Draft Assistant

Drafting against your league, not against a list

A draft board tells you who is available and roughly what they are worth. What it cannot see is the room you are in: whether three teams ahead of you already took a quarterback, whether the run on tight ends has started, or whether your league drafts running backs earlier than average every single year. Those local facts decide more picks than the ranking gap between two adjacent players.

The most reliable edge in any draft is positional scarcity rather than raw value. Taking the last player in a tier is worth more than taking the first player in the tier below, because the drop after him is real. When a tier is about to empty, that is the moment to reach.

What to do at each stage

• Early rounds: take the players whose workload is least ambiguous. Certainty compounds. A locked-in workhorse gives you a startable slot every week without further thought.
• Middle rounds: where drafts are won. Look for players whose role grew late in the previous season, because the market prices the season average rather than the ending state.
• Late rounds: stop drafting depth you will never start. Draft players with a path to a starting role instead, usually backups on good offences.
• Kickers and defences: last, always. The difference between the best and the average is smaller than a single waiver claim in October.

Mock drafting is practice, not prediction

The point of a mock draft is not to learn who you will end up with. It is to learn where the runs happen and what your board looks like when a position dries up two picks before your turn. Run the same slot several times and vary your first pick; the useful information is which structures leave you with a lineup you like.