Guess Late - Win More

Draft day is right around the corner. You are taking a few (too many) hours to prepare for your drafts. Where do you begin?

Find a generic cheat sheet, alter the sheets to suit your opinions, and make sure you leave it all out on the draft room floor. Are you going to be right? Are you going to be wrong? Are you going to be relevant? You’ll know by the last round of your drafts.

The draft room is where a plan for glory is mapped out… the challenge, the charts, the anxiety, and the choices. Confidence must be high. Execution must be flawless.

If drafts were easy, we wouldn’t draft. If winning leagues was easy, we wouldn’t play.

Fantasy football, like no other statistical pastime, truly meshes the thrill of victory with the agony of defeat. A loss on Sunday wrecks your mood for a week. A couple losses in a row and you are now down a month. Scrambling to make a comeback is no way to go through the fantasy season. Hit three and, uh, let’s not go there.

How do you avoid the misery?  How should you attack the draft?

Don’t try to be right in the first 5-6 rounds… know you are right. Reaching for players is best left for the later rounds. Drafting hunches leads to drafting for need, not value. Hope is not a winning strategy, folks. Reaching for players does not allow you to secure value. If you gamble early in the draft, you are going to be reaching for players throughout the remainder of your draft resulting in the reduced overall performance of your squad. Don’t get me wrong… you could be right with every pick, but the later you roll the dice the better your team will be. Reliability secures a competitive core.

I’ve reviewed many questions regarding draft strategy. Should I go RB-RB or RB-WR or RB-QB?

The simple answer is “YES, you should.” What do I mean “YES”?

Rigidity in a draft is the only strategy that is not viable. Every draft is unique… no two are alike. There may be trending similarities, but different players slide in different drafts. A concrete pre-draft strategy might make you feel prepared and secure, but champions capitalize on found money. Are you going to walk past a $100 bill because you’re too focused on getting somewhere? Something tells me that if you take a moment to alter your plan you will have more fun at your destination with that extra C-note in your wallet. It’s the same thing when you draft for value. It’s more fun to be in the playoffs than to watch the playoffs. Let’s face facts; we are all in it to win it. The flexibility to alter your draft preferences mid-draft will help you win leagues.

A core of reliable studs will get you farther than a core of educated guesses. Guess late, win more. Let someone else guess early… maybe they’ll be right, maybe they won’t. I reserve my guesses for lower tiered roster spots. The 3rd RB or 3rd WR are better spots for hunches than the more critical #1 and #2 spots at each position. I can’t take Jonathan Stewart as my #2 RB just because I think DeAngelo Williams is going down - that’s too risky a guess. Pierre Thomas is another example… I am on the 2009 Pierre Thomas bandwagon like many other people, but to grab him in the 2nd round is lunacy. There is way too much established talent still on the board to consider gambling on Pierre Thomas that early. While I agree that Pierre Thomas is well positioned to be highly successful and that most will consider his selection a calculated risk, the reality is that his sample size of production is too small to consider when regarding this player as a potential 2nd round draft pick. You will have more confidence in a team that showcases Greg Jennings and Steve Smith as your #1 & #2 WRs than you would with Pierre Thomas as your #2 RB. Do not wait until the end of your draft to recognize that. It is better to select a player that has fallen into your lap than reach for a player that is not yet established.

Buying the hype can be a slippery slope. Guessing right does stroke the ego, but guessing wrong early kills your season. Realistically, you cannot go through a draft without some quality guesswork, but the longer you can delay the guessing the better your team is going to be. In the early stages of a draft the only necessity is to secure quality players. Identifying and drafting the highest value at each turn builds your core by the 7th round. By Round 8 you’ll know where you stand and what you still need to do to round out your team. If you’ve drafted well, you can gamble with higher upside picks. Your core will produce every week and you can rotate your hunches in and out of the lower tier roster spots until someone steps up. This creates more long-term total upside for your team than rotating players in an out of your #1 or #2 RB or WR spots. Some of your hunches are going to pan out and become reliable scoring contributors. With a sound core, you give yourself time to determine who best completes your roster. With an unstable core you’ll have too many roster decisions week to week.

In 2008 you would have been much better off finding Matt Forte or Steve Slaton late rather than reaching for the overhyped Rashard Mendenhall or Jonathan Stewart early. A sound core puts you in a position where the late hunch that works out puts your team over the top. You can say hindsight is 20/20 and you would be right, but foresight can also be close to 20/20.

Draft a reliable core to ensure being competitive. Use your wits to find the late gems that will put your team into title contention. - Jack Winn

Jack Winn is a fantasy football sports columnist from the New York City area. A growing reputation for concrete insight is reflected not only in his articles, but in his yearly performance in fantasy leagues. As a 15 year commissioner of multiple high-end fantasy leagues, Jack understands the strategic thought process of many ultra-competitive gamers. His philosophical approach is conservatively aggressive and astonishingly effective. We hope you enjoy the content of his articles.