For as long as I’ve played fantasy football, my favorite part about it was the live draft. I love talking trash to my opponents, sweating and praying a specific player would fall to me in the next round, and the subtle art of trying to balance a roster. Unfortunately, by the time Week 1 rolls around, I’m always left with a tinge of sadness. I know I won’t be able to draft again until the next season. Perhaps this is why I’ve begun to fall more and more in love with DFS over the years. There’s more money at stake and opponents tend to take it more seriously than in any friends and family redraft league. Still, selecting players based on salary doesn’t have the same impact for me as drafting players against opponents.
Luckily, PlayDraft.com has found a way to merge my two favorite things about fantasy. Rather than selecting players based on salary, like with DraftKings, FanDuel, and Yahoo!, on DRAFT you’re physically drafting a team against one or more opponents. There are multiple benefits outside of just being a potentially more fun and more intimate approach to DFS. Sick of entering tournaments against DFS pros using an immense bankroll to their advantage, engaging in lineup sharing, paying for lineup optimizers, or who are max entering every GPP they play? All of these strategies are useless on DRAFT.
Rules
On DRAFT, you’re drafting (snake-style) against opponents and have a certain amount of time (typically 30 seconds) allotted before making your pick. Draft order is randomly generated. You can play in cash games (head to heads), where you’re drafting against a single opponent. Or, you can play in a tournament against anywhere from three to 10 opponents. You’re drafting and starting exactly one quarterback, two running backs, and two flex players (wide receivers/tight ends only). DRAFT’s scoring system is identical to FanDuel (0.5 PPR). A typical draft lasts five rounds and doesn’t take more than several minutes to complete.
General strategy tips
Before we dig into position-specific strategy, I just wanted to hit some general strategy tips for this specific format.
- Just try to grab the best player available in each round. Without having to weight salary into your decision-making process, things get much simpler for us. If you’re a PFF subscriber, things get even simpler. Try to look at PFF’s weekly projections each week as a jumping-off point for who those best players might be.
- Go heavier on upside the more opponents you’re playing against. In typical head-to-heads, you’re just trying to draft the best team possible. When against, let’s say, nine other opponents, it will be tougher to pull ahead, and thus, there’s more merit to drafting high-ceiling players. For example, in a 10-team league on DRAFT, there’s no difference between finishing in 10th or fourth place.
- Similarly, as a way of increasing the upside of your roster, you should be more inclined to “stack,” or draft both of a quarterback and one of his receivers. Like with our last point, I’m more inclined to do this the more opponents I’m up against.
Quarterbacks
Typically, I’ll be drafting my quarterback with the last pick in any draft. As numberFire editor-in-chief J.J. Zachariason has been writing about for years, quarterbacks should be devalued when looking at the position on a week-to-week-basis. Last season I wrote up a detailed analysis on what exactly to look for at the quarterback position on a weekly basis. The short version is: we should value efficiency over volume and be boosting quarterbacks playing at home and/or are favored by Vegas. In this format, we’re primarily chasing touchdowns from quarterbacks. So, I’ll spend a great deal of time projecting this based on matchup, a team’s run vs. pass rate, and a quarterback’s touchdown rate.
Outside of this, one the statistics I’m most concerned with is fantasy points per dropback. Last season, the four quarterbacks ranking highest by this metric were (in order): Matt Ryan, Dak Prescott, Aaron Rodgers, and Tom Brady. When up against a funnel defense, or a team ranking highly in pace of play, Prescott skyrockets near my rankings.
Running backs
With the running back position I’m mainly focused on two things: gamescript and volume. The best way to measure gamescript is by looking at our projected box-score numbers. The teams projected to beat their opponents by the most points are the teams most likely to put their running backs in the best position to be successful. Teams go much more pass-heavy when trailing, and running backs tend to see a lot less volume. We should also be paying careful attention to how many points a team is projected to score in total, as the more scoring opportunities for a team, the more likely a running back is to sneak into the end zone. In terms of volume, the statistic I’m most focused on is snaps – which surprisingly has a much greater correlation to fantasy points than either carries or targets.
Wide receivers/tight ends
At the flex position, I’m typically always drafting wide receivers, rather than tight ends. Last season, among all receivers, 17 wide receivers outscored the highest-scoring tight end (Jordan Reed) on a point-per-game basis. In a six-team league, let’s say, where only 12 receivers will be drafted, I’m rarely every looking at a tight end, unless Reed or Rob Gronkowski are 100 percent healthy and in an especially attractive matchup.
With receivers, we’re always chasing targets, which has the highest correlation to fantasy points of any statistic outside of yards. After raw targets, the best statistic to look at is yards per route run. Last season, the top four wide receivers in yards per route run were Julio Jones, A.J. Green, T.Y. Hilton, and Mike Evans.
Finally, I’m paying special attention to which cornerback any specific wide receiver is likely to run the majority of their routes against. Each week, I’ll be looking at Jeff Ratcliffe’s WR vs. CB Chart to see a breakdown of where each wide receiver will be running their routes, where the opposing cornerback will be lining up, and the skill level (in terms of fantasy points or fantasy points allowed on a per-route basis) of each.
Week 1 players to target
Quarterback: Russell Wilson, Seattle Seahawks – In Week 1, Wilson should be your top quarterback to target. He ranks ahead of all other quarterbacks in our projections, and draws an especially soft matchup against a Green Bay Packers defense that allowed the second-most fantasy points per game to the position last season. Though not playing at home, we do project Seattle to outscore Green Bay in this contest, and because the differential is especially close (+0.8), we might expect this game to be a pass-heavy shootout. Doug Baldwin makes for a great stacking option in this contest.
Running back: Le’Veon Bell, Pittsburgh Steelers – No surprise here; Bell is our projected highest-scoring running back this week, after posting the highest fantasy-point-per-game average of any player the past decade in 2016. Bell also has the benefit of playing against a Cleveland Browns defense that allowed the third-most fantasy points per game to opposing running backs last season. As an added bonus, Bell should run behind plenty of positive gamescript, as the Steelers are projected to win by 6.6. With Bell, we also know volume won’t ever be a concern. If drafting from the 1.01 spot, Bell is the obvious choice.
Wide receiver/tight end: Antonio Brown, Pittsburgh Steelers – Brown has averaged 24.6 DRAFT points per game over his last three games against Cleveland. Cleveland surrendered the 12th-most fantasy points per game to opposing wide receivers last season. For the second consecutive season, Brown finished as the highest-scoring wide receiver on a points-per-game basis. Brown leads all receivers in projected Week 1 points, and, to me, is a no-brainer pick once Bell, David Johnson, and (possibly) LeSean McCoy are off the board.
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