Should you grab quarterback Michael Vick with your first pick? Depends on your strategy...
You’ve enjoyed your summer.
You’ve eaten your hot dogs at family picnics, you’ve gone to the beach, and you’ve even found the time to avoid doing anything resembling hard work.
But now that August is here again, it’s time to shift our collective minds back into gear to tackle the really important things once again.
And obviously, that begins with preparing for your fantasy football draft.
In years past, I’ve shared my thoughts about sleepers and snoozers—or if you prefer layman’s terms, guys you want and guys you don’t.
This year, in part because of the recently-resolved NFL lockout, and in even larger part because of the aforementioned summer plans of eating hot dogs and avoiding hard work, I’m not going to do that.
Instead, I’ve decided to help you tackle your overall draft strategy. In the end, it kind of doesn’t matter what players you have—so much of the game is luck, plus you can easily go to about 84 different places online to get “expert” advice, and part of what makes fantasy football fun is rooting for the guys you like, so go ahead and draft the guys you like—so instead of talking about specific players, let’s look at some options for how your team could look once the drafting is over.
It never hurts to have a plan, especially when you come to the sudden realization that you’re the only guy (or girl!) in your league who doesn’t have one, and you start re-thinking that decision to draft T.J. Houshmandzadeh last year (even though you just couldn’t resist quoting that ESPN commercial).
All slight variations aside, there are five directions you can take your fantasy football team on draft day, and it pretty much comes down to what you do with your first three or four picks. Let’s dive in and see what we can discover.
Quarterback
The strategy here is to grab a quarterback with your first pick, no matter who else is on the board. If you’re picking in the top five, you can land Michael Vick and simultaneously bookmark WebMD so you know exactly how serious every tweaked ankle really is. If you’re outside the top five, you can hope Aaron Rodgers didn’t just have the best season of his life last year, or that Drew Brees plays better than his haircut makes him look.
Pros: My favorite sportswriter, Bill Simmons, once said that having a crappy fantasy QB is like driving a four-cylinder car. Yeah, it works, but it just isn’t a whole lot of fun. And if you’re into having fun with your fantasy football team, then you should probably help the rest of us convince that one guy in every league who takes it way too seriously. You know—the guy who writes about fantasy football for the local newspaper every summer. Oh wait…
Plus, if you look at the statistics (always dangerous, I know), you can see that the difference between a great QB and a mediocre QB is bigger than the difference between the top players at other positions and their mediocre counterparts. If math is your thing, this might be something to pay attention to.
Cons: If your fun, six-cylinder QB tweaks an ankle, bruises a shoulder, gets his head slammed into the turf, or just flat-out stinks like a redneck barbecue, you’re stuck with a nightmare all season. A lot of pressure gets packed into that one pick.
Plus, you almost have to tag-team this strategy with the “make sure you get the best tight end available” strategy so you can maximize the whole point-differential thing. And unless you want to draft a tight end with your third pick, that might be difficult.
Running Back
A strategy as old as the game itself—running backs win fantasy football championships. The strategy is to grab a stud RB who can carry your team to the title.
Pros: Running backs get the ball consistently, which is what you want in fantasy sports. There’s nothing worse than suffering through a feast-or-famine-that’s-mostly-famine season with a streaky QB or WR threatening to obliterate your lineup every Sunday. Well, that redneck barbecue might be worse, but let’s just move on.
Cons: The days of Earl Campbell, Eric Dickerson, Emmitt Smith, Curtis Martin, Marshall Faulk, Priest Holmes, Jamal Lewis and LaDanian Tomlinson are well behind us, no matter what Tomlinson fans try to tell you this year. Coaches these days worry about running backs like they’re used cars—nobody wants to have to get a new one when the old one breaks down. So a stud running back gets maybe 80% of his team’s carries, while a decent running back gets maybe 70% of the action. Not to mention the trend of more passing in the game than ever before.
Wide Receivers
The NFL is a passing league! Run-heavy offenses died out with Curly Lambeau and the leather helmet! Airing it out not only wins games, it keeps the crowds coming back! Exclamation points are great for emphasizing a point!
This strategy involves going after wide receivers with your first two picks, then worrying about everything else. If you have a mid- to late-round pick, this could be intriguing.
Pros: You lock up studs at one position, hopefully avoiding injuries and essentially forgetting about those two slots in your lineup for the rest of the year. Not bad for those who like some degree of peace of mind.
Plus, there are always players who make surprise leaps to fantasy relevance every year, so when you lose your first three matchups, you have the waiver priority to snatch up this year’s steals.
Cons: The rest of your team is awful, and you find yourself asking questions like, “Who sees more third-down action for the Jacksonville Jaguars, Deji Karim or Greg Jones?” And that, I assure you, is not a place you want to be in December.
One Of Each
The thought here is to spread the wealth—grab a running back, then a quarterback, then a receiver, then a tight end, then running backs and receivers until the last two rounds.
Pros: It evens out your team a little bit and doesn’t leave big gaps. This is a nice strategy for people who like folding laundry and alphabetizing bookshelves in their spare time.
Cons: You can’t cover all the gaps, and if you follow a pattern too closely, you miss out on chances to snag a sleeper that other owners either forget about or don’t have room for.
Best Available
This is almost an actual NFL draft strategy, in that NFL owners throw around the “he was the best guy available” excuse when they don’t know what they’re doing and just grab the first name they find under the empty pizza boxes in the draft room.
Pros: You’re getting the best player available at any given moment. It never hurts to have good players.
Cons: You might end up with seven good wide receivers and a headache trying to figure out which ones to start each week. And when the later rounds start whizzing by, it gets harder and harder to know who the best player actually is, so there’s kind of a lot of guesswork that I don’t think any of us is qualified to do.
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Hopefully this helps you make up your mind about how to strategize for your fantasy football draft this year.
Because if you don’t spend the time thinking about this stuff now, then you’ll probably end up actually getting something productive done, and we definitely can’t have that.
And be sure to share your thoughts with me by leaving a comment or sending me an e-mail to sports@valleycenter.com.
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