In 2000, Harvard researcher Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone. The gist of the book is basically that we used to spend time together as a society, but we don’t do that anymore. The title is derived from the declining prominence of bowling leagues (but bowling with strangers would be pretty weird). But in a world where it seems like everyone bowls alone, fantasy football leagues are one of the last things we do together.
Fantasy is the best way to keep in touch with your friends in adulthood. You move to new cities. You get married. You have kids. Suddenly, the friends you used to talk to every week you talk to once a month, then once a year. Fantasy football is a digital kitchen island where everyone in different cities and time zones can gather to talk shop and talk shit. And that is an increasingly important thing to hold on to.
A study in 2018 found that more than a fifth of U.S. adults felt lonely “often or always.” And that was before the pandemic. Now, loneliness, particularly among men, is being discussed as an epidemic, and the U.S. surgeon general even went so far this year as to call loneliness a public health crisis.
Friendships, it turns out, can help your heart. But when we play fantasy, we still want to rip our friends’ hearts out. So we give you the 2023 Fantasy Football Guide to Dominating Your League. The football is fake, but the importance is real.
1. Know Your Rules
As Matthew Berry always emphasizes in his annual manifesto, the most important thing for drafts is to know your league settings. Read the rules! Even the boring ones! Knowing these standard rules of fantasy is essential:
- Rushing yards are worth almost three times more than passing yards, so quarterbacks with rushing upside, like Josh Allen, Justin Fields, and Lamar Jackson, are worth more.
- Is there a point-per-reception bonus? A player like Steelers receiver Diontae Johnson is a lot more valuable in a league with a point per catch than a league without one.
- Is there a superflex spot in which you can start a quarterback (maybe that rule was added after a group-chat conversation you refused to catch up on)? If so, Patrick Mahomes might be the first player off the board.
- Is there an injured reserve spot? You might be more willing to draft Kyler Murray or Jonathan Taylor if there is!
- Can you put suspended players in that IR spot? If so, Jameson Williams of Detroit is worth a pick.
- Do you have to draft a kicker (like you do in ESPN leagues), or can you just draft another position player (like free agent running back Kareem Hunt in case Indy signs him) to stash and add a kicker the day before Week 1 begins? (This is something you can do on the platform Sleeper.)
Read the rules! Winners know the rules.
2. Know What You Need
In a one-quarterback league, Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, and Allen are top-30 picks. In a league that starts two quarterbacks, they might be the first three players off the board. This happens because the demand for starting quarterbacks doubles while the supply stays the same, so passers come off the board earlier.
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What’s less obvious is how different structures affect the receiver position. For all the variations of point-per-reception scoring (with things like half-PPR or zero PPR), the bigger difference might be between positions. For example, a default league on ESPN’s fantasy platform has two wide receivers and one flex player in the starting lineup. But plenty of people customize their leagues to have three receivers and a flex. That’s … 50 percent more demand for starting receivers. And if your league has two flex spots, you might want to start five wide receivers. (Receivers are often the ideal flex players because they score more points than the running backs or tight ends you could draft in a similar range.)
If you are in a league that requires two starting receivers and one flex player, you could start your draft with Dallas’s CeeDee Lamb, and as long as three of your first four picks are running backs, you could be fine. If your league has three receiver spots and two flexes, you might want five receivers in your first seven picks.
3. Know Your Platform
Drafting turns everyone into sheep. You can do all the prep you want, but when a number is next to a player’s name, you cling to that ranking (it’s even more extreme in a salary cap draft, where people bid for players with suggested prices—everyone bids up to the little “$17” next to the player’s name but is afraid to go over $20).
The key is to unanchor yourself by using different rankings than everyone else. When nine people in your draft are using the same template, the easiest way to get value is to change to a different template.
If you’re looking for some different rankings to have in front of you while you make decisions, we’ve got our own rankings and draft tracker.
4. Be a Sheepdog
While you’re using different rankings to not be sheep, let’s go a step further: Be a sheepdog. Sheepdogs don’t bark when they see sheep. Sheepdogs bark when they see gaps between sheep. Similarly, you want to find the gaps between the players as ranked by the platform you’re drafting on and everywhere else. Every platform has a handful of players ranked differently from the consensus. For example:
- Joe Burrow is ranked in the 40s on ESPN, but he’s in the 60s on Yahoo.
- Anthony Richardson is 128 on ESPN but 108 on Yahoo.
- Kyler Murray is 165 on ESPN but 252 on Yahoo.
You want to identify all of those huge gaps—those with a 20-plus spot difference or 10-plus in the early rounds—ahead of time. Understanding these differences can help set targets for you and dictate your strategy later. You don’t want to build a strategy around getting one guy, but when there are big pockets of guys with different rankings, that’s good to know. This is especially important when drafting quarterbacks; it’s easier to get an elite one late on Yahoo, but mediocre ones tend to go off the board earlier. Grabbing a mid-round running back is easy on ESPN when D’Andre Swift and David Montgomery are outside the top 65 picks. And it makes sense to target an elite quarterback and tight end on Sleeper with the running back and receiver depth available late.
5. Make Tiers
Rankings are good. Tiers are better. As the clock goes TICKTOCK, it’s natural to panic and default to the rankings in front of you. Creating tiers of players helps you make the decision in a split second. Let’s say you are choosing between a running back and a wide receiver. The wide receiver is ranked two spots higher. Your default is to draft the receiver. But tiers would help you see that there are five similar receivers left on the board and spot a big tier drop-off at running back after the guy you’re eyeing. And let’s say in this scenario you’re picking again in five spots, so the odds are high that you’ll get a similar receiver. Take the running back, even against the rankings, because you’ll get a similar receiver soon. Making tiers ahead of time helps you avoid panicking while against the clock.
