The most important range of 2023 drafts

Let's talk draft strategy, from high stakes to home leagues

You know this by now, but I love talking about strategy. This game to me is so much about what we can do to execute a lot of different goals, without really knowing the situations we’ll be placed in. A fantasy draft is a little like a board game, or like chess, where we’re reacting to the opportunities in front of us, reading and contemplating the best risk-adjusted moves.

And there are central tenets to playing and winning all games, like understanding you can’t just make conservative decisions at all times and expect to finish on top. Much like I love to complain that NFL coaches make late-game decisions to prolong defeat rather than face the potential ramifications of decisions more or less ending a game right in the moment they make them, I find fantasy football to be best played when you’re willing to take on risks and live with the results. Ranking players is important, and it’s important we know what profiles we want to target and those things. But ultimately, reaching multiple rounds to get the guy you had to have, isn’t a long-term winning strategy.

I made a case recently that analysts are probably more heavily influenced by their own past results than their audiences, or probably even they, understand. One great example of that is the analysts who will ride for very boring player archetypes, say aging Dead Zone RBs with “guaranteed touches.” Part of the way that profile can actually work in a league, though, is if it starts to become a real value; you get that type of guy in Round 8 instead of Round 5 and the opportunity cost is hugely different, and the paths to success for a decision where you’re taking a player with a pretty clear lack of ceiling based on historical precedent can still work.

As I’ve said, pretty much anything can work, as long as you draft the right players, which is of course the hard part. If that were easy, we could make a killing in NFL futures markets. But in fantasy, who becomes “the right players” is all relative to cost. Getting a certain type of production in Round 8 or Round 12 can be far more impactful than if you got that same production at that same position in Round 2. That’s all very basic, but it impacts the way we see the draft as it unfolds in real time; as ADPs develop, and league types shift, I’m hearing from casual leagues where WRs are priced up, and questions about how to play both early and later QBs in SuperFlex, and being price conscious does in my opinion matter now more than ever.

Where in the past we could be pretty sure RBs would be overdrafted in almost any league, and we could talk more openly about how to exploit that in ways that carried across draft types, in 2023 my approach to fantasy football drafts will be more heavily tailored toward league type than ever before. And to be clear, tailoring your draft strategy to unique league types is something that’s always been kind of a nice edge; it’s not that it hasn’t been important before.

But to understand how to properly adjust, we have to understand the basics, and what goals we’re trying to accomplish in any draft. I didn’t really want to rewrite past draft strategy stuff this year, because so many of you have been here for multiple years and know it very strongly. But for those that haven’t, The 7 Pillars of 2022 Drafts is a nice Cliff’s Notes version, although it ends by referencing my long draft strategy piece from 2021, and that’s a fuller version of the main tenets of what we’re trying to accomplish, while The Definitive Discussion of How to Approach RBs in Fantasy Football (and also the in-season companion piece RB Talent Doesn’t Matter, but it’s the Most Important Thing) hit more on that key position. Those pieces should do a great job of outlining the basics including the WR Window, what it means to take “detours” to that goal of WR depth, and the other general roster-building principles we’re going to consider every year.

But 2023 offers a new and unique landscape, one where QBs are being drafted in the early rounds again, and also RBs are being drafted later than ever in many formats (but perhaps not in all home leagues, although a shift there should at least be considered for those of you who think you know your league well and expect it to be RB heavy — it wouldn’t be too surprising to see some movement even in those leagues given the overall analysis and lack of “Zero RB doesn’t work” articles and discussions on social media this year; I’m assuming there are at least a few people in your league who read other fantasy advice, and fantasy advice is shifting).

So let’s talk through how to apply the tenets of most draft years to the 2023 landscape.

Quick recap of structural drafting theory

The biggest things to remember about structural drafting, as things like Zero RB are argued to be overly constricting, is that the idea isn’t to prevent you from doing anything. It’s merely to keep you on track, targeting the right positions at the right times to give you the best chance of hitting on the players that actually matter for fantasy — at all positions — in the best cost-adjusted areas to be taking those swings. Ideally, we’d be able to draft the best players at every position, but that’s not how it works, obviously.

But what was always true was if the landscape shifted dramatically, such that the types of players that have the ability to truly impact fantasy seasons were more interspersed throughout the various draft ranges, then our approach would need to shift as well. That doesn’t mean suddenly targeting the wrong types of players simply due to changes costs. It also doesn’t mean abandoning chief tenets like the understanding that high-end WR seasons do not come from the late rounds of drafts, and there is a legitimate window that will close at that position after about 50 or so are drafted, every year, like clockwork. In the off chance that a potential upside WR profile is going well outside the top 50, the market typically corrects (with haste), as it did with guys like Skyy Moore and Romeo Doubs in best ball this offseason.

And again, 2023 does offer real changes to the landscape. So, we need to understand the core goals of roster-building, discussed in the links above, but we also need to be flexible. And as I’ve thought through this a bunch of different ways, I’ve decided the key lies in a specific area of the draft, where there are tiers of players at all four positions that intersect, and the ways your league plays those different positions will impact how you can identify the optimal draft structure in your own league format in real time.

Working from the middle out?

One of my favorite exercises in fantasy drafts is to think back to front, something I was writing about as early as 2016 over at RotoViz.

Anyone who does any amount of personal research is going to develop opinions that deviate from ADP, perhaps vastly... An issue is introduced, however, as we seek to maximize value from our draft picks. There is obviously no reason to draft a player you are confident has sixth round value in the actual sixth round if his ADP puts him somewhere in double digit rounds.

That said, I would argue you should do everything in your power to get that player on your roster. To do that, one strategy is to overdraft by a round or two.

Some would argue you should never lock in like this; that every player is draftable at the right price. That to overcommit to a call is to suck some of the projected value out of him. I don’t necessarily disagree, particularly if you are building a portfolio of similarly important drafts, such as through MFL10s.

But if you’re playing in a high-stakes league or have a specific draft or two that are significantly more important to your overall season, consider building your draft strategy around an expected commitment to a player later in the draft.

The reference to MFL10s is hilarious, and for those that don’t remember that format, it was one of the original best ball phenomenons before Underdog helped take best ball to the moon. I left it in there because the idea of approaching your drafts differently if they are a part of a best ball portfolio or are a key managed league is still very obviously relevant in 2023.

But in that article from literally seven years ago (man, I’ve been doing this for too long), I go on to talk about how it’s not necessarily about picking a specific player, but rather finding pockets of players you like at given positions, where you know you’ll be able to build some depth at that position in that range, or find a starter you’re willing to go with for Week 1, or what have you. And then once you’ve figured that part out, you can have a better idea of what you might want to do in the all-important first few rounds of the draft, because all the positions are more or less viable there. Hence, you’re building a draft plan back to front, thinking through the decisions you’ll want to be making later to help figure out what to commit to early.

In previous years, those decisions about how to approach things later started a little deeper. The height of the RB Dead Zone was this Round 4 and Round 5 range, where I probably took a WR in those areas of drafts something like 80% of the time or more, so there wasn’t a ton of consideration that needed to be given. But in 2023, we have a different RB landscape with a lot more interesting names landing in what is traditionally the Dead Zone — when you click through to those links I mentioned about the Dead Zone, you’ll see me consistently highlight the types of younger backs whose profiles the market doesn’t really know yet as the RBs who can come out of these rounds and have real ceilings. That’s a key group of potentially hugely important players that is simply much larger in 2023.