A few age old questions have haunted fantasy football team managers. Am I wasting my life away by spending years and years on fantasy football? If I win my league will that fill the empty hole of loneliness and despair in my heart? And most importantly, what are the best draft strategies and positions at which to draft?

Well, let’s focus on what we can answer. We are going to take a look at some of the top draft strategies and will run 100 draft simulations at each draft position, optimizing for starting roster projected points.

Draft Strategies considered:

1. Value Over Next Available (VONA) - Learn About VONA
2. Hybrid VONA/Best Available Value - VONA for first 4 rounds
3. Best Available Value - Learn About Value
4. Best Available ADP
5. Zero RB- No RB taken until at least 5th round
6. Hero RB- RB always taken in 1st round, but not again until at least the 6th round
7. Late Round QB- No QB taken until at least 6th round

Assumptions

Draft Settings
Snake, Redraft, Half PPR, 12 Team

Data
2023 projection and ADP data used. Weighted averages for this data across many sites are used for the drafts.

Roster Composition
1 QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 1 Flex, 1 TE, 1 DEF, 1 K, 5 Bench

Target Value
Starting roster projected points, excluding defense and kicker

User Logic
Each draft strategy will incorporate basic logic which manages positional needs. For non value-based strategies, value will still be used to some degree in determining picks. Such as for Zero RB, value is still used to determine between QB/WR/TE in the earlier rounds.

AI Logic
The AI opponents’ behavior will be kept the same for each draft. The AI uses ADP loosely for pick guidance, but there is a large element of randomness as well. This randomness increases as the draft goes on.

Results - Starting Roster Points

Takeaways

Value Based Drafting WINS
As probably assumed, value based drafting is technically most optimal, when looking at it from only this early round analysis. Interesting though is that the Hybrid strategy outperformed a strict VONA strategy. Meaning, VONA is not the end all be all for draft optimization and can be improved upon.

Early draft position makes a BIG difference
Most specifically, the first 3 rounds of the draft dominated performance, with the last 3 performing much worse. Interestingly, the Best Available strategies somewhat made position meaningless. This may indicate that the VONA strategy used by other drafts in the early rounds actually makes a big difference, which aligns with why the Hybrid strategy outperformed only VONA.

Drafting with ADP is the WORST strategy
Unsurprisingly, if you simply follow drafting for ADP, which somewhat aligns with what the opponents are doing, you will not be able to find any advantages during the draft.

There is room for GROWTH
The Hybrid strategy outperforming VONA proves that there is room for growth when looking at how to optimize a draft. Plenty of dials are waiting to be turned here, in terms of which round we transition away from VONA as well as which strategies are used later in the draft.

Summary

The earlier your position in the draft, the better your outlook. In terms of strategy, modern value based approaches do seem to have an advantage over more simplistic pre-determined approaches.

That being said, there seems to be plenty of room for growth, and I am excited to see what the future holds for further draft optimization.

What do you think?

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1. All drafts were simulated using PerfectPick
2. Learn more about Value over Next Available (VONA)