Fantasy Football Draft Advice - Building Your Team Backwards

By Author: Michael Williams
Total Articles: 15
Comment this article

There are a lot of ways to build your fantasy football team, and let's face it, that's half the fun of playing fantasy sports; we get to be the GM. Unlike a real GM though, our drafts are the entire song and dance. Screw it up, and there isn't a whole lot you can do in free agent bidding or waiver wire pickups to save yourself. That's why it's important to come up with a great draft plan. Any bozo can yell out Ladainian Tomlinson when your draft starts, but the truly good players have a solid plan in place for that special day, so let's take a look at one that you might not have heard of, that might help you win your league.

Fantasy Football Strategy:

Most people come into the draft armed with player rankings, magazines, cheat sheets, computer printouts, and all of the latest tools that they think they need to help them win their league. Most however, don't come in with a well thought out plan and this is where you can distance yourself from those players and find an edge.

The most common drafting plan that people use is either:

1) Take the best player on the board, in which they are looking for ...
... the best value that they can find regardless of position in the first 5 rounds without worrying about filling out their roster.

-or-

2) Try and fill out their key positions (2 RB, 3 WR, QB, TE) as they move from round to round.

Both of these plans usually allow you to predict who will be available to take in Round 1, and give you a pretty good idea who will be there in Round 2. Let me explain, if you draw the #4 pick this year, it's a pretty safe bet that both Tomlinson and Steven Jackson will be gone, so you know before the draft even starts, that you will be picking from a Brian Westbrook or Joseph Addai. If those are your top 5, you are guaranteed one of them. You are going into your draft with the knowledge that you have your #1 back covered.

In the 2nd round, you can get another good idea of who might be there and you will have a list of guys who are targeted to go in that area. Most good drafters have a good idea of who and what positions they are going to have through the first 2 rounds. For example, if you are picking 12th, there is a good chance that you can grab 2 elite WR's to start off your draft, which means you will be looking for good RB's in the next few rounds. Once you leave the 2nd round though, all bets are off as you don't have much control on who will be left. This is why a value-based strategy is used moving forward, but I want to discuss another strategy that works even better. I like to call it Hit It From The Back.

The whole philosophy of HIFTB is it gives you control of knowing who you are going to pick in not only Rounds 1 and 2, but who you are going to take in Rounds 5-8. How and the hell do you know who you are going to pick or who will be available 60 picks in is the first question you are going to ask, but it's a fairly simple thing to find out. With all of the rankings, cheat sheets, and mock drafts available, you should be armed with solid ADP (Average Draft Position) info for your draft and have a solid idea of where guys are going to get drafted in the middle rounds. In order to do this, we need to follow several steps.

Fantasy Football Draft Advice:

Fantasy Football Draft Advice #1: The first thing you need to do is identify your mid round sleepers, or guys you think are going to put up big numbers that are comparable to the people at their positions. I'm not talking Glenn Holt here, he would be considered a deep sleeper. I am talking about guys like Santonio Holmes, Tony Gonzalez, Dwayne Bowe, Matt Hasselbeck, etc- all guys who right now are being drafted in rounds 6-7 of Fantasy Jungle football drafts (We just use these players as an example, do your own research to pick your guys in these rounds)...We can toss out RB's, because the RB market is too fragile to count on someone being there that late, so we want to focus on QB, WR, and TE because the depth of those positions allow mid round guys to occasionally out produce or put up numbers that are close to the top guys at their position who are drafted in the first couple of rounds.

Fantasy Football Draft Advice #2: Now that you have your mid round guys in mind, you need to project an ADP for each one of them. Here is the important part. You need to take that projection and beat it by at least a half of a round, if not a full round. For example, if you like Dwayne Bowe and his ADP is middle of the 7th round, than you should plan on grabbing him in the 6th round. If you like Matt Hasselbeck as your QB and his ADP is the middle of the 8thth round, than you need to grab him in the 7th round. This ensures your chances of landing theses players you are targeting. Who cares if you are taking him a little early. Remember that if you have identified him as a guy who is going to be one of the top guys at his position, it will be worth grabbing him a little early. By doing this, you are pre slotting your middle round picks. We will get to the benefits of it in a moment.

