The 3 golden rules to crush your fantasy football draft

Fantasy football is probably my greatest passion that I haven’t yet written about on the internet. That changes this year.

Despite my official background as a basketball writer turned tennis writer turned analytical baseball nerd turned vibe-coded sports browser trivia game specialist, I actually cut my teeth as a fantasy football analyst writing weekly power rankings for my long time league going back to middle school. Every Wednesday, a PDF with some thoughts on each team’s outlook would hit the group chat, and if you’ve ever seen any of my power rankings on this or another site with a “made-up award” tab underneath it? That originated in my fantasy football PDFs. Obviously I was super cool and popular as a kid.

Fantasy football is a complex game. It’s also super fun

My love of fantasy football will now be shared with the world as I aim to help you, yes you, win your league and brag to all your friends, coworkers or neighbor’s cousin’s dogsitter’s mailman. You never know how these leagues come together.

Step one is the draft, a time-worn artistic expression of your character and football-watching persona. In a league that really cares, your fantasy football draft is one of the most exciting days of the year, your purest chance to craft the group of guys that will be with you through happiness and strife, through sickness and health, through war and peace and until the unshakable urge to trade everyone means who have a whole new roster by November 1. 

So how do you crush the draft? There’s no one strategy, and this won’t be a “How to PERFECTLY play ZERO-RB to OBLITERATE your fantasy football league” type list. This is more of a philosophical breakdown, since fantasy football — the universal microcosm — very much encapsulates much of human intellectual history. And while Moses had the Ten Commandments, Martin Luther had his 95 Theses and Woodrow Wilson had his 14 Points, we’re coming at you with the next installment: Three Golden Rules to destroy your fantasy football draft.

1. No plan survives first contact 

This is the truest maxim in fantasy football. Ask anyone who has played for multiple years; ask someone who just drafted yesterday; ask me, but really … ask my friend Mike. 

He will show up to every draft with an earth-shattering 12-round master plan in which he snipes the RB1 in the third round, sets his team up with the perfect 10/11 turn with a high-upside WR and game-breaking TE and has a secret list of ringers that he’s ready to target in the 15th round. And then … the draft actually starts, he ends up with Cam Akers way higher than anticipated and ends up needing serious reps out of JuJu Smith-Schuster for his flex.

No plan is stronger than the forces of chaotic order imposed by 10-12 friends tripping over themselves trying to find the next Amon-Ra St. Brown. Every “sleeper” you think you’ve identified will somehow be gone two rounds before you thought you could get him. Quarterbacks will always disappear from the shelves like toilet paper during global economic panics. Someone will draft the kicker you want in the 11th round for some reason — looking at you Tom. 

The best advice to manage this: know your league. Know the people you’re playing with, how knowledgeable they are about the NFL and how engaged they usually are with fantasy. If this is a work league with some people who may or may not watch football, you might be able to snipe some hypebeast sleepers down the draft board. If it’s 10 guys who all listen to the same podcasts and read the same articles (like this one), you might not be able to sneak Jonah Coleman by your buddies in the 16th round. It’s a cold world, but one you can mentally prepare for.

2. You can only play so many players

I like depth as much as the next guy, but unless you are in a two-quarterback/superflex league, it’s not great business to stack quarterbacks when only one of them will be suiting up for you every week. In terms of raw value, only 10/32 NFL starting QBs and tight ends will appear weekly in a 10-team league, as opposed to 60 wide receivers and running backs. As genius as you may feel for giving yourself options with both Brock Purdy and Dak Prescott, you can only play one.

You’re far more likely to win your league in the middle rounds by chasing after talented wide receivers with dubious roles in the offense or committee running backs who could command a larger role later simply because you have to play more of those players week over week. Tight ends, quarterbacks, defenses and kickers are just far more replaceable on the waiver wire unless your league has 14 or more teams. And if that’s the case … well, you’re in for a world of hurt once people start getting injured.

Another depth concept to remember: stashing rookies who will barely play to start the year or backup running backs to elite guys — what we call “handcuffs” — is a valuable strategy … but not at the expense of a roster that can support itself. Sure, drafting Christian McCaffrey’s backup in the 9th round may seem like a genius move, but you’ve missed out on a chance to draft a second option receiver with good volume in a questionable situation. Upside is just that: upside. And not all upside cashes — if it did, fantasy football (and gambling for that matter … fantasy football is really just elevated gambling) would be far too easy.

3. No “process” actually works, so draft with a method you enjoy 

There are significantly smarter people than I with theories about how to properly plan your draft. Some people like “Zero RB” where you just draft wide receivers all day and go for late-round lottery ticket RBs, some like the inverse, believing instead that there are so many valuable receivers every year while running back is a far scarcer position. Some will draft Josh Allen in the second round, others won’t take a QB until round 12. These methods have merits, but they all ultimately succeed or fail based on who is available at what pick. 

Last year, I went for a balanced approach; I took Malik Nabers (ouch) with my first pick and then Jonathan Taylor with my second. Unlucky with Nabers, who missed the whole season with injury, but genius with Taylor, right? But here’s the thing: I was fully planning on taking Brock Bowers in the second round, though, which would have been a disaster next to the season that Taylor wound up having. I wasn’t a genius, my process wasn’t good — I just got lucky.

The reality is you are going to get lucky somewhere, unlucky somewhere else, and there’s honestly nothing you can do about it. So just go with the strategy you enjoy. If you get super emotionally invested in your team and can’t stand watching bad quarterback play, maybe reach a bit for Josh Allen so you don’t have to deal with that. If you had a high school football coach you loved who always said “run the damn ball!”, go for Derrick Henry to honor them. If you like to live dangerously, go for as many Rashid Shaheed types and chase 70-yard touchdowns until the cows come home. It’s all about finding a team you actually want to have. So find a process that gets you there.