TG Fantasy Baseball

Fantasy Football Drafts and Strategies

The Draft

The most important day of your fantasy football season will be the draft. The draft is where you get together with all your league mates, either in person or virtually, and select or draft your players.

For typical leagues, there are two main ways to conduct your league draft - via snake draft or auction. We will also touch on some other draft types in this article, but those are the two most commonly used methods to draft your team.

For the most fun and camaradarie with your league-mates, no matter which draft type you use, you should try and conduct your draft in-person. If that's not possible because people live in various parts of the country or for other reasons, you can conduct your draft virtually. Most websites that can be used to manage your league will have a draft room feature available and all the different members of your league can log into that draft room and conduct the draft online.

Snake Draft

The most popular way to conduct your fantasy football league draft is done via a snake draft. Why do they call it a snake draft? Well, it's because of the order of the picks. In a ten-team league, for example, the picks go in this order: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 then 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. This is repeated every two rounds. Without the use of this snaking process, the same team would get the first pick in every round and that would not be fair. So, instead, the team who gets the first pick in the first round, gets the last pick in the second round. Then the process starts all over again - that same team will get the first pick in the third round, but the last pick in the fourth round.

Because of this snaking process, the draft order is much less important that it is in leagues that do not snake (see keeper league considerations later in this article). Still, it's exciting to have the #1 pick in a draft. The draft order should be selected at random. In my leagues, we use the Google random number generator to pick the draft order for us. All you need to do is assign each team a number from 1 to 10 (or however many teams you have) and let the random number generator pick those numbers in any random order.

Some leagues will have some kind of contest to determine the order of the draft. It's your league, so have some fun with it. Just make sure everyone agrees to the rules prior to the draft and that each team has an equal chance of getting the top pick. You don't want your league-mates getting salty before the season has even started!

Once the draft order has been established, the team with the first pick gets to select any NFL player they'd like. In 2024, the consensus top player is Christian McCaffrey, running back from the San Francisco 49ers. That doesn't mean the team with the #1 pick will take McCaffrey, of course. Let's assume, for the purposes of this article, that they do. The team who has the second pick can now take anyone else in the NFL for their fantasy team EXCEPT Christian McCaffrey. This process repeats for all teams until all teams now have one player on their fantasy team.

The second round works the exact same way as the first round, except the order is reversed. So, in a ten-team league, the team with the 10th pick of the first round will get the first pick in the second round, which will be the 11th pick overall. This process completes until the last pick in the second round, which will be the 20th pick overall. Now, all teams have two players on their team.

This process continues until all the teams have a full roster. Typically, fantasy rosters have about 16 players on them. In this case, your draft will consist of 16 rounds, which will give all fantasy teams a full roster of 16 players.

Auction

The second most popular way to draft your team is via an auction. In this draft method, all teams are allotted a dollar amount (not real money), and they must stay within that total amount in order to fill their team. In fantasy baseball, this dollar amount is usually $260. In fantasy football, it's $200. Don't ask me why.

In any case, one advantage of an auction draft is that every single team has a shot at every single player. With Christian McCaffrey the consensus number one pick, in a regular draft, only the team with the first pick has the opportunity to draft him. In an auction, if you want to spend enough of your money, you can get any player you want. Of course, the more you spend on one player, the less you have for the rest of your team.

The order in which players are called up for auction does not really matter. It's typically done with a random order and each team calls up one player at a time to be bid upon. Once there is only one team left standing with the highest bid, that team is awarded the player. The process repeats until all teams have a full roster.

Of course, you cannot bid more for a player than the amount of money you have left. Let's say, for example, you have $5 left to bid on players and have two roster spots left to fill. You MUST pay at least $1 for each player, so that means the maximum you can spend on one of your final two players is $4.

There is a lot more strategy involved with an auction compared to a draft but can be a lot more fun!

Salary Cap Draft

A salary cap draft is similar to an auction where each team is allotted a certain amount of money. However, that's where the similarities cease. In a salary cap draft, all players are assigned a salary. Also, players can be owned by more than one team, so salary cap drafts are typically used for contests rather than standard fantasy leagues.

All teams have a salary cap, say $50 million, for example. Each player is assigned a salary, say $18 million for Christian McCaffrey, for example. You need to fill out your roster by selecting the best players while still staying under the $50 million cap.

Dynasty and Keeper League Considerations

Some leagues, called re-draft leagues, draft a brand-new team every year. Others are known as "keeper" leagues or "dynasty" leagues. In these leagues, you keep some or all of your roster from season to season, so it is more like the real NFL in that manner. Only those players who are not kept or who are rookies are available to be drafted.

Normally, in re-draft leagues, the draft order is randomized at the beginning of the year. For keeper or dynasty leagues, in order to help the lesser teams gain on the better teams, we recommend not switching the order in each round of the draft. Instead, the worst team gets the first pick in each round of the draft and the best team gets the last pick in each round of the draft. That's just a recommendation, however and of course, it is your league, so do it however you and your league-mates see fit.

Best Ball

The term "Best Ball" is taken from golf. When four golfers play a hole, they all hit tee shots, and they pick the best ball of the four. Then all four play their next shot from there. In fantasy football, the definition is quite different, so it can be confusing.

In a Best Ball draft, once the draft is done, your activity is also done. There are no trades, no add/drops, no waiver wires, nothing. The team you draft is the team you keep for the entire year. You don't even set starting lineups each week. The reason for that is that the best scorer at each position is automatically put into your lineup after the games have been played. Hence, the term "best ball."

This type of league is also known as "set it and forget it" for obvious reasons. A lot of contests online will use this format, but typically, this isn't used by friendly leagues where you want to trade and banter with your league-mates all year long.

Guillotine Leagues

A guillotine league is a relatively new concept and, I have to say, a whole lot of fun. In a guillotine league, you conduct a draft (usually a snake draft) like most other fantasy leagues. However, in this format, there are no head-to-head games that are played. Instead, all teams play in week one of the season and the lowest scoring team in that week is eliminated. That's right, your season is over and done with! The guillotine has chopped you!

As you might imagine, this type of league lends itself to a lot of trash talk. Another fun aspect of the league is that all of the players on the chopped team each week go back into the free agent pool and can be acquired by other teams. We will go into different ways to acquire players during the season in a future article, but these leagues typically use a free-agent acquisition budget (FAAB) where teams bid on free agents. Just imagine if Josh Allen is on the team that gets chopped in week one. He's now available as a free agent for other teams to grab.