This offseason, we’ve published enough fantasy football content to rival War and Peace by word count.
And, of course, this entire time, you’ve been asking for just one article in particular… This one.
How am I approaching 2025 drafts? Where are my rankings? Who are my top draft-day targets? Who are my “Exodia” players – the players I don’t want to leave my draft without?
Without further ado, here is the answer to all of those questions and the one article you’ve all been waiting for.
This article and all references to ADP (Average Draft Position) will be continually updated throughout the remainder of the offseason. (Last Update: August 6th)
1QB/2RB/3WR/1TE/1Flex with PPR scoring is assumed throughout.
Game Theory Optimal
If you want to be a Game Theory Optimal (GTO) fantasy player, you’ll want to read these articles:
1. Upside Wins Championships (2021)
If you just want to know who to draft, you can keep reading.
How to Leverage This Article To Win Your League
True story: With a single email, I have helped multiple people who have never watched a regular-season game of football before, let alone played fantasy football before, win (actually, dominate) their fantasy football leagues.
Here’s the e-mail I sent:
1) I’ve attached my rankings. Print those out. 2) Since you’re drafting on Yahoo!, I’ve also attached Yahoo!’s ADP. Print that out as well.
3) As players are drafted, cross off names from both lists. Physically cross them off with a pen.
4) When drafting, consult both lists. The first list (my rankings) ranks how good each player is. The second list tells you when you should expect those players to be drafted. If you only consult my list, you’ll do alright, but try to look at both lists. If I have a guy really high, but he’s a lot lower on Yahoo!, you should draft him later. That way, you get more value and give yourself an even bigger edge.
5) Load up on RBs and WRs early. Don’t be afraid to draft “bench RBs or WRs” before drafting your first QB or TE. Draft a Kicker with your second-to-last pick, and a DEF with your last pick.
Once the season starts, be sure to read the Fantasy Points Waiver Wire article every week to determine who to add and who to drop. When setting your lineup, use our projections to determine who to start and who to bench. Really, that’s about all it takes.
In the vast majority of home or work leagues, that is about all it takes. However, for the more advanced and competitive players out there (98% of you reading this), I’d urge you to take this a few steps further.
At a minimum, you should contrast these two lists before your draft (my rankings vs. your draft site’s ADP); you can do that in Excel or manually. Find the biggest values (my rankings vs. ADP), circle them, and then plan your draft around them.
But again, that’s only the bare minimum approach. Throughout the remainder of this article, I'll do this for you.
But what you should really do if you want to dominate your league, crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women… is to come into your draft with a preset game plan. You want to run multiple mock drafts before your league's draft. You need to know exactly who is likely to be available to you at every pick in your draft. And then, you’re going to want to tailor your strategy around the best values likely to be available to you at each pick.
What is the best strategy for me? It really depends on your league settings[1], league format, the competitiveness of your league, the site you’re drafting on, and your draft slot. I highly encourage you to study this article and run multiple mock drafts from your draft slot (if you know it beforehand) or from every draft slot (if you don’t). Always try to have a gameplan in place before you draft.
Before every draft, I spend at least 30 minutes devising my optimal draft strategy, envisioning my ideal draft, and considering which players are most likely to be available at each pick. Why? Because the optimal draft strategy is not one based on positions, but one based on players. And that could change dramatically based on your draft slot.
Let’s say I’m drafting from the 1.12 on ESPN in a 12-team league. Then I’ll know I have the 12th, 13th, 36th, 37th, and 60th picks in the draft, etc. Once you have this written down, you should plot out your ideal draft. Your process should look something like this:
“Ideally, my first two picks will be some combination of Malik Nabers, De’Von Achane, and Brian Thomas Jr. Then, I’ll make sure I draft Scott’s Exodia RBs in Round 4, Round 7, and Round 9. Tet McMillan is a must in Round 8. If I’m able to land all of these players — and ADP suggests I will — that means I can afford to take a Big-4 QB or a Big-3 TE in Round 3 if they’re there. If that’s a QB, I’ll have to take Colston Loveland in Round 10. If that’s a TE, I’ll have to take my Exodia QB in Round 11. That leaves Rounds 5-6 a bit of a mystery. But based on this, I will probably have 2-3 WRs and 3-4 RBs through 9 rounds. I can stay flexible, but I’m probably best off going best available WR in Rounds 5 and 6…”
I know what you’re thinking, and yes — I shit you not — home leagues are exactly this soft. Or at least this is true of ESPN at the time I’m writing this (August 6, 2025). But there’s no way this ADP holds. All of “my guys” always inevitably skyrocket in cost, so if you’re drafting later into August, you might have to reach a little more for most of them. (This is why I always recommend that you schedule your league draft as close as possible to this article’s publication date.)
