Survivor Drafts and You

  Guest Submission posted 8/25 by Josh Silvestri, Exclusive to Footballguys.com

If you're looking for a variation of a redraft that rewards long-term planning, player evaluations / projections and making depth truly matter then a survivor format may be the league for you. For those who don't know what a survivor draft is, here's a quick description:

Survivor Leagues
There are two primary differences between a Survivor-style draft and a typical fantasy redraft league. One, there are no transactions after the draft. The team you draft is the team you get. Yes, that means if Larry Johnson breaks his leg in a few weeks, that team who rostered him is a man down, with no hope of replacing his production. Two, you don't compete head-to-head but rather the goal is to avoid being the lowest-scoring team in a given week. If you are the lowest scoring team, you get eliminated (hence, SURVIVOR).

Cited from: FBG Blog - Survivor Draft strategy musings

Unlike a total points league, where you could very well know the winner of the league weeks before the end of the season, or worse have members stop caring as they fall out of contention by week eight. A survivor draft provides incentive to keep watching week to week and truly rewards careful planning.

Although there are many variations on the survivor theme, I'd like to focus primarily on the message board survivor leagues on Footballguys.com. For those with different scoring formats, don't worry, the same general strategy I'll be going over will pass over league to league in many cases. For those who have never participated in one of these leagues, you can see the scoring format here.

Personally I've never participated in the FBG survivor leagues until this year, because I was too worried about getting trounced by more experienced drafters. In 2006 I set up a few survivor leagues among using the same scoring system as the MBSL to get some valuable experience. What I learned was invaluable, and though now is becoming more common knowledge; I feel has been lacking any sort of basics article to help new people get started in this type of redraft. So now I'm sharing some of the basic guidelines you should most likely be following until you fully grasp the league structure.

So now that you know what a survivor league is and the scoring format we'll be referencing, let's begin!

Five major differences between survivor and normal redraft

1. Bye weeks matter
   
   Since each team has limited roster space and no wavier wire to pick up shills for a week, the bye weeks can make or break your entire season. In a normal redraft league, you might lose a game because your first three picks all had the same bye week. In a survivor league, that's tantamount to suicide since the lowest scorer will be eliminated each week; and typically by the time the bye weeks come around the poorly constructed teams will already be gone.
   
   This means planning out the bye week schedules over your rankings and who's available. Many times it may be worth it to take a small downgrade to avoid any bye week conflicts between the early picks. Obviously there are times where you risk dropping off a tier in your rankings to avoid the bye week conflict. In these cases you need to have a good idea of where your draft is heading to determine if you can take the risk for that one week if it'll significantly improve your chances over the course of the season.
   
   
2. Depth is critical, especially at wide receiver
   
   One of the easiest ways to see who has a lot of experience with survivor leagues and one who doesn't is to look at the depth of a position such as wide receiver. If you're coming from a normal redraft perspective, five or six wide receiver probably seems fine and maybe a bit excessive. For someone who has done survivor leagues in the past, especially those who were unsuccessful, you'll rarely see less than seven and even eight is an accepted strategy in certain setups. Why such a big difference?
   
   A position like wide receiver tends to fluctuate wildly over the course of a season. Even the top ten at a position are nowhere near locks to put up even the league average in fantasy points each week. A wide receiver like Chad Johnson wasn't even the leading FF receiver on his team 11 out of 16 games! Torry Holt, one of the most consistent receivers in the league, put up numbers up 9.8, 8.0 and 14.3 in one three week stretch. That means two weeks in a row he probably didn't even outscore your #3 WR and then scored like a middle of the pack #2 WR after that. Consider that if the top guys can't even get amazing scoring week to week, how likely are your 4th and 5th WRs going to even put up their average numbers?
   
   Having so many wide receivers means you have better odds on getting three usable scores each week, rather than three scores period. Instead of being able to play matches like in a normal wide receiver league, you need to be looking at guys deep in a draft which will be targeted at least a few times a game or have the opportunity to move up into a real starting role. The idea is to reduce the role of luck and huge deviations in your scores each week and the best way to do that other than trying to draft consistent players it to simply have more of them than the other guys in the league.
   
   All of this on depth and we haven't even gotten to the most obvious reasons for needing it, injuries and suspensions! Players getting hurt in the NFL is nothing new, but while you can at least replace a guy in a normal league, you have to carry that dead weight in a survivor league. It also means the only way you'll be able to take advantage of the opportunity that appears for a back-up is to of drafted him in the first place, rather than race to wavier wire to pick him up. The typical rule of thumb for survivors is having at least twice as many players at each position as you would be starting each week.
   