Fantasy Football Draft Advice #3: The next major important thing that you need to do with HIFTB, is have a backup plan for each player. Look, you might be in the same league as Dwayne Bowe's grandmother and she might take him in the 2nd round. If he was your 6th round guy, you better have a backup plan in place. Once you settle on the mid round sleepers you want, you need to back them up with at least two secondary choices in the event that your guy gets selected. You don't want to have this plan and become disoriented and dispirited if your guy gets drafted before you can select him. By pulling the trigger on the guy you want a little early, it's going to help your chances of getting him, but by having a couple backup choices, it's going to allow you to still implement this plan if you lose your guy. Let's say that Bowe is gone, but you feel strongly that Calvin Johnson or Lee Evans will produce on the same level as him, then they would be your backup choices. If Hasselbeck is gone, maybe you would feel just as comfortable with McNabb or Bulger. Once you have this info settled, you are set.

Fantasy Football Draft Advice #4: It's now time to tee off on the top 5 rounds. You now have an advantage that other drafters in your league don't, and that is that you know not only who, but what positions you are going to take in two of the later rounds. You can pre slot Bowe as 1 of your 3 WR's in the 6th round, and you can pre slot your QB, Hasselbeck, in the 7th round. In standard leagues with starting lineup requirements of QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, TE, Flex (any positon), you can now go after 2 RBs, 2 WRs, and either a TE or a 3rd RB/4th WR that will serve as your flex, in the first five rounds of your draft, because you know you are going to get a WR (Bowe) and QB (Hasselbeck) in the 6th and 7th rounds. It's like when a blitz is called, you are going to pin your ears back and go after the QB because you know what you want to do, the offense doesn't know where you are coming from. Your opponents don't know what they want to do either, they are reacting as guys are coming off the board waiting to see what value is there, worrying about being caught in position or end of round position runs.

You can sit back and say I am grabbing a top RB or a top WR here. Maybe you want to treat yourself to Antonio Gates earlier than you normally would, go ahead you have earned it. Maybe you want to draft a 3rd RB early this year for your flex, go ahead, your boy Dwayne Bowe is waiting for you later and he is going to outperform the guy who was picked right beside your luxury 3rd RB, three rounds earlier. If you have Hasselback pegged as a guy who can come close to Tony Romo or Carson Palmer, those guys are going to get picked by the end of Round 4. You know you are getting your QB in Round 7, so by passing on one of them in Round 3, you can now bust out the whipping stick on a guy like Andre Johnson or Anquan Boldin. If you have 2 WR's already secured and you know you will be taking Dwayne Bowe in the 6th round, than you can take that chance of drafting Julius Jones in the 4th round and passing over a WR there because your guy, Bowe, is going to be just as good as what is there at his position in the 4th, the difference is you don't have to spend an early pick on him.

This strategy works, and it works well. Think about it, you have a good idea of who you are going to pick in Round 1 before the draft starts, and a fairly good idea of who will be there in Round 2. If you can nail down Rounds 6 and 7, than you should basically know who to take in Rounds 3 and 4 because you will be able to capitalize on taking one of the best guys at a particular position in those rounds. So instead of your opponents who aren't sure who they are going to take and what might be available, you are in command of your team and know who you should take and at what position in early rounds.

Fantasy Football Management:

I can't tell you how often people realize how much they have f%$#& up their drafts by Round 3 or 4 because they have picked a player from the wrong position and now realize they have a shortage of guys available to them at other positions. The most common mistakes are taking a QB or TE too early, or taking a 2nd or 3rd RB who is not very good way too early. Look if you need a 2nd RB and the best starter left is Thomas Jones, you might as well wait a few rounds and grab a Jerious Norwood instead of passing on a Plax Burress and drafting Jones.

And just because you are using HIFTB, it doesn't mean that you can't still take advantage of the same things that value based drafters can if players slip who you didn't think would be there are. You aren't married to Bowe or Hasselbeck. Say Brandon Marshall fell and was still on the board when it was time to pick Bowe, and you like him even more, then you can replace Bowe with Marshall. You have the best of both worlds, the people who are reacting and taking the best value often get good players that fall to them, but you also have that same luxury now and can replace your pre-slotted players if something better is still there, only if that doesn't happen, you are still solid because you have already pre-slotted your players before the draft started and built your team from the back.

***DISCLAIMER- All players projected draft status used in this article are for informational purposes only. Please check all ADP's before each of your drafts.