In this hypothetical scenario, we have 4-6 WRs, 3-4 RBs, and one TE through 10 rounds. If we don’t yet have a QB, Round 11 would be a great spot to take one. Since we clearly have an embarrassment of riches at WR, maybe it’s worth swapping one out for a different position. If you know for sure you’re taking a QB in Round 3 and you don’t feel great about Colston Loveland, you can play around with how this team might look if you forced David Njoku onto your team in Round 6. If you’re worried about Kenneth Walker making it to you in Round 4, you can consider pivoting to Omarion Hampton instead. Or perhaps drafting Chase Brown in Round 3, or reaching a round early on Walker if he’s your favorite. You should play out scenarios where many of these players don’t make it to you, or scenarios where you have to reach for them because the best draft strategy is the one that adapts in real-time to how the board is unfolding.
I encourage you to build out your own perfect draft and variations of that draft where things go awry. It’s essential always to have contingency plans in place, as things often go awry.
I promise you, you’ll be glad you put in this extra work.
Fantasy Philosophy
Upside Is Everything / Outliers Win Championships
Football is already an unpredictable sport, due to everything from the inordinately high injury rates down to its weird, oblong-shaped ball that can bounce in any direction. To make matters worse, ADP continues to get better, and the game of fantasy football has gotten a lot tougher.
I like to think I have one of the best track records in the industry, but I’m still likely to make mistakes in this article. That’s okay. I’m willing to be wrong. More than that, I embrace it – it’s actually a core tenet of my draft strategy and fantasy philosophy.
"If I had played my career hitting singles like Pete Rose, I'd wear a dress." – Mickey Mantle
The average drafter cares far too much about their batting average, and nowhere near as much as they should about their slugging percentage; they care far too much about a player’s median projection (or most likely outcome) than their bull-case projection (or upside).
Drafting a player who beats their ADP just flat-out isn’t good enough; in double-digit rounds, it might not even be good at all. In fantasy football, you want high-end producers, every-week starters, and foundational assets. Or, most ideally, true power-law players like 2024 Ja’Marr Chase, who out-scored the next closest WR by 4.9 FPG.
This is true for two main reasons:
1) The goal of the game is to finish 1st of 12 teams; an inherently unlikely 92nd percentile outcome. (Or 10th percentile outcome in 10-team leagues.)
2) We always have the safety net of the waiver wire to fall back on, offering depth, a floor, and (often enough) a ceiling as well. I’d wager your league’s championship-winning roster looked a lot different in Week 17 from how it looked on draft night.
I don’t know what it’s worth in baseball terms, but in fantasy football redraft leagues, hitting a home run on a pick is equivalent to something like 25 doubles. And hitting a single is all too often the same as striking out.
Consequently, we want to be swinging for the fences with every pick we make. There’s maybe some grey area in the first four rounds of your draft, but at least from Round 6 on, upside is just about all that matters, and it should really be the driving force behind every pick you make.
So, don’t be afraid to strike out on a pick. Actually… Embrace it. When drafting, you want to be like Adam Dunn (2nd in home runs, 1st in strikeouts from 2004-2010). You don’t want to be like Pete Rose.
Draft scared, finish middle of the pack. Draft bold, finish first.
Now let’s take some swings.
Random Story Time: The first in-person draft I’ve ever attended was in 2004. I was 13 years old, drafting against my stepfather and all of his friends. In Round 3 of this draft, someone selected Tiki Barber, and the person sitting next to them cracked up dying of laughter. In between tears of laughter, he started chastising the Tiki Barber drafter, and soon everyone else joined in. “He’s 29 years old. He can’t hold onto the football. He doesn’t score touchdowns.” Barber had just hit 8 or more fumbles for the 4th consecutive season. He scored only three touchdowns in the previous season, although he did finish 10th in YFS.
Fast-forward six months, and the Barber drafter had the last laugh. Barber out-scored everyone but the 1.01 that season, propelling his team to a championship trophy. Even back then, I took this as proof that you don’t win fantasy leagues by following groupthink or playing scared. That fortune favors the bold, and karma usually gets the last laugh.