   This also means handcuffing (Taking the back-up of a player) becomes a valuable tool for keeping production high even in the face of injury. Do you want to handcuff everybody on your team? Obviously not, but a few precautionary measures could reward you with the next Larry Johnson or Ladell Betts. The back-up's to look for, even if you don't own the player in front of them, are the ones with enough talent to make use of an opportunity if they get a chance. For example, even if you somehow correctly predicted an injury to Shaun Alexander that would take him out for most of the season, how good was his back-up while he was out? Do you even remember his name? Remember that many back-ups are behind these players for a reason and it's not always because they've got LT2 in front of them.
   
   
3. Balance is incredibly important
   
   The draft is the only shot you get at making your team the best it can be. This means not being overly neglectful to any one piece of your team, because you can't improve it down the road and every point matters some weeks. The reason strategies like taking early tight ends or three running backs in a row the draft aren't as popular as the classic RB/WR or RB/RB plans is because they cause a team imbalance that's difficult to make up for. Sure you'll take care of that one aspect of your team early on, but you have to try to make up for all the value and high performance players in other positions you skipped out on.
   
   This means if you've got a line on certain players far outperforming their ADP, you can take more chances at gaining small performance advantages early in the draft and still keep balance later. The main idea is that you shouldn't overload one or two positions of your team because of the runs that will occur and suddenly devoid a certain position of all value. Being stuck needing to take a WR2, but having people just get off a WR3 run is never where you want to be. Things are only going to get worse if you don't reach on a receiver right then, but if you continue to wait you'll likely be taking bottom of the barrel scrubs.
   
   
4. Stay flexible with your draft plan and pay attention
   
   Although this is true for all drafts, survivor drafts are different in that you typically have a plan and then are faced with the choice to break it and form a new one. For example, I had the 12th pick in the MBSL and the running back I was willing to take wasn't there, so I took Antonio Gates, which is a late round one pick with 2 PPR to tight ends. I then took Terrell Owens as my original plan had been to, but I modified my third round to take a high upside running back (Adrian Peterson) instead of my second WR.
   
   My original plan was to then take another wide receiver to sow up at least two top 15 wide receivers, but then Marshawn Lynch dropped to me in the fourth round. So now I had another high upside running back I could take and suddenly make up for ignoring RB in the first two rounds or I could stick with the plan and take a WR. I ended up taking what I felt was value in Lynch, because I wasn't dead set on drafting one way.
   
   In large leagues like this that take bye factors into account, it's very possible to have weeks where you'll just meet the bare minimum of starters at a position. Any draft decision you make in the early rounds will have ramifications down the entire draft, meaning you have to think about all your decisions ahead of time. Being flexible with a plan is not the same as drafting with no plan at all and simply chasing value. When faced with filling out starter or a back-up player, sometimes you have to bite the bullet and take the back-up, because he won't be there the next time you get to choose.
   
   
5. Don't go overboard with upside
   
   I see some people come into survivor leagues and get so excited to draft a team of home run hitters, because they've got people to fall back on if they don't go off. The big problem with this idea is a bad week can get you booted off the island. People tend to overrate those who have huge upside potential over more consistent players, which is a dangerous game to play where the teams that can keep a middle of the road score for weeks on end are going to last the longest. Taking a guy with a nice solid floor (barring injury of course) and a little bit of upside is often better than spending an early pick on someone with considerable risk and a high ceiling. As the draft rolls along this paradigm shifts back in the other direction where it's less likely your late picks will have as many chances to put up numbers, so when they do you want them to be huge.
   
   It's great to pick high upside guys, but ask yourself if you'll potentially be risking the reason if push comes to shove and you have to rely on them due to injuries / byes / flying spaghetti monster attack. Reggie Bush had a high upside last year, but for those that took him and got bumped out before the second half when he started to show his upside, ask them if they would like a redo and had taken Brain Westbrook or Willie Parker instead. Upside is great and it's how you win against the high powered teams at the end, but getting to that point tends to be a bit more important.

Hopefully this has taught you a bit about survivor leagues and given you some insight into the basic rules you want to consider when playing in them. Remember that in fantasy football, none of these rules are ironclad, merely guidelines to help you until you get your feet wet. Good drafting and good luck!