A lot will happen between now and the start of the NFL season on September 5th. Fantasy Football rankings and ADP will fluctuate as more news comes out of training camp, and everything will change again as we get our first preseason game stats. So this fantasy draft prep piece isn’t going to tell you who you should draft at QB or which RB you should avoid, although I, of course, have my opinions on those positions.
Instead, the goal is to mentally prepare you to succeed in crafting a winning team no matter what.
Ironically, some of the things that excite us most have the greatest capacity to disrupt our logical plans. First, you must have a logical plan when entering a fantasy draft. To make one, you need to know what type of designer you are. Traditional starting RB? Love veterans who have survived year after year? In fashion? Do you need to have the hottest players? Zero RB? RB Hero? Star TE? What is your guiding philosophy in creating a great fantasy team?
Go into your draft with a strategy – but don’t fall in love with it
I’m convinced there is no right answer here. In addition to your personal inclination and the quality of the various position players, your league’s roster and scoring settings should play a big role in determining the best strategy for you this season. Once you have a plan, the next step is to keep an open and flexible mind while drafting. One of the main reasons why certain strategies like Hero RB (my favorite) work is that not everyone in your league will use them. The idea is that you take a “hero” RB in the first round and then accumulate high quality receivers over the next 5-6 rounds. Other people in your league will spend early picks on running backs, elite tight ends, or dual-threat QBs, allowing more higher-level WRs to fall into your lap.
However, if you notice that 10 other players in your league seem to be doing the same thing, the quality of WR you can pick in rounds 3 through 6 will be much lower than you expected. In this case, it would be counterproductive to stick to your plan by drafting a second or third tier receiver when higher tier RBs remain available. You have to keep your mind open to unexpected values, even if it’s not the value you intended. In my example, your team will be more competitive against your league with two or three Tier 1 running backs than three or four Tier 3 wide receivers like everyone else. Be unique!
Information overload is real, but not in the way you think
Two of the things that make the preseason and opening week so fun can actually hinder our ability to make the best decisions on draft day. The first one is very sneaky; It’s information bias. This concept states that the more information you have, the more confident you will be in your decisions and the more rigid in your analyses. Sounds like a good thing, right? But studies have shown, especially in horse racing betting, that after a certain point, having more information does not increase the accuracy of our decisions, but just our trust in them.
I’m a scientist and I love data, but in our thirst for any and all information about every NFL player that might be relevant to fantasy, we can get overwhelmed. Some of the information we’re getting just doesn’t help us predict which TE will put up the most PPR fantasy points. You can find out stats about anything and everything in the NFL, but that doesn’t mean you he must. There are some basic statistics at each position that you want to pay attention to. They are boring, reflecting skill and opportunity.
I’m not being old-fashioned – targeted air yards are part of the opportunity – but when data is mined minutely, it loses some power. Bottom line: Be selective about the type of information that guides your draft picks.
Don’t let excitement cloud your judgment
The other downside to this article is that the very excitement you feel at the start of the season can shift your thinking from more logical to more emotional. The long anticipation of our fantasy drafts, preseason action, and of course Week 1 creates a chemical rush that floods our brains with dopamine and norepinephrine. These neurochemicals make us more alert, happier, ready to absorb and retain information. These are good things.
But they can also encourage a shift from the slower, more logical thought pathways in our brains to quicker, easier, less logical, more emotionally driven and potentially biased conclusions. We become overly intrigued by newcomers (a form of novelty bias, something you’ll see me address in regular season articles), convinced that what happened in camp or in a preseason game is a true harbinger of the production in the season (recency bias) and in love with the players on our home/favorite team.
This is a good time to point out that cognitive biases, including Novelty, Primacy, and Recency, are not necessarily bad. But it’s important to be aware of when we are under their influence so that we can actively try to figure out whether our emotional decisions in fantasy sports are the same as our logical decisions. If yes, then do it! But if not, see where your logical analysis of the selected data takes you. Just taking a second to question your instincts and decisions is valuable. Asking yourself to justify your conclusions to yourself, as you would to a friend, will show you whether there are any flaws in your argument for or against a particular player in your draft.
At the same time, it’s true that playing fantasy football should be fun. So if giving in to your illogical, emotional and biased decision will make managing your team more fun, give in! Ideally, this advice concerns your 12th round pick, not your third… and your local league, not yours. FFPC Main Event Prohibited.
Get used to drafting and going with the flow
Lastly, you can do everything right and be constantly attacked every step of the way in a draft. This can really throw you out of the game. It can create feelings ranging from annoyance to panic, and this is not the state in which you want to draft. In my ideal drafts, I enter what is becoming commonly known as a “flow state.” In this state, you are perfectly in tune with the rhythm of the draft, distractions pass you by, you are ready when your turn comes, alert and actively checking and rechecking your queue when it isn’t. You are calm, centered and functioning optimally, generally aware of what other managers are doing and even chatting well. Getting hit even once can completely derail your best-laid plans and, with the timer ticking, force you to make a mistake. A mistake early on can lead to more complex mistakes as you try to make up for your fantasy team’s loss.
The solution is simple. Draft a lot. Whether it’s best ball or mock drafts, the more experience you have being a shooter, the better prepared you’ll be to react to it in drafts in your top leagues. Also, going back to my first point, be flexible. You should never be in a position where just one player makes sense for you. We’re all pretty good at this in the early rounds, but for example, I was browsing my recent SFB14 draft until, in Round 12, five of my top six players in line were picked in succession. I may have been a little upset, but I was ready.
There are many ways to prepare for the ultimate fantasy experience: draft day. Hopefully, you are now a little better equipped to move beyond knowing ADP and player ratings to… knowing yourself.
Great fantasy football players take advantage of every advantage there is, and if you focus on having a mental edge over your league mates during the draft, you should put together a team you can be proud of. And if that doesn’t win your league, there’s always the self-serving bias, which allows you to take credit for things that went right and blame others (i.e. me) for what went wrong.
Here’s to fantasy football 2024, everyone!
