The Apex Drafting Strategy: Draft Sharks, Not Guppies (Fantasy Football)

Recently, my wife Kelly and I took the girls to see their first movie in theaters; we saw Inside Out 2, which was terrific. A few things have evolved inside Riley’s brain since we met her in 2015. A new artifact at headquarters called the Sense of Self forms the bedrock of Riley’s worldview. This is comprised of her Belief System, which, in the movie, is a series of sturdy bands that have grown out of significant ideas allowed to germinate, shaping Riley’s perspective on life. This Sense of Self is resilient but not impervious to change; with new conditioning based on new experiences, the Sense of Self can be rebuilt when new ideas are nurtured in a certain way and slowly reconfigure the Belief System.

If you’re like me, your fantasy worldview is pretty well established, and you probably have a strong Fantasy Football Sense of Self. I imagine you consume a fair amount of fantasy content in various forms. I tend to digest it almost under highway hypnosis, the malaise that sets in when you zoom past mile markers, allowing the vehicle to take you from where you are to where you’ll be as if you no longer control it. I collect parasitical catchphrases and theories; I repeat them as truth without pausing to analyze them. Every once in a while, I stop and contemplate harder. Periodically, the conventions I’ve never challenged buckle with new revelation; this happened to me about ten years ago when my Fantasy Football Sense of Self changed forever.

The Great White Shark & Those Toothless Guppies

I already had a juvenile Fantasy Football Sense of Self when I began toying around with value-based drafting (VBD), though I didn’t know what it was called or that it was already well-trodden ground. In my research, I realized Rob Gronkowski didn’t simply finish as the No. 1 TE every year; he finished with a point total well beyond second place. The disparity was smaller between the second and third TE, slimmer still between the third and fourth; this continued until ultimately the increments shrunk to an almost negligible amount.

It became evident that Gronk was not a TE but a Great White shark. Compared to him, everyone else was a guppy.

This led to further investigation, and I realized that fantasy scoring was seldom linear; the best at each position almost always scored well above No. 1 – maybe not with quite the profound advantage Gronkowski had over his counterparts, but it was this way to some degree. The more I looked, the more I realized this pattern was true at every position every year, without fail.

The effect becomes more pronounced if we use a visual aid. Here are bar graphs for each player at each position from 2023 in order:

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Fantasy Points Are Not Scored Linearly

We tend to think of fantasy scoring in linear terms, as if the difference between each player in order of fantasy scoring is one equal step down in value from the last. This is never the case. Fantasy scoring forms a logarithmic pattern, not a linear one. The red trendlines in the graphs above show what an incremental (-1,-1,-1) pattern would look like. However, the graph forms a shape that less resembles a wedge and more resembles a mountainous peak transferring gradually into a long foothill.

Reading from left to right, the fantasy outputs of 2023 fantasy players at each position deescalate sharply at first; as we work through the body of the graph, things begin to level out. The area on the left is what I’ll call the “head” or the “apex” of the graph. The area where it levels out is what I’ll refer to as the “tail.”

Looking At It Another Way

Look at the following table for half-PPR scoring among 2023 WRs:

The difference from Lamb to Hill was 18.8 fantasy points. The fall from Hill to St. Brown at No. 3 was more precipitous at 43.5 points. Between the No. 1 and No. 3 WR, the reduction was a substantial 62.3 points. To put that in perspective, having Lamb in your lineup instead of Amon-Ra St. Brown was equal to having St. Brown and Darnell Mooney plugged into just one WR spot every game (which, according to extensive research, most leagues do not allow).

In dropping one more spot, the disparity from Lamb to Puka Nacua at No. 4 balloons up to 93.7 fantasy points. It has taken three single increments of rank to lose 27.6% of Lamb’s scoring output.

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By the time we get from Lamb to Nico Collins at No. 10, we’ve lost 119.3 fantasy points, about 35.1%.

Over the next ten WRs, the pace at which points drop off slows by an enormous 78.1%. The difference between No.1 and No. 10 was 119.3 fantasy points. The difference between No. 11 and No. 20 was just 26.1.

The closer we get to the head of the graph, the greater our advantage becomes; we see exponential edges rather than incremental ones. The players in the tail? They aren’t as different from each other as we give them credit for. The difference in scoring between the first and fourth fantasy WR in 2023 was far greater than the difference between the 20th and 50th fantasy WR. This type of pattern recurs every year at every position.

In the fantasy community, we reduce information to be concise. We find arbitrary thresholds to make comparisons. It is unbelievably frequent – almost universally so – for members of the fantasy community to put players in neat 12-player buckets. We snap it off with snazzy (slightly confusing) terminology: WR1 (ranked in the top 12), WR2, or WR3. We count the occasions in which players have reached these thresholds.

