The startup draft in a dynasty fantasy football league is critical to your success. You cannot win your league in the draft, but you can seriously set yourself back by making poor decisions.
Plan Your Board Ahead of Time
Before the draft, establish a game plan. There is a good two-step process to do this. First, look at each position starting at the end of the draft and work towards the beginning, identifying players you like at their cost. Second, use different strategies to see how your roster would look with your target players. How do you feel if you select four running backs in the first six rounds compared to four wide receivers? Likewise, how do you feel if you wait on a quarterback and/or tight end instead of selecting one early?
This exercise will give you benchmarks and pivot points to identify when the unexpected happens during the draft.
Chose A Contending Window
There is no one size fits all strategy in dynasty fantasy football. Some owners aim to win in year one, while others look to build a long-term team. While reasonable minds can differ on the proper strategy, once you decide on a time frame for your team, every decision you make should be aimed at executing that strategy. Your player selections and trade decisions should all reflect the strategy you choose. Like oars on a boat, your decisions should all pull in the same direction.
If you are taking a win-now approach, you should avoid rookie wide receivers who rarely produce earlier in their career. Instead, you should favor veteran wide receivers with at least one top 24 seasonal finish in their career. If you are going to mix veterans with rookies, the optimal route is veteran wide receivers paired with rookie running backs as both are capable of short-term production.
If you are taking a long-term view, a simple way to think about player decisions is to ask yourself, “will this player be on my next contending team?” If you are building a long-term strategy to compete in year three of the league, a 33-year-old wide receiver is unlikely to contribute on your next contending team. Avoiding this type of wide receiver, in favor of a younger player is a preferred strategy.
Roster Construction Strategy
Roster construction is a critical decision in dynasty fantasy football.
While a common narrative is wide receivers maintain their value better than running backs in dynasty leagues, that is only true early in startup drafts. Since 2008, 42% of wide receivers with an average draft position (ADP) in the first five rounds of a startup draft drop more than a round in ADP after the first season. This compares favorably to the 59% of running backs in the top five rounds who lose more than one round in value after the first season.
After the top five rounds, wide receivers do not maintain their value significantly better than running backs. In Round 6 through Round 10, 68% of running backs lose a round of value compared to 62% of wide receivers while in Round 11 through Round 15, more wide receivers (67%) lose a round of ADP valuation after a year than running backs (64%).
While wide receivers do not present significantly safer investments in the middle rounds of your draft, they also are less likely to produce a top-24 seasonal finish. Below is a graph with the rate of both running back and wide receiver producing a top-24 seasonal finish within the first three years of a startup draft.
Wide receivers are near locks for at least one top-24 seasonal finish in the first two rounds, before performing worse (68%) than running backs (74%) in round three. This trend continues through Round 15.
Historically, wide receivers have been a bad bet compared to running backs outside the first five rounds of startup drafts. This is confirmed by advanced metrics like wins over replacement player (WORP) and adjusted wins over replacement player (aWORP) which factors in the starter rate of a player to determine their true impact.
While at almost any point, running backs have a higher upside than wide receivers in advanced metrics like WORP and aWORP, the only time they are close is early in a startup draft. Put another way, any time you draft a wide receiver over a running back in a startup draft, you are losing value. My research has found for every roster spot you choose a running back over a wide receiver, you -- on average -- win .17 more games in the first three years of your league. While this strategy raises the average it also raises the ceiling of your team.
To maximize your odds, your best bet is to select as few wide receivers as possible, which can be accomplished best by selecting them early in your startup draft. What you may lose in the top end upside of a running back like Ezekiel Elliott, you gain in longevity and roster construction by selecting Michael Thomas. Ideally, if you need to start a minimum of three wide receivers in your weekly lineup, focus on four wide receivers in the first six rounds, while making only one or two wide receiver selections later in the draft.
While that has been a historically strong strategy, every year is different. The 2020 startup market presents a rare combination of aging wide receivers at the top of ADP with depressed value wide receivers with strong historical track records, like Robert Woods and Jarvis Landry are available around WR30 and T.Y. Hilton, A.J. Green, and Brandin Cooks available around WR40. These present intriguing options as wide receiver four or five options on your team. After this tier, there are only a handful of target players you should consider at their cost.
Combined with the young running backs, like this year’s rookies, Jonathan Taylor, DAndre Swift, J.K. Dobbins, Cam Akers, and Clyde Edwards-Helaire, along with those in their early 20s like Josh Jacobs, Joe Mixon, Nick Chubb, Saquon Barkley, and Christian McCaffrey, there is an opportunity to optimize young running backs and productive profiles at wide receiver in your startup draft.
Quarterbacks and tight ends, in formats where you start only one, offer unique opportunities. A common strategy is to wait on selecting quarterbacks. This is a delicate balance in dynasty leagues. Waiting on quarterback creates opportunities to select premium positions early in a startup draft but may result in the need to roster multiple quarterbacks to fix a hole. If you wait too long, you give away upside, and it is harder to find quarterbacks on the waiver wire in dynasty leagues than in redraft leagues. Paying up at the position can create stability, as quarterbacks are much more likely to produce a WORP of 1 or more in the first year than other positions. If you wait on the position, targeting first-round quarterbacks in the third round of future rookie drafts has been a historically lucrative strategy.
When selecting quarterbacks, err on the side of selecting those with a history of production. Quarterbacks early in their career who have no or only one top 12 seasonal finish are a dangerous historical bet. This is only more important in Superflex leagues, where quarterbacks are more important and difficult to acquire. Selecting strong profiles like Dak Prescott over a young quarterback with one top-12 seasonal finish like Kyler Murray is an example of a good historical bet at quarterback.
For tight ends, the top eight to ten offer stability to your roster. This is an important point in leagues with 20 or fewer roster spots, as you have fewer opportunities to fix the position through a volume approach to the position. If you do not select a top-10 tight end, your best bet is a combination of first-round draft picks at a depressed cost, like Hayden Hurst and Eric Ebron, and veterans who have produced top-12 seasonal finishes and project as starters in year one, like Jared Cook and Greg Olsen.
Be Flexible in Trading
A critical aspect of a dynasty startup draft is the trades during the draft. Relatively uncommon in redraft leagues, trades in your startups offer an opportunity to create more value. Teams with a win-now approach may choose to trade up the draft to secure another high-end player for a Year 1 push.
On the other hand, teams with a long-term mindset are usually willing to trade down to acquire multiple later picks in the startup draft or future rookie draft picks.
Trading down creates an opportunity to create a deeper roster and more flexibility for future decisions. While the opportunity to trade up is tempting, caution is in order. Over a sample of 25 leagues studied in 2019, teams that did not trade away their future first-round pick in the startup draft made the playoff 52.2% of the time. Teams that traded away a future first-round pick in those startup drafts, made the playoffs in 56.9% of the time. While that is an improvement, it is likely less than the owner thought when they were making the trade.
Each year is different, but this season, trading out of the middle or end of the first round, into the second-round while adding a fourth-round pick will give you picks in valuable ranges of the draft. Look to also acquire a 2021 first- or second-round rookie pick in that type of trade.
Additionally, when you are having a hard time deciding between two or three players, that is usually a good time to explore a trade down a few picks and collect a future pick upgrade.