How to win your fantasy football snake draft
The classic snake draft, where you’re at the mercy of the random number generator, or whatever method your league of choice uses to determine draft order.
Most people tend to think the higher you pick, the better your chances of winning the league.
But they are wrong, dead wrong.
So today, let’s talk about how to win your fantasy football snake draft.
How snake drafts work
Let’s run through how snake drafts work:
1. Each manager is assigned a draft position, which is determined by the equivalent of “drawing numbers out of a hat.” Which is an ancient way of generating random numbers.
2. The first round of the draft proceeds in order, from the manager with the first pick to the manager with the last.
3. Managers can select any available player at any position when it’s their turn, usually under a time limit. If the time limit expires, an automatic selection will be made.
4. After the last manager picks, the order is inverted. So the manager with the last pick picks first in the second round and so on.
5. The draft proceeds in this fashion for X rounds and each manager leaves with a full roster.
If you’ve never done a snake draft before, then do a couple of mock drafts to get a feel for how it works. And under no circumstance should you use the results as an indicator of your league mates will actually draft.
Now let’s look at the 3 biggest challenges and craft a strategy to overcome them.
Challenge #1: draft order luck (ie, you have no control over where you pick)
I hate snake drafts for this reason, so I try to avoid them in favor of auction drafts.
But this is the way most leagues choose to divvy up players.
It’s easy to get defeated if you wind up towards the bottom, but being low on the list doesn’t mean you’ll finish the season on the bottom of the standings.
In fact, there is no correlation between where you pick and where you finish. What matters is your strategy.
This is why it’s crucial to have a quality set of Value Over Replacement (VOR) projections. Because you need to be able to compare players across positions.
VOR is a hedge against picking towards the bottom. So if the last 7 picks were running backs, then you’ll know if it’s smarter to draft the next highest ranked running back left on the board or grab a more valuable wide receiver or tight end or quarterback. Your VOR projections will tell you this at a glance.
Without VOR, you’re likely to panic and go with flow, grabbing a lower tier running back out of desperation when there were 1 or more wide receivers with higher perceived value.
Some sites offer VOR draft projections for free. But I recommend you build your own so you can control what “value” means to you at each position.
Challenge #2: following the crowd (ie, desperately grabbing a less valuable player at a position because there’s a run at that position)
You almost never want to find yourself snagging a player at a particular position because the last 5 picks were from that position.
What you want is to either start a run (be the first) or break the run (which is the same as starting a new run, but sounds awesomer to break shit).
You’re probably already sick of me saying this by now, but this is where your VOR cheatsheet comes into play.
Think of a run at a particular position like this: the value at that position decreases while the value at other positions increases.
So if it’s your turn and the 5 managers before you picked a QB, you might be tempted to also grab a QB for fear of missing out.
There’s a name for this. It’s called the bandwagon effect.
Think of each position as a particular stock. The more people buy it, the higher the entry price for anyone else who wants to buy. Which means a loser return if the stock increases in price, and a larger loss if it declines.
Lean on your VOR. Ignore what other managers are doing. Pick the best player based on need and value.
Challenge #3: name brand mania and team loyalty delusion (ie, drafting players because they used to be great or because they play on your favorite team)
There’s another name for this challenge: ignoring risk.
Every pick you make comes with a risk. Injury risk, declining performance risk, and regression to the mean risk.
All players get injuries. They all eventually decline in performance. They all regress to the mean. And eventually, they all exit the league, usually unceremoniously.
The challenge is not avoiding declining players, but to understand the risk you’re taking on.
The goal is to distribute the risk. Kinda of like diversifying your stock portfolio. The old “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
I see managers drafting declining players way too early because they used to light the league on fire.
Or, they draft a bunch of players from their favorite team because those are the players they know best.
Don’t be stupid like this.
As a pre-draft exercise, go through your VOR cheatsheet and identify which risk category each player falls in.
Are they injurious? Are they declining? Did they have a big season last year so will probably regress to the mean? Are there any other risks for each player?
You can’t avoid risk, but you can distribute it by not drafting all injury inclined players or players whose most productive years are behind them.
Doing this pre-draft instead of in the moment during the draft will make it easier for you to draft a robust, diversified roster.
Now let’s put it all together.
Game day strategy
Ok, this should be easy now that we’ve addressed the biggest challenges for snake drafting.
Let’s form it into a clear plan.
Pre-draft
The first thing you need to do is build your VOR cheatsheet. This is your roadmap to draft day success and will keep you focused on building a bullet proof roster.
You can grab one from a BigCorpFantasy site, or build your own using lineup theory’s draft cheatsheet builder. I strongly recommend the later, as it draws from multiple sources and allows you to make customizations to suite your style.
Next, go through your cheatsheet and assign risk categories to each player. It’s better to do this now than think about it during the draft.
The risk score will serve as a visual reminder how risky your lineup is, or could be if you draft a particular player. This will lead to a more diverse, robust roster.
The draft
Don’t freak out about your draft position. If you land #1 you know what to do. If you’re last, you still know what to do.
Pay more attention to who you need to draft next than who’s being drafted by whom. The objective is to build a robust, high performance roster.
Follow your VOR projections and risk assignments. You put this together so you wouldn’t need to think so much in the heat of the draft.
The late rounds are reserved for taking flyers on rookies and backups who may become breakout players at some point in the season. So it’s safe to throw out the playbook and pick who you want.
Also, have some fucking fun. Fantasy football is supposed to be fun and for a lot of players, the draft is the funnest part.
If you still have questions, leave a comment or send me an email: a-ron@lineuptheory.com.
Now get out there and fuck some shit up.