But if we are being honest, this is not the proper valuation for players at the positional apexes.

Drafting at the Head of the Graph vs. the Tail of the Graph

In the blue box below, where players are above the trendline, we gain an advantage over our opponents. These are not fortune-swinging players, but they are important to have. Thirty-three WRs in 2023 provided advantages over the trendline. The players in the yellow box are in a range where we can earn a significant advantage over our league mates.

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The two players in the green box were crushing our opponents weekly in 2023. I call these Apex Predators. In this case, there are two WRs well above the rest: CeeDee Lamb and Tyreek Hill. It would have been hard to do in a snake format without a trade, but if we imagine that one team had both Lamb and Hill, that team’s advantage over the rest of the league would be about 10 PPG without other factors.

What Does This All Mean For Me?

Let’s make it easy with even number estimates. Let’s say 10 players per fantasy starter gives us an advantage over the trendline. If we play in traditional home league formats, think of it as 10 QBs, 20 RBs, 30 WRs, and 10 TEs. At first blush, we may essentially picture these as the starting lineups in our league, more or less; in reality, these players won’t be dispersed equally among all 12 teams. We want to be a team that hordes more of these advantageous players than our league-mates.

Let’s also say there are three difference-makers per fantasy starter (yellow box or better). These are the players who provide a far greater advantage. That’s three QBs, six RBs, nine WRs, and three TEs.

Finally, there are the greens – the Apex Predators. Consider these the Golden Guns. There are about one of these per fantasy starter. That’s one QB, two RBs, three WRs, and one TE each year. There is admittedly luck involved because these players have to hit the top end of variance; they endure no setbacks, score a lot of TDs, and collect explosives all year. But if you can stack more than one on a team at once, you’ve essentially collected all of the infinity stones.

Each level is an estimate. Results may vary, but they give us a realistic target to shoot for.

How This Helped Us Win in 2023

Below are the 20 players rostered on the most fantasy championship teams based on ESPN data. I categorized them Apex Predators (green box), difference-makers (yellow), and advantageous players (blue). The results are in total half-PPR.

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Based on most home league formats, only seven Apex Predators are possible, and six appear here. The lone exception is Raheem Mostert, who did not play in Week 17 when most fantasy championships were settled. We see four of a possible 21 difference-makers. And we see seven advantageous players. There are only two players who appear in the table who were below the trendline in the season-long half-PPR. Among those, Zamir White caught fire once he gained control of the backfield down the stretch. Achane was incredibly efficient but missed several games; he ranked 8^th among RBs during Championship Week.

Championships were won with players nearer to the top of the positional apexes. This is an annual tradition. Fantasy managers should aim for these types of players.

Action Plan: Hunting for Apex Predators

You’ll often hear Andy, Jason, and Mike speak about looking for upside, especially as they get deeper into drafts; your favorite writers, too. This is what that is all about. We should always aim for more players at the head of the graph, happily sacrificing chances to take from the tail.

The first thing to do is to stop worrying about having perfectly neat and complete starting lineups as we exit our drafts. Let’s shift that focus elsewhere, trusting we will get our shots to form a playable lineup using the waiver wire throughout the year. When we draft, we should emphasize the upside cases for players and deemphasize downside cases.

For example, Jake Ferguson and Raheem Mostert go in a similar part of the draft. Ferguson has very little chance of reaching the apex of his position; Mostert proved he could one year ago. Even if we feel there is a tier break at TE after Ferguson, we should fade him for Mostert, knowing the difference between the point totals for players at the front of the tail is not all that different than those further down. In other words, if we wait longer at TE, the disparity between Ferguson and what we end up with at TE is not great. If we wait longer at RB, the disparity between Mostert and the RB we land on could be critical.

Retrain yourself to look for common breakout hacks, especially later in the draft: second-year players, players with high double-digit fantasy points over expected in consecutive years, players with an easy path to improved volume mid-season, and players who hit on predictive advanced metrics like yards per route run and converted air yards. When we take QBs, we should find runners going late (Jayden Daniels, anyone?). Seek players due positive TD regression. Take shots at rookies and more mature players who have done it repeatedly but are being left for dead (2023 Mike Evans anyone?).

Conversely, we need to devalue player downside in fantasy football. Limited players in seemingly poor offenses (e.g. Devin Singletary on the Giants) are bad bets. When a player may have greater talent, is connected to a better offense, and is being devalued because of a less apparent pathway to touches despite being available in the same part of the draft (e.g. Blake Corum for the Rams), we need to take the upside over the downside. We should remember that, on any given week, we can find someone to replicate one off the wire, but we will be forced to break the bank to acquire the other if his role becomes clarified (or worse, someone else in our league is already holding them).

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Draft sharks, not guppies.