The draft doesn't care what your needs are
Food for thought for upcoming drafts
Earlier this offseason, I had a buddy ask me about the rookie QB class as it related to his dynasty roster. He was looking to address the position in the early part of the second round of his Superflex rookie draft, which after the way the NFL draft went, wasn’t really a viable area to look at the QB position. I’ve really enjoyed the preseason performances from guys like Sam Howell, Desmond Ridder, and Malik Willis, but I was trying to explain to him that despite his dynasty team’s needs at the quarterback position, these guys who weren’t given much draft capital weren’t smart options ahead of some potentially very interesting WR, RB, or TE profiles in that area of his rookie draft.
I told this story not long after on Ship Chasing, relating it to a spot we were in during a draft where we had to let the room dictate what we were doing a bit. My awesome co-host Pat Kerrane responded with the perfect tagline: “The draft doesn’t care what your needs are.”
It makes perfect sense, right? When we talk about the RB Dead Zone, for example, and we talk about why people love to get their RB anchors in the early round, it’s because those people don’t want to be in position where they don’t have an RB when they know the draft is not going to offer good RB alternatives to the options at other positions. Of course, if you don’t go with an anchor RB early, the Dead Zone becomes the perfect example of this tagline — even though you don’t have an RB yet, you need to commit to full Zero RB by stacking talent at other positions, because taking some RBs in the Dead Zone is not going to fix the hole you believe exists on your roster after you didn’t take an RB early.
This idea is true of any draft. It’s true in the actual NFL draft, where pundits constantly talk about the worst picks being when teams reach for need as opposed to taking the best player available. And it’s a very good reminder that while it’s important to understand good draft structure philosophies, every draft is unique, and when the room gives you something, it’s OK to take it, even if that is a pivot off your plan. You can’t force a square peg into a round hole; you can’t fix a problem with your roster in an area of the draft where there’s no value to be had drafting that position.
This was also present in my writeup of my Superflex draft a couple weeks ago. I wanted to be deeper at QB than I wound up in that draft, but with an early draft slot, there wasn’t QB value to be had near the Round 2/3 turn that I found myself picking my second and third players at. Instead, I got an elite TE and an anchor RB.
By the fourth and fifth rounds, the deal was similar. I finally broke the seal and got my QB2 in the sixth, when the QB that was at the top of my board in the early fifth round fell all the way back to me and did feel like a value worth accepting at that point, and then I didn’t take my QB3 for another three rounds. I left that draft with a QB room of Lamar Jackson, Mac Jones, and Marcus Mariota, well shy of the QB production I was hoping for, but with a lot of firepower in other spots I’m hopeful can make up the difference. The worse outcome for this team would have been taking poor QB values just to address the QB depth situation, which wouldn’t have even given me serious QB firepower, and would have also prevented me from building out the other positions in a way that would help me win.
The single biggest mistake you can make in any draft is trying to force a pick to fill a specific need that the value in the draft suggests you shouldn’t be making. You won’t even fix your problem — just like drafting Dead Zone backs won’t change the decision to be light on RB upside you made by not taking one in the first three rounds — but you will miss an opportunity to benefit in another area — just like how drafting Dead Zone backs in a build that starts down a Zero RB path prevents you from actually leveraging the Zero RB structure by being dominant everywhere else.