Drafting For Depth

Guest Submission posted 8/25 by Steve Alt, Exclusive to Footballguys.com

Just as good WRs need to be able to create separation from the CB, so also good fantasy owners need to separate themselves from their peers, and draft day is one of the best places to do that. It happens every year: a fantasy team owner somehow gets great starters at the key positions and is projected by everyone to win the title. Then a couple of injuries occur, a player or two has a subpar year, and that team's bench was too weak to carry the load. They either make an early exit from the playoffs, or they do not even get that far. If there is anything worse than losing, it is losing when your hopes were justifiably high to win the title. The sting of unexpected defeat is poisonous. If you want to avoid it, you must become as good in the latter half of your draft as you are in the early rounds, and the way to do that is to have a good strategy, preferably one that suits your personality.
What is striking to me is that many good fantasy owners do not even have anything that can be called a strategy when it comes to drafting bench players for their team. Therefore, adopting a good strategy for drafting depth players at the key positions is one place where a good draft day owner can create separation and become a great one.

Although there are many reasons why it is important to have quality depth at the skill positions (RB, QB, WR) on your fantasy roster, I believe three are primary: (1) to be able to start them when a starter is on a bye or gets injured; (2) because one of them may have a breakout season and replace one of your starters; (3) because these players may have trade value for you. Following are three strategies for drafting for depth, each of which is tied to a philosophy that suits a particular personality type. Each of these philosophies directly relates to one of the three key purposes for having good bench players on your roster. Any one of these strategies can work for you, provided you employ the strategy skillfully and you have done your homework. If you are not sure which one to employ, try the one that best suits your personality.

Steady as she goes

Purpose: bye week and injury replacements
Personality: conservative
Strategy: draft the best player available, based on need

This strategy is good for people who stress consistency, who like "vanilla" defenses, and who think they can beat you with a straightforward approach. This strategy is clearly the most boring, but it is also the most used, and for good reason. If you simply take the best player available, you will be assured of having good players on your team. While other owners take chances on risky players with high upside, the conservative owner takes the player with the highest percentage chance of producing solid numbers, even if his upside is not great. The conservative owner will avoid injury-prone players and malcontents; he might let someone else draft DeAngelo Williams, opting to take DeShaun Foster in a later round because Foster is the starter, after all. Or he might select Chris Brown ahead of an immature LenDale White and a rookie, Chris Henry. Who knows, he might even unconsciously avoid the latter on the basis of name association.

The irony is that the conservative owner sets as his primary purpose to have suitable replacements in case of injury, but because of his philosophy he is the least likely to have injury problems beset his team. This could be seen as an argument against this approach, but in fact, almost every fantasy team gets hit with injuries at some point, and every team has to deal with the bye week, and bye weeks cover about half the fantasy football season (weeks 4-10). If you will check your record in games during bye weeks, you might find that the teams that you have the most trouble beating are those with conservative owners.

Diamond in the rough

Purpose: midseason replacement of mediocre starter
Personality: aggressive, risk taking
Strategy: draft players with high upside, even if they are high risk

If you have ever thought about going mining for gold or if you like to go to yard sales looking for a $10 Rembrandt, this may be a good strategy for you to employ. Owners in search of the steal of the draft often hit pay dirt with players drafted in later rounds that turn into productive fantasy starters. They also are the ones who feel robbed the most, which is why you can identify the aggressive, risk-takers in your league, because they are the ones complaining that their players always seem to get injured, lose their starting job, or fail to reach their potential. Such owners do not always pay enough respect to the injury-prone label that some players have earned. If you want to be a risk-taker on draft day, it pays to know what risks to take and which ones to pass on. Some players are wrongly called injury-prone, while others define the label.

A good example of this is in this year's rookie class. Everyone wondered when Adrian Peterson would be drafted in April because he was considered to be injury-prone, but he was wrongly labeled. Peterson did have multiple injuries in college, but he also played through those injuries when others would have been sidelined. Most NFL coaches and personnel directors will tell you that they do not look at how many injuries a player has had as much as they look at whether they can play through the injuries and how quickly they recover from them. Peterson passes the injury test and is a good risk to take if the prospect of injury is what is holding you back from drafting him.

