Before the 2016 NFL season gets underway, having a good daily fantasy sports strategy going into the first week of the season is a great idea. Whether you play at DraftKings, FanDuel, or another site, you will want to be prepared before you ever finalize the draft of your first team of the season. While this will be mainly basic strategy and advice here, it is a good start to a winning fantasy football season.
Let’s Look at Position
You should always place special emphasis on some positions over others. And the emphasis that you place is really dependent on the rules of the league that you are in. Most leagues have a separation between the quarterback position and everything else. If this is what you are looking at, then the separation is a lot easier than it is in some other leagues. You simply look at the amount of fantasy points that a top QB averages per game, and then the amount of points that the average winning team has. If you need 200 fantasy points to win your contest, and the average top QB contributes 80 points per game, then you are looking at 40 percent of your salary going to the QB, and 60 percent going to other positions.
What it comes down to is salary dollars even in leagues where a top ranked wide receiver can outscore the top ranked QB. If you are in a league where WRs are more highly priced than running backs because they are able to score more points, then you should divert more dollars to them. But, if you are in a league where wide receivers are more highly priced than running backs, yet they do not have a tendency to score more points, then you should focus on the RB because you can get more fantasy point potential for less money. That will allow you to focus your salary where it can help you more in other places. This is a concept often referred to as value.
Value is Key in Fantasy
Value, if you want to get technical about it, can be defined as the amount of fantasy points you are getting per salary dollar invested. If you’re in a league that gives you $50,000 in salary, you will find that some players are more costly to draft than others. That’s just the nature of the game of daily fantasy football, and different sites use different ranking methods for valuing their players. All use skill, but to different degrees. Some even take popularity into account, which is an ideal situation for the smart fantasy manager. This allows you to take advantage of other people’s biases when they are drafting their favorite players. Instead, you can often get a great deal on a top fantasy performer that doesn’t have as large of a fan base.
Measuring value is an inexact science, but it’s an extremely important one. For example, if you are able to project that Julio Jones will score 18 fantasy points per game, and Odell Beckham Jr. will score 19, if they are priced the same, Beckham is the better value. It’s when prices are different that you need to actually break down each player with math. But the math is pretty simple. If Jones is priced at $7,000 and Beckham is priced at $7,200, then you take Jones’ $7,000 and divide it by 18. Do the same with Beckham; $7,200 divided by 19. Jones stands at 388.9, while Beckham stands at 378.9. We see here that even though Beckham is $200 more than Jones, the added point outpaces the increase in price making Beckham cheaper per expected point scored than Jones is.
Positions don’t even need to match up as they do in the above example. You can compare a QB’s value to a kicker’s if you want. However, as a general rule, QBs will always be more expensive than Ks, meaning that kickers should not be given the same priority on your draft. You can find high value players anywhere, but you should focus on those that have the highest salaries (QB, WR, RB) as these are where value becomes most important.
Finally, remember that while you will need to save as much money as possible when you draft, you don’t want to leave too much money on the table, if any at all. You have a salary cap for a reason, value just lets you stretch out your salary and get more talent for less. You will need to draft expensive players occasionally, especially if they will contribute points to your team.
