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Strategies for Drafting Depth - Summary

Draft Recommendations: Draft the most depth at the position which you neglect in the first nine rounds of your fantasy draft, do not pass on a good player in early rounds because you already have all your starters at that position and do not neglect the importance of a third QB.

Fantasy owners often focus on the strategy for drafting starting players for their fantasy football team but often forget that injuries happen very often in the NFL. Some people will pass on a running back they really like because they already drafted two and would rather draft their third starting wide receiver. In this article, we will address this and tell you at which positions you should have the most depth and how important it is to have depth on your fantasy team.

In order to do this analysis, we used a measure called “starter games”. Starter games are equal to the average number of games played by players drafted at a certain position (QBs in the top 8, 9 to 16 or 17 to 24 in average draft position) in fantasy drafts but only for players who would have been good enough to start on your fantasy football team. For example, for quarterbacks it will only count the number of games played for quarterbacks who averaged more than 17 fantasy points per game in a season.

This may seem complicated at first look but it will clarify as we analyze each position one by one:

Quarterbacks
Quarterbacks are the ones that play the fewest number of starter games amongst all positions. This means that quarterbacks are quite unpredictable and also get hurt quite often. In our Top QB or QB Tandem Article we suggest that you should draft two quarterbacks in the 13 to 16 range instead of drafting one of the top quarterbacks. Our numbers show that it is a slightly better strategy for depth than drafting a top QB but it also tells us that, if you can, you should draft a third quarterback in the top 24.

Running Backs
Fantasy players generally draft a lot of depth at the running back position because it is known that running backs are injury-prone and you can usually find some nice sleepers late in the draft. The best strategy for depth is to draft a top 12 running back and three in the 13 to 36 range. If you do that, most of the time you will not need your other backups and four running backs would be enough. If you cannot draft that many in the top 36, you just have to draft more running backs later in your draft.

Wide Receivers
Wide receivers will generally play more games than running backs and there is also more depth available later in the draft and on waivers. If you draft two WRs in the top 24 and two more in the 25 to 48 range, it will leave you a few games short. However, even if you have to wait until the final few rounds of your drafts to select your backups, it is not a big deal because there is quite a bit of depth at the position and you can always get more on waivers during the season.

Tight Ends

Most fantasy players generally don’t bother about their backup tight end but as you can see, even if you draft a top eight tight end, you are still missing 4.4 starter games.  Because of that, we strongly recommend that you draft your backup tight end in the top 16 or you could lose some valuable points from the tight end position for a number of games.

Conclusion

These numbers were quite surprising to us and show that you cannot underestimate the value of a backup quarterback or a backup tight end. Based on this analysis and our Average Draft Position Analysis, in the first nine rounds of your draft you will need at least 1 QB, 3 RBs, 2 WRs and 1 TE.

There is nothing wrong with drafting your second backup RB before your last starting WR or your backup QB before your first backup WR if you are getting good value. The only thing that you want to ensure is that you do not go over the average starter games required before having drafted all of your starters at these four positions. The final pieces of advices are that the position which you neglect in the first nine rounds of your draft is the position where you will want to draft the most backups and if your draft has 20 rounds or more, you should absolutely draft a third QB.

See the complete analysis