So, you’re getting ready for your annual fantasy draft and you’ve perused a bunch of “expert” mocks to get a feel for trends and how your home league draft might play out. But how much stock can you, or should you, actually put into a mock draft by fantasy industry folks? I mean, sure, we’re all well informed, we stay on top of all the latest developments and we’ve got the best tools and data (ahem, PFF subscription!). A handful of my colleagues here at PFF have, literally, hundreds of MFL10s under their belts by the time most normal people have remembered their fantasy league’s password from last year.
But is there a correlation between these industry mocks and how you might expect things to play out in your leagues? In other words, is what you see what you’ll get? Well, let’s dive into that.
Here are five ways an industry draft differs from your home league.
When to draft quarterbacks
Without question, the average draft position of quarterbacks is the biggest difference between industry drafts and home leagues. It wasn’t all that long ago that elite QBs were commonly taken in the first round of fantasy drafts (Andrew Luck had a 1.10 ADP as recently as 2015). But with more QBs continuing to put up more and more fantasy points, and with so much changeover at the very top (only once in the last 10 years has a QB finished No. 1 in fantasy points back-to-back seasons), pundits far and wide have implored drafters to wait on selecting a QB until other positions have been filled. Heck, you’ve no doubt come across that advice from any one of us at PFF.
Case in point: going back to March, the PFF Fantasy staff has gotten together for no less than a dozen mock drafts in virtually every fantasy format except for 2QB. Only twice did the first QB (Aaron Rodgers) go off the board before Round 4, with his 3.04 selection by Tyler Buecher in our most recent 12-team standard mock draft representing the earliest a QB has been picked. In the one other draft that Rodgers was selected in the third round, only five QBs were off the board by Round 9.
But just how useful is the late-round QB strategy for your regular home or work league? I randomly pulled one of my annual home leagues from last summer and found there were 13 QBs selected before the ninth round, including six in the first five rounds and one as early as the second. We’re currently doing a company-wide PFF Championship draft involving 192 staffers across 16 leagues, and in my particular division a QB has been taken in each of the first five rounds, including Rodgers at 1.11.
The takeaway: Obviously, go into your draft with a plan, but be prepared to adjust on the fly depending on how the draft board shakes out. And of course, have handy some consensus ADP info from our site as well as others like Fantasy Football Calculator or FantasyPros. Sure, it’s exciting to see someone like Drew Brees getting picked in the sixth round of industry mock drafts, but if Brees is your guy and his ADP is the middle of the fourth round, you’ll need to plan accordingly.
Whether to draft a backup QB
Industry folks often skip drafting a backup QB. Our Tyler Buecher detailed his very solid reasoning a couple months back. Heck, it’s why I release a column every Tuesday during the season identifying the top streaming QB options for that week. But one thing about our mocks is that they’re done in a vacuum; there’s no consequence for a thin roster, no in-season moves to be made. Truth be told, none of us ever really looks back at these things six months later and thinks, “Gee, I probably could’ve used a backup for Cam Newton.”
Of last year’s top-seven finishers among fantasy QBs, four were drafted in the double-digit rounds. But unless you struck waiver-wire gold with Matt Ryan or perhaps Dak Prescott, you were left with streaming options a la Colin Kaepernick, Brian Hoyer, or Sam Bradford. If that doesn’t sound appealing to you, then make no apologies about ponying up for someone like Prescott in the 11th round as an insurance policy/matchup streamer, even if it means passing up, say, Jamaal Williams. Mock drafts are one thing, but when there are real stakes and commitments involved, do I really want to bank my season-long league on someone like Carson Wentz (QB19) or Blake Bortles (QB21) if my starter goes down for the season?
The takeaway: It’s ok to draft a backup QB. Really, it is. But if six of your league mates have already drafted a backup, the dropoff from QB19 to whoever you’d find on the waiver wire is simply not worth the opportunity cost of passing up an upside stash at another position. For those familiar with risk management, it still boils down to planning for negative risks (threats) or positive risks (opportunities), whether stashing a QB or any other position.
Sticking to host site ADP
Let’s say I’m eyeing up Ezekiel Elliott in the second round. Well, if it’s an industry draft I know that my cohorts are using consensus ADP sites with large data sample sizes like FantasyPros (1.10) or Fantasy Football Calculator (1.15). But if you’re doing your home league draft on MyFantasyLeague.com, for example, Elliott’s 1.07 ADP on that site means that everyone else will see his name atop the screen of available players. That’s an important factor to be mindful of when making your draft preparations.
In an industry draft – even the ones in March – we all have our rankings and draft boards and data tools, and will use them as a guide to land the players we want when we want. You do the same thing in your leagues. But where it gets tricky is when Player X is going in the mid-ninth round across several sites, but his ADP on the host site is the mid-eighth round. You’re on the clock with pick 8.09. Do you pull the trigger a little early and sacrifice some pick value? Or do you chance it and take another player you like, hoping that Player X is still there seven picks later?
The takeaway: Aggregate consensus ADP data only serves us if we’re mindful of the variances on our league’s host site. By the middle rounds, I often find myself scrolling down a few pages of available players to get to the player I had pegged for that spot based on my draft prep. And that’s OK. So before your draft, do some mocks on the host site and make note of ADPs. Spot the biggest variances and determine in advance what your cutoff point is for that player you really want, because his name will stay on top of the ‘available players’ list for everyone else only for so long.
Positional runs
You know the drill: it’s often best to zig when everyone else zags, to be the first to start a positional run than the last to chase one. Whether it’s an industry mock or your home league draft, the QB position is almost certain to see a run at some point. The same goes for linebackers in IDP formats. This year, the sweet spot for both of those positions seems to be circa Round 9. But what about the other positions?
In our latest 12-team standard mock draft at PFF, there was a run of seven tight ends between the eighth and 10th round. If you were to base your draft prep off of that, you’d be left with Austin Hooper in the 11th. But going by public league ADP data, only three TEs are going in that range, leaving much more attractive options like Eric Ebron, Jack Doyle and so on.
The takeaway: We say it all the time because it’s so important: formulate your draft board into tiers. Use rankings (preferably PFF’s – we’re pretty dang accurate), ADP, intuition… whatever your method. Of course, the best way to visualize expected positional clusters by round is with PFF’s Draft Board Cheat Sheet, available in our Fantasy Draft Master tool. By laying out our draft board into tiers, it affords us an all-important visual of the cutoff point when that position run starts to happen, and whether or not it makes sense to break from the pack or fall in order. The last thing we want is to get caught off guard and panic.
How much stock to put in rookies
You see, for the industry folks, there is a whole lot of down time during the offseason when there isn’t much to do besides fawn over the next incoming crop of talent and get together for rookie IDP mocks in May (YOLO!). I mean, it’s cool to dissect Michael Crabtree and everything, but we all pretty much know what we’re getting there. Not so much with rookies. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: we industry folks are a little too overzealous with rookies.
Look no further than last year’s dud rookie WR crop. Michael Thomas thrived, but there wasn’t much else for the group to hang its hat on. Did we learn our lesson? Not really. But you guys and gals have caught on. Case in point: Corey Davis can be had with a 10th-round pick right now, whereas Sterling Shepard cost an early eighth-round pick this time last summer. Yet, in our latest 12-team mock, Davis still went off the board with the second pick in the eighth round, ahead of more proven 1,000-yard receivers than I care to count. Know how many rookie WRs have posted a 1,000-yard season in the last decade? Seven. Those aren’t exactly favorable odds.
The takeaway: When the weather breaks in late-April, you’re better off not obsessing over 40 times and every minicamp practice report. Just trust me on this.
© 2025 PFF - all rights reserved.