Fantasy Football OWL

How to Draft in Fantasy Football

This guide from fantasyfootballowl.com is here to help you draft a great fantasy football team. It’s designed to apply across different league formats, scoring settings, and draft years. Rather than focusing on specific players or trendy draft strategies like ZeroRB or HeroRB, this guide focuses on core principles that work for all fantasy football players in all leagues.
The draft is the single most important day of your fantasy football season. This guide provides you with the tools and strategies to navigate the draft confidently and build a competitive team that can adapt to the challenges ahead.

The Problem Space

In fantasy football, you get a set number of starting roster spots across various positional groups (e.g., quarterback, running back, wide receiver, etc.). To win in any given week, your players need to outscore your opponent’s players across all starting positions.
In this sense, fantasy football draft strategy falls into a class of combinatorial optimization problems, where you’re trying to assemble the most effective team from a pool of options across different positions.
Your opponent might have a dominant quarterback group. But if you can build a strong enough running back and wide receiver group to make up the difference, you can turn the tide and come out on top.
Throughout the draft, you have a limited amount of draft capital to assemble the best complete roster. In this sense, fantasy football draft strategy is also a resource allocation problem. Everyone in your league starts with roughly the same draft capital. It’s up to you to maximize its value and build a winning team.

Why Drafting Is Hard

There are several factors that make drafting in fantasy football challenging. Some are solvable with a little bit of math.
  • You’re comparing players across different positions. A 20-point quarterback is not the same value as a 20-point wide receiver because they fill different roster slots.
  • Player points depend heavily on league scoring settings.
  • Everyone in your league is also trying to draft the best team.
  • You don’t know which players will still be on the board at your future picks, which makes it hard to plan more than one selection ahead.
But much of what makes fantasy football truly challenging is the tremendous amount of uncertainty involved across the season.
  • Injuries are an unfortunate but huge part of fantasy football.
    • Injuries can drastically hurt a player’s value over the season.
    • Backup players can suddenly become top fantasy options.
  • It’s very hard to predict how a player will perform over a full season.
    • Young players can show tremendous growth year over year, but it’s difficult to project exactly how much.
    • Older players eventually drop off in production, but it’s hard to know when that drop will happen.
    • Injuries affect more than just one player. A running back behind an injured offensive line will likely struggle. A quarterback with injured receivers will have a harder time moving the ball.
To win in fantasy football, you need strategies that help you manage the challenges of drafting.

Quantifying Player Value

While a number of different considerations can factor into a fantasy football player's value, the two most important are the player's projection and position. Using a comparison metric to compare players across player groups is very common in fantasy football. Some common comparison metrics include:
  • Value Over Replacement Player (VORP): Defines a datum for each position group at the "replacement level" (e.g. what you could feasibly get on the waiver wire). A player's value is then calculated by taking their projection and subtracting the "replacement level" projection. This is a very common approach to projection player value. Note that league settings and size can effect what players at what positions are freely available, so the replacement level will change from league to league.
  • Value Over Starting Player (VOAS): Defines a datum for each position group as the average of the starting players. A player's value for this metric is calculated the same as VORP by subtracting the average starting level projection from a given player's projection. League scoring settings and size also effects VOSP calculations, so this will also change from league to league.
Comparison metrics work to simplify player comparisons across positional groups, since they produce a single value for each player. The higher the value of the player, the earlier you should consider drafting them.

Value Based Drafting

The idea behind Value Based Drafting is simple: in each round of the draft, pick the most valuable player available. Comparison metrics help you compare players across positions to identify that value. This approach contrasts with popular strategies like ZeroRB or HeroRB, which prescribe drafting specific positions at specific points. Value Based Drafting gives you the flexibility to capitalize on edges your leaguemates might miss, and it maximizes your team’s scoring potential.
Value Based Drafting is especially important in the early rounds, when player values differ significantly. In later rounds, you can shift focus toward balancing your roster by drafting for positional need. This may mean passing up slightly better overall value to fill a gap, but that’s often a reasonable tradeoff as player projections flatten out deeper into the draft.
Average Draft Position (ADP) also plays a key role in Value Based Drafting. If a high-value player has a lower ADP, you might try to wait and hope they fall to a later pick. While this strategy carries some risk—another team might take them, it can pay off big if it works, giving you even more value from each draft slot.

Tier Based Drafting

The core idea behind Tier Based Drafting is that player projections are not evenly distributed. Players within a position group often cluster around similar projections, followed by a drop-off, then another group of similarly projected players. Each of these clusters is known as a tier. There are many tiered rankings available online, but you can also build your own. Keep in mind that league scoring settings will affect player projections and tier groupings.
Because players within a tier have similar expected output, tiers help you decide when to shift your focus between positions. For example, if four wide receivers are left in tier 2, but only one running back remains in tier 2, positional scarcity favors drafting the running back. There’s a decent chance one of the wide receivers will still be available on your next pick.
When applying Tier Based Drafting, you generally want to draft players at the end of a tier. This lets you extract full value from the tier before a projected drop-off. Tier-based thinking works well alongside Value Based Drafting to build a roster that maximizes both positional value and team-wide upside.

Drafting with OWL Value

OWL Value is our take on a comparison metric that builds on Value Based and Tier Based Drafting. Standard metrics tell you who’s best on the board right now. OWL Value looks forward through every remaining pick in your draft, for your exact league and scoring settings, and tells you which selection maximizes the points your full roster is projected to score across the whole season. It re-solves that problem after every pick, yours and everyone else’s.
In practice, that closes the gap the other frameworks leave open: what’s actually going to be available two, five, or ten picks from now, and how should that change what you do right now. For a deeper walkthrough of how OWL Value works, see the OWL Value explanation page.

Recipes for Winning Your League

  1. Draft Well: On draft day, you get to fill out a full roster of players, many of whom will be with you all season. It’s critical to get this right. Do your research ahead of time to identify potential value players. Build rankings or tier lists to guide your decisions. This site, fantasyfootballowl.com is built to help you draft well. It offers tools like multiple projection sources, customizable league settings, player value comparison metrics, automated tier rankings, and a draft helper that suggests picks for every round. If you found this article useful, check out the rest of the site!
  2. In-Season Management: Even with a strong draft, you need to actively manage your team throughout the season to handle injuries, find hidden gems, and keep improving your roster. This breaks down into three main activities:
    • Optimize your starting roster: Often, two or more players will be close in value for a starting spot. Making the right call is critical to winning matchups week after week. Here are some helpful tools:
    • Be active on the waiver wire: Every year, championship-caliber players emerge from the waiver wire. Stay active, scout and add players who can boost your team. These tools can help you find hidden value:
  3. Get a little lucky: Even if you do everything right, you won’t win every week—or every year. There’s a lot of uncertainty in fantasy football: week-to-week scoring swings, unpredictable performances, injuries, and more. But by maximizing value at every stage—drafting, waivers, lineups— you can greatly increase your odds of success. Just remember: no matter what happens, enjoy the ride and have fun with it.