If creating tiers sounds exhausting to you, we have tiers at each position already made! If you go to our rankings and sort by position, each tier will automatically pop up.
6. Draft the Rainbow …
They say with vegetables that you should eat the rainbow. The same applies to fantasy. On an app like Sleeper, positions are coded with different colors. This year, you want to see a lot of different colors on your draft board early. Usually, we say you should grab a top running back in the first two rounds and hammer a bunch of wide receivers in the next few rounds. And you can still do that! But it’s never been more acceptable to draft four positions in the first four rounds. If you’re in a 12-team ESPN league, for example, it’s totally reasonable to start your draft with Tyreek Hill in the first round, Tony Pollard in the second, Hurts in the third, and Mark Andrews in the fourth. Usually, we advise waiting on tight end and quarterback, but there’s a great argument to be made that starting with elite players at those two positions early and loading up on running backs and receivers later is the best strategy to maximize your advantage at each position.
7. … But Take Plenty of Wide Receivers
Yes, draft the rainbow, but still take a bunch of wide receivers. A good rule of thumb is that you probably want five of your first 10 picks to be wide receivers. You want depth, and quality receivers are hard to find on waivers. Plus, mid-tier receivers are generally better to have in your flex spot over mid-tier running backs.
8. Channel Your Inner Ricky Bobby
Fantasy is like Talladega Nights: If you ain’t first, you’re last (unless there is a punishment). When you lose, it’s usually because you didn’t draft enough players with upside. Early on in a draft, you want players to be reliable. As you get into the later rounds, reliability becomes less important than upside. You don’t want an entire roster of risky or unproven players, but you do want guys with high ceilings: The Giants’ Darren Waller is one of three tight ends who are no. 1 options on their respective teams. If he’s available with the 70th pick, the upside is too good to ignore. D’Andre Swift is a big risk to take high as a starting running back, but he was a second-round pick last year and is an Eagle now. The downsides of him in the seventh round have been baked in, but the upside is probably still underrated. Fields was a top-three fantasy quarterback down the stretch last year, the Bears added D.J. Moore for him at receiver, and he is now getting drafted 30 spots behind Hurts. Fields might be one of only four players who could actually finish as the no. 1 quarterback if everyone is healthy. These are the upside guys to sprinkle into your team.
9. Don’t You Dare Settle for Fine
Your bench is like that scene in Ted Lasso where Roy Kent meets the guy Rebecca is dating and tells her the truth.
“He’s fine!” Roy says. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Most people are fine! … You deserve someone who makes you feel like you’ve been struck by fucking lightning. Don’t you dare settle for fine!”
Treat your bench the same way. When you’re taking your last receiver, you may be tempted to take Cincinnati’s Tyler Boyd. Boyd is a slot receiver who is the third option on his own team. He is fine. I’d rather take a chance on a guy like Marvin Mims Jr. for my bench. Mims is a rookie receiver for the Broncos who has the record for most receiving yards and receiving touchdowns in the history of Texas high school football, and he was Sean Payton’s first draft pick as Denver’s head coach. Mims might start for the Broncos as soon as Week 1. Sure, he could suck (lots of rookie receivers do!) and be irrelevant. He could also be Denver’s best receiver immediately. Lightning. Don’t fill your bench with fine. A few similar players with lightning potential you could target: Carolina’s Jonathan Mingo, Cleveland’s Donovan Peoples-Jones, Pittsburgh’s Jaylen Warren, and Atlanta’s Tyler Allgeier.
10. Pick a Strategy—and Know Thyself
Here’s a weird question: Do you check your league’s waiver wire when you’re on the toilet? If you’re the kind of person who checks your waivers that frequently—if you enjoy finding waiver players—maybe don’t take your second running back until round 10 and trust yourself to add another back later. But if waivers feel like a chore to you, or something you do only when you’ve lost a starter to an injury, maybe don’t wait that long for a running back! If you are a sicko who likes adding tight ends every week, then maybe don’t reach for T.J. Hockenson. But if the thought of drafting a mid tight end like Tyler Higbee is the bane of your existence, then splurge for Pat Freiermuth.
If you hate having to add quarterbacks based on matchups each week, maybe just grab Allen or Hurts in the third round and make yourself happy. There’s power in admitting what you’re good at and what you’re not. I’d argue that you don’t need to have a backup quarterback, tight end, and defense on your initial roster, but if that’s how you like it, cool! But maybe make sure you’ve at least got running back sorted out by round 10, because you won’t have room on your bench for more than a couple of running backs.
When in doubt, a strategy that is unlikely to fail this year is to take a receiver and a running back in the first two rounds and fill out your starting roster (except defenses and kicker) from there, then hammer depth at receiver and running back.
11. Have Fun, Talk Shit, and, When in Doubt, Pick Fun Players
This is fantasy football. It’s supposed to be fun. Yes, it’s stressful, and it will make you very upset, and only one person will win, and there’s a chance that the person who does used autodraft. But at its core, fantasy is the way we keep in touch with our friends in adulthood.
The cheat code is, as sappy and cliché as this is, to enjoy the freaking season. If you’re choosing between two players, let the tiebreaker be who went to your college or was on your favorite team but was traded away. Don’t draft players you don’t like. Participate in the group chat. Talk shit. Scroll up in the chat and read the 50 messages you missed. Maybe even call the person you’re playing that week about your matchup. Whatever you do, by the end of the season, you should feel a little bit closer to everyone involved. There are a thousand ways to build a fantasy team. Make sure to bowl in a league, not alone.
