How To Win Your Fantasy Football League

The simple process I’m about to outline is the same one I use every year, and at least for the last two, helped me take down my $7K NFFC Primetime leagues. The odds of winning two 12-team leagues due to dumb luck would be 1 in 144, and keep in mind those leagues were populated by a who’s who of NFFC Hall of Famers and champions.

So what did I do? I went to the NFFC ADP Page here. I sorted by recent drafts — right now you’d use two weeks’ worth to get a decent sample for the type of league you’re drafting, but in late July or August, a few days should suffice.

Let’s say you’re doing a RotoWire Online Championship today. You’d sort by 12-team leagues of that type, since say June 5.

You can see under #Picks that there have been 13 drafts of this kind since that date, a good enough sample at this stage. It’s important to match the parameters to your draft because you don’t want 10-team Cutline ADP (with different positional drop-offs) confounding your results.

The next step is to download the results into a spread sheet or google doc. See the “Download” button above the draft list on the top left. Once you’ve got it into a spread sheet, it should look like this:

Delete all the columns from ADP rightward. It should look like this:

Then sort by position.

Then line up all the players by position on your spreadsheet. This is your cross-off list. It’s sorted by position, with overall ranks to the left for easy reference:

Now you don’t want to draft by straight ADP, though some people probably do just take the best ADP value, based in part on positional need each round, and there are worse things you could do.

But this list is where you can roughly expect players to go off the board, and accordingly, you can figure out what your options are likely to be in advance of each pick.

For example, in Beat Chris Liss 1, I drew the ninth pick and decided I wanted either Bijan Robinson (8) or CeeDee Lamb (10). I was prepared for both being gone — either Stefon Diggs (9) or Cooper Kupp (7) were my fall-backs, but I had a good idea of what I’d be looking at.

For Round 2, I wanted Garrett Wilson (16), but he was gone, so I pivoted to Saquon Barkley (14). Now I had two running backs and was fairly set on taking a WR. At pick 28, I targeted DK Metcalf (28), Tee Higgins (26) or Chris Olave (24). If all three were gone, I might have gone with another back, Rhamondre Stevenson (30), but that would be a tougher build to pull off. Had I done that, I’d know in advance the receivers I’d need to target and where I’d likely need to pay up to shore up that position.

As you get deeper into your draft, the ADP becomes less reliable, and you should be prepared to get your players a round or more in advance. Certainly when you get to double-digit rounds, ADP value becomes almost negligible, just get your guys. I screwed up in BCL1, by waiting too long to draft Danny Dimes. Just an oversight on my part, an unforced error.

. . .

But wait, didn’t I bill this as “How To Win Your Fantasy Football League?” Aren’t I going to tell you which players to draft and which to avoid?

No, I am not. The reason for that is people who win high stakes leagues against good players don’t take tips! If you want to be one of them, get used to doing your own research, figuring out what players you like at ADP.

Of course, you can look at my Beat Chris Liss league and live stream to see what I think, but I could be completely off base this year. It’s the process of using the NFFC ADP to draft and prep that’s valuable.