The draft is one of the best days of the entire fantasy season. The excitement, the camaraderie, the uncertainty, the hope. It’s the best! And if you draft a good team, you are flying high! A bad draft, however, can make the following 15 weeks of your life a real drag. Especially if your buds are a ruthless bunch of trash talkers, like mine.
It’s critical to do well in your draft. Grabbing a magazine or reading one awesome article isn’t going to cut it in the age of Twitter and 24/7 sports news. No one drafts injured players by accident anymore. Finding sleepers that the rest of your league doesn’t know about is more difficult than ever. You need a leg up on everyone else in a world where information is not just at our fingertips but flooding into our lives. However, more information isn’t always better. Knowledge isn’t power anymore, wisdom is. Contextualizing the info is what wins championships.
Draft mags, big boards, cheat sheets, draft strategies and player profiles all still have their place, of course. Some people love the reading, the research and planning. They love furiously jumping between a cheat sheet, laptop and print mag on draft day while that clock ticks down. It enhances their fantasy football experience. But there is an easier way for those that prefer something less harried.
Tier Based Drafting
The method is known as tier based drafting. With tier based drafting, all players are categorized into tiers. The best of the best players are in the top tier while subsequent players fall into lower tiers. This is a better system because you can completely eliminate big boards,cheat sheets and draft strategies and just bring one spreadsheet into your draft room. Prefer pen and paper? No problemo. Just print it out and go to town.
The beauty of the tier based system is that as you cross off drafted players, your tiers will automatically direct you to the player you should take next. No anxiety, no worry, no going on tilt.
There are plenty of sites out there that will offer to sell you pre-populated tier based cheat sheets, although you should really consider making your own. It’s more fun and it really deepens your knowledge of the game, which pays off in the long run. If you do decide to make you own cheat sheet be sure to stand by it. Like any other endeavor in life, there will people who will disagree.
Drafting Sheet
Below is an example of the first few tiers of the current iteration of my 2018 tier based drafting sheet. Remember, it is only the tier that matters. The order of the players in that tier is irrelevant.
You likely will notice a few things right off of the bat. Firstly, these tiers follow my own player rankings, not the consensus ADP. Tyreek Hill, for example, is waaaaay down in Tier 6 despite going early third round according to ADP. You’ll also notice Aaron Rodgers is stuck down in Tier 6 as well. This doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize his elite level talent. Rather, it means that I wouldn’t take him before any of the players in Tiers 1-5.
Ok, let’s pretend that I am drafting #9 overall in 12-team .5ppr league. According to ADP, the first round would look like this:
Psyched to get Beckham to anchor my team; I consider him to be one of the few truly elite talents in the NFL and firmly entrenched in Tier 1. I am not as high as the general public on Kamara, Barkley, and Hopkins. Therefore, I don’t mind them being taken before Beckham as I would have taken Beckham over them regardless.
Round Two
Again, I am a big winner in this round according to my own sheet. I get Keenan Allen at #16, a player I consider to be a top 5 wideout this year because of both his talent and opportunity share.
Round Three:
Most of my Tier 3 guys are gone by this point but I had a choice between Lamar Miller, T.Y. Hilton and Allen Robinson. I am excited for Robinson this year and the Hilton-Luck connection is always dangerous. My team already had two guys who can contend for the #1 overall wide receiver so I took Miller. I couldn’t be happier about getting a Tier 3 running back who is also the last true workhorse back on the board (don’t come at me with that McCoy stuff. I’m not even sure he’s playing this year). D’onta Foreman won’t play for half the fantasy season and Alfred Blue is no threat to a healthy Lamar Miller.
Round Four:
Seven picks later and I am lucky enough to land Robinson, who is the last Tier 3 guy on my sheet. In fact, I have A-Rob ranked inside my top 12 at wide receiver this year. After four rounds I now have what I believe are three WR1s and an RB1. The draft software may not like this roster thus far but I LOVE it.
Now that I have the receiver position sewn up early, I can sit back and let my tier based drafting sheet guide me to which running backs I will take in the juicy middle rounds of the draft. The rounds that win championships.
As tight ends and value wide receivers crop up, I will be able to grab them to provide depth. Best of all, because this sheet is based on my own rankings, I feel great about the results. Absolutely no second guessing myself.
Do yourself a favor and try tier based drafting in at least one fantasy draft this year. You won’t be disappointed. Not to mention it’s actually a lot of fun figuring out tiers for 200 of your favorite players.