On the other hand, LenDale White is a high-risk, high-upside player who may be good to avoid in this year's fantasy draft. White has the talent to be a RB1 on a fantasy team, and if he lives up to the hype, he will be a steal on draft day for every fantasy owner who chose him. But recent history tells us that it is difficult for a person to change his personality, even with millions of dollars flashing in front of his eyes. LenDale White has all the symptoms of an underachiever who may never live up to his potential, and if I were not sure about that assessment, the Titans' signing of Chris Brown, the player they seemingly gave up on only a year ago, certify my concerns about White's prospects for the coming year. He is still a good pick if he lasts late enough into the draft, but there are enough owners looking for the steal of the draft to ensure that that does not happen.

Adrian Peterson might end up on injured reserve this year, and LenDale White may go to the Pro Bowl. I am not trying to predict their futures. But on draft day you must pay attention to the percentages, and only take chances on players whose upside is greater than their risk. When I look for diamonds in the rough, I look for young players who show signs of a breakout season, like Jay Cutler or Vincent Jackson, people who are likely to become the starter after sitting behind the incumbent, like DeAngelo Williams and Jerious Norwood, and people whose new situation - whether a new team or new system or new teammates - leaves them poised for a great season, like Brandon Jacobs or Travis Henry. Regardless of who you think will be the steals of the draft this year, make sure you identify them, predict accurately when they will be drafted in your league, and pick them one or two rounds earlier than their ADP, if necessary, in order to beat your fellow owners to the punch.

Play the market

Purpose: midseason trade bait
Personality: shrewd, businesslike
Strategy: draft the best players at one particular position

If you prefer the prestige of winning to the prize, if you take pride in outwitting others, or if you find trading players to be the most enjoyable part of fantasy football, then this strategy suits you. The basic idea of what I call "playing the market" is to load up on players at a particular position in an attempt to corner the market, and then when other teams realize they are weak at that position, they will come crawling to you for help. The immediate drawback to this strategy is that to do this you inevitably will be weak at another position, so you may be as desperate for a trade as anyone else. But if you effectively corner the market, you will have no shortage of trade partners.

If you want to employ this strategy, you must analyze the draft pool and determine what position is best suited to accomplish your purpose. In recent years, TE was a good choice because there were two who stood apart from the rest and only a few others who were TE1 quality. This year, however, there are many good TEs available, and chances are, every team in your league will be able to get a viable one in the draft. QB is a better position to look at. Although there are a lot of decent QB options available, there are not many top-quality starting QBs this year. On my draft sheet I see only seven or eight QBs that I would feel comfortable with as my starter. I do see eight or nine more good QBs that might be good starters for a fantasy team, but there are too many question marks surrounding them to be comfortable penciling them in as my starter. So if you draft three top quality QBs in the second to seventh rounds of your draft you could corner the market on top level QBs. Then if the teams that drafted Eli Manning or Alex Smith become disenchanted with their starter, they will go to you to get a better option.

It is not necessary to draft a lot of players at one position for this strategy to work. You only have to draft more players than you need. In one draft I participated in this year, I drafted Tom Brady in the 3rd round, then in the next round I took McNabb. I selected him earlier than his ADP suggested, but Steve Smith and Willis McGahee were already taken. Over the first seven weeks last year, McNabb averaged over 300 yard passing per game, and had at least two TDs in every game. At that time a McNabb owner might have been able to trade him for Frank Gore, or at least for Willie Parker. With Donte Stallworth gone and coming off an injury, I don't expect the same numbers, but if he puts up numbers comparable to what he has over the span of his career, I might be able to trade him for Smith or McGahee, and if I do, that will be great value for a 4th round pick, and my fantasy team will be stout.

It is usually not wise to stick to one strategy throughout an entire draft. Too many unexpected things happen to guarantee that any one strategy will work the best in every round of the draft. So what I recommend is that you pick a strategy and stick with it until an unexpected turn of events demands that you change your plans. The key is to be aware of the strategic options that are available and to use the one that best fits the situation you are in. There is no substitute for knowledge and preparation, and even a good strategy will not work if it is not applied skillfully, but these are some good strategies that will help you draft better, and employing one of them may just move you from being mired in last place to being admired as your fantasy league's champion.