Early Round Draft Strategy: Safe & Risky Players

Diversifying Your Portfolio

If you follow fantasy football, you've no doubt seen articles and tweets about diversification. That concept is commonly used in the context of best ball rosters. But diversification can be a strategy within a single team as well. Drafting a team full of known commodities could lead to a solid team that can't get over the hump and win it all. But having a team with all boom-or-bust players could lead to a level of variance that feels unsafe.

Using our Footballguys projections from David Dodds, Bob Henry, Maurile Tremblay, and Jason Wood, a range of outcomes for each player can be gauged by the variance within the projections and the delta between the highest and lowest projections of the group.

Note: quarterbacks have been excluded from this exercise. Their projections tend to vary less, and there are fewer boom-or-bust types at the position.

Round-by-Round

Below, we'll separate players into groups based on Average Draft Position and identify the known commodities (those with a small gap between the highest and lowest projections) and the boom-or-bust players (those where our projectors are less aligned).

When looking at the tables below, note the following abbreviations.

• FP AVG = the average fantasy points projection of the four projectors
• Max = the highest projection
• Min = the lowest projection
• FP GAP = the delta between "Min" and "Max"
• In the "FP GAP" column, red shows a narrower gap between the maximum and minimum projections, implying a safer player.

Round 1

Observations

• It's no surprise that the top-ranked player at each position has a narrow distribution of projections. Both Saquon Barkley and DeAndre Hopkins are projected to see plenty of volume and be efficient with their opportunities. Michael Thomas is also a high-floor play, as he's a candidate for 180 or more targets and a 30% market share in the New Orleans offense.
• Alvin Kamara headlines the "boom/bust" category in Round 1, and that's logical considering the difficulty in projecting his workload. Of all running backs in the top-12 of PPR points per game last season, only James White had fewer carries per game than Kamara's 12.9. So will this finally be the year that Kamara sees 15-17 rushes per game? As our projectors suggest, it's difficult to assess that.
• Players joining new teams and teams with new coaches are always difficult to project. LeVeon Bell checks both of those boxes and also has some uncertainty due to him sitting out 2018. Those reasons contribute to him having the largest disparity in projections among all first-round fantasy picks.

Round 2

Observations

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