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.