Fantasy Draft Strategy: Tiering Your Player Rankings and Cheat Sheets

Posted by Jacob

May 28, 2008

Now that players have settled into their teams for 2008 — overlooking the few free agents still bouncing from workout to workout — it’s time to start preparing your draft cheat sheets and practicing your draft strategy with a few mocks.

Tiering your draft sheet is one very effective method of drafting a batch of strong contenders that I swear by — profusely. By tiering, you get a leg up on your fellow drafters.

Some fantasy football sites and sources will tier their cheat sheets for you. Whether you trust one source’s rankings or want to combine several intel sources into one power sheet (like I do), it’s always best to look over your draft notes and adjust the tiers based on updated info and/or any personal, gut feelings — that better be really strong to be considered better than mine.

Tiering provides you with a visual reference on draft day to see where value is being overlooked, but the real benefit is that you separate players by value regardless of position and see when a top tier player has been overlooked no matter what position he plays.

Too often, bad drafts happen because friends let friends draft drunk.

Ahem. That’s not right, kids. Always take the draft boards away and make them spend the night before someone gets behind a draft list and makes a bad decision. PSA complete.

When that isn’t the case, sometimes we focus too much on a specific position we are targeting rather than taking the best player on the board. Don’t get caught thinking about running backs into the third round when WRs is where you could build a stronger team.

You might be looking at a QB in round 2 when the market is richer for taking another RB with the top 2-3 QBs off the board. Likewise, you might find yourself in round 4 looking at QBs, but you see there is still a top WR that you could grab who could make your team a powerhouse or provide a trade bait for someone who drafted a QB much higher than you.

With a tiered cheat sheet, you can easily make the snap judgments and see when a first tier RB is still on the board in the third round or catch when the last top QB is about to go off the board in round 4. These small details can keep you from missing an important position in your draft or overlooking opportunity at another position.

Best Way to Tier It Up in Your Fantasy League

Tier your draft cheat sheet based upon how many points that player generated on average last season or how many points they are projected to generate this season.

I prefer to mix it up a bit here. I start with the top ranked players from various news sources and then move players up/down based upon this season’s projections and last season’s performance — notching down people who will have an off year because of over-performing last year.

Once you have the rankings, put breaks where significant point differences occur, and if you can stand the level of detail, make these point breaks universal across the board for each position.

Depending upon your point system, you might have the top scorers (say 30+ points per week) in tier 1 while players that averaged or will average 25+ in tier 2. Tier 4 might be made up of players that only generate 10-15 points per week. The more tiers, the better.

You get the idea — if not, just give up now and go with a drafting drunk excuse.

It’s okay if Randy Moss, Tom Brady and L.T. are you’re only tier 1 players. Just make sure you know when the players projected to generate the most points are going off the board.

With this sheet, the draft strategy is to snag as many top players as you can regardless of position.

I don’t worry if I don’t have a QB into round 4 or 5 as long as I have a stable of strong fantasy point generators. You can always snag a backup-quality QB later in the draft and put a trade together with some of your stronger talent at other positions for your starter.

This “best player available” strategy tends to be the most successful in getting a team that will dominate throughout the regular season and into the playoffs. Even if you miss with a few top drafts, you should have enough quality players spread out across every position to compensate. You never get distracted by need at a specific position until the final rounds of the draft, but the majority of the time, you still get a balanced team covering every position.

Ever tried a tiered draft strategy and failed? Do you feel bad putting L.T. and A.P. in their own tier? Having a hard time drawing a line after Brady, Manning and Romo in the QB tiers?

Talk back in the comments and you might get a response or discussion from me or, if you are lucky, a Shakespeare-typing monkey.

Spread the love and share it!

Foolish Thoughts, Tips & Strategy

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ffexchange

I love the using parts of the tiering approach. I mainly use tiers to determine position scarcity. If I have the option of drafting a backup RB of which there is 1 left in a tier or my 2nd WR of which there are 7 left in a tier, I usually grab the RB because I'm pretty sure there is a WR in that group that will be there when my turn comes up again, even though most would consider the 2nd WR to be more important than a backup. Near the end of drafts, I tend to throw away the tiers and would rather take a high-risk, high ceiling guy in a lower tier than a safe player in a higher tier.

Doug Darroch

Have you ever used your tier system for an auction? And how would you reccomend someone use this system for an auction?

Jacob

@ffexchange

That's good use of your tiers. When you have a good sense (or secret tidbits of info that you collect all off-season), taking your high-risk players near the end of your draft can payoff big.

I usually try to mark players that I see as "sleepers" or high upside players regardless of where they tier. When it comes down to the end of the draft, similar to your method, I snag as many as I can.

@Doug

I've never used this tiering method for an auction draft, but it can be easily adapted. Here's how I would prep it:

In tiering for an auction league, do your research and split the players for each position based on how much they will cost you (using average draft pricing or expert projections). I'd try to set aside 2-3 players at each position that could be your high-pay stud to build a team around. You'll try to get at least one of these studs for you team. Split the tiers where the big hype/money breaks will be.

The difference when you get to drafting is that you can use the tiers to budget your team. For example, if you get a tier 1 RB stud and maybe a tier 1 QB, you can look to tier 2 WRs to fill out your roster.

The tiers will keep you from overpaying and also let you track when a player can be "stolen" off the board for much less than he should normally be worth.

If you use this for your auction league, be sure to let me know how it goes.

Lee

Good stuff Jacob. I read your stuff all the time at Bleacher report but don't know if I have made it over here or not. Hear that? The clang of a new subscriber...

Jacob

@Lee:

A clang? Is that what I am supposed to hear when someone subscribes? Like when an angel gets wings?

I always thought my notification was the rooster tied into my computer that crows randomly throughout the day until I slap it. Maybe I need to upgrade...

I have my articles publishing to Bleacher Report at the moment so that fans wander back here for the rest. I'm glad to have you on board, Lee.