round 8-11: probably three WRs plus an RB3

The way you play those middle rounds becomes dependent on your draft slot and how heavily your league goes at each position, and again the onesie positions present opportunities for playing it later if need be. But essentially, by locking in multiple elite WRs in a league where you know you can also get Window WRs a bit later than the high-stakes formats, you can probably afford four detours (can we even call them that at that point?) in the RB Dead Zone (two RB gambles plus a high-end QB plus a high-end TE).

I would specifically be willing to play it this way because I have multiple legitimate star WRs — from before my first Big Tier Break, or possibly that first tier after it which includes Keenan Allen and Deebo Samuel — at WR. When set up that way, I don’t feel quite the same pressure to get the WR depth, which coincides with the ways these particular drafts naturally don’t pressure you. You can look for fallers at WR.

But again, the key in 2023 is you can do that while there are a plethora of options in the RB Dead Zone such that you can make that range work for you rather than having to target (and reach for) one or two specific RBs there. And then additionally, with QB ADPs elevating but also probably being worth it (before the Big Tier Break in my rankings at that position), you can use a single-digit pick on a QB, too. And, with Kelce entering his age-34 season and being a tough risk/reward bet, plus six or seven TEs I actually really like in that Round 4-6 range (as opposed to there often only being three or so good TE bets and the TE4-TE6 looking like fool’s good a lot of years), 2023 offers more viable paths to playing TE in those RB Dead Zone ranges.

Scoring settings where I wouldn’t do this

The optimal league type for this strategy is probably a 12-team, PPR league that, as many of you tell me your leagues are still doing, only allows two starting WR slots and one Flex, so only three WRs total in the lineup. Although, in fairness, I might consider an Anchor RB in the first two rounds in those formats.

• I’d be very comfortable applying it to the start three WRs plus a Flex leagues, and maybe that’s the optimal league type for this concept.

• As you move from PPR to 0.5 PPR and Standard, my willingness to consider early RBs grows. In Standard, I’m probably taking at least one early RB, but I might still use some of the above logic to take an elite WR. Standard sucks guys. I don’t care to hear your thoughts about how receptions don’t matter; touchdowns are arbitrary, too, and RBs probably don’t directly deserve credit for how they compile yardage relative to offensive lines and the ways defenses play the opposing passing game, and very little of this stuff in our fake game directly corresponds to what matters, but Standard just makes for a format where randomness is ratcheted up, and removes strategy. But if you’re playing standard, yeah, go take your RB gambles.

• In SuperFlex, I’m still very into Elite QB strategies this year, but I would probably just layer this on top of that. I’m more into Zero RB in SuperFlex, and I might only take say one Dead Zone RB when employing the above strategy, if I needed the other early picks to secure enough QB, WR, and TE firepower, and then hit RB2 and beyond later.

• If I’m in a league where I’m less confident the WR Window will stay open into that Round 10ish area, I would probably just take one RB in that Dead Zone range while employing this.

Draft slots where I wouldn’t do this

• I’ve mentioned elsewhere I think Austin Ekeler is a good pick starting at 1.06, if the first five picks include my top tier of WRs and Christian McCaffrey. If I was in that range and looking at that board, I would probably just take Ekeler over forcing a WR just to get onto this path. A similar thing would be true about being on the board at 1.05 and the top four WRs going 1.01-1.04, so I would just take McCaffrey. In both situations, I would probably look at a Keenan Allen in Round 3 to still get two really good WRs (if I did that with Ekeler, I’d grab Justin Herbert and build out a big stack which I don’t necessarily like to do in 12-team leagues, but the Chargers are a team where the play volume floor should be really high and I would definitely be willing to put multiple eggs in that basket and live with the results).

• From the top-five slots, after taking say a Kupp or whoever, I might grab a Rhamondre Stevenson or a falling Jonathan Taylor in the second round in a RB-happy room where I can still pretty easily get Tee Higgins or someone on the wrap in the early third round. But while I love that pocket of RBs at the Round 2/3 turn, I’d probably want to grab two WRs through three at a minimum so I could free myself up to go other directions in Rounds 4-7.

• From the 1.09 through to the 1.12, it’s really easy to start WR-WR, but if you’re in a super RB-heavy league where you’re concerned Breece Hall, Gibbs, and Etienne aren’t likely to make it to the Round 3/4 turn, and you also don’t think the elite QBs or Andrews will get there, then you might be thinking a Tee Higgins could actually make it all the way back to 3.10 or so. (Or maybe it’s a 10-team league.) In that situation, I could see taking one early RB at that first turn, and then hoping to get the Higgins slide but if not, again hitting on a Keenan Allen or Deebo type as the WR2 at that Round 3/4 turn instead. (That said, I’m mostly just giving you that option if there’s a RB you really like, like a Tony Pollard, because if I thought Higgins might fall to the third I would probably still just start WR-WR, and then if he did you can still execute this strategy starting WR-WR-WR pretty easily, and it might even be more powerful, although in that type of really RB-heavy league you might have to reach on a James Cook in the Dead Zone for your RB detour.)

I think that more or less covers the big questions I anticipate, but feel free to shoot me more if you have them. And if not, I hope this strategy sets you up to crush your drafts in 2023!