ASK THE EXPERTS appears weekly from training camp through the Super Bowl with answers to a new question being posted Thursday morning. How the guest experts responded when we asked them: What is your best piece of draft-day advice?
JASON WOOD
The best advice is to remain flexible. Too many fantasy managers obsess about a hard and fast plan. They read too many articles describing the "perfect draft" and set unrealistic expectations for how their own drafts will unfold. If you're too rigid in your plan, it's going to lead to panic and poor decision-making when your strategy inevitably unravels, as your league mates have their own ideas for how the draft should unfold. Instead, trust your pre-draft research process. Whether you do your own projections and rankings, or trust one of us to guide you, believe in them. Take best players available on the board, and focus on tier breaks to optimize your build.
Wood is Senior Editor at Footballguys.com and has been with the company since its start in 2000. For more than 20 years, Footballguys has provided rankings, projections, and analysis to help fantasy managers dominate their leagues.
LUKE WILSON
This is sort of an emerging bit of wisdom over the last few years, but I think it bears revisiting: You're generally not going to regret steering clear of the "RB Dead Zone", i.e. the running backs that are coming off the board immediately after the consensus top 12. This portion of most draft boards is headlined by guys like Rachaad White, James Cook, Alvin Kamara, Aaron Jones and D'Andre Swift -- purported high-end RB2s with the high draft price tag to match. These running backs are like buying a used Dodge sedan at auction: It might seem like a good deal today, but there's a good chance this purchase winds up filed under 'buyer's remorse'. The teams I've drafted in both mock drafts and real ones so far have generally featured at least one running back in the first two rounds, and quite often two. Going 'RB-RB' is not exactly a revolutionary concept in fantasy, but in the current fantasy landscape that lauds going heavy on the receivers, waiting until the 3rd/4th rounds and loading up on the likes of Nico Collins, Cooper Kupp, DK Metcalf, DJ Moore and Jaylen Waddle has just felt right. So let's all embrace our inner dinosaurs and go Saquon Barkley-Derrick Henry to kick off our drafts this weekend!
Wilson is a Fantasy Index contributor who also hosts the FI Podcast and weighs in with fantasy advice regularly in the FI Discord server. He's not the former Seahawks tight end, but he is the proud father of two large boys.
MIKE NAZAREK
Wait on taking a quarterback in your draft. The elite guys are nice, but you can get more value in the middle rounds of your draft with guys like Joe Burrow and Kyler Murray.
Nazarek is the CEO of Fantasy Football Mastermind Inc, celebrating 29 years online! His company offers a preseason draft guide, customizable cheat sheets, a multi-use fantasy drafting program including auction values, weekly in-season newsletters, injury reports and free NFL news (updated daily) at its website, www.ffmastermind.com. He has been playing fantasy football since 1988 and is a four-peat champion of the SI.com Experts Fantasy League, a nationally published writer in several fantasy magazines and a former columnist for SI.com. He's also won $36K in recent seasons of the FFPC High Stakes Main Event. Nazarek can be reached via email at miken@ffmastermind.com.
DAVID DOREY
The greatest piece of advice I can offer, which is 100% true and delivered me many championships is simply this -- Build the optimal starting lineup. By that, I mean try to populate your starting roster with the highest scoring player in each position possible. Don't get cute with 4 straight WR to begin. Don't leave any position to mid draft. You only win with the best possible starting lineup so get a great QB, get a great TE, fill in RB and WR the best you can and still get the great QB and TE. Later in the draft, get a great defense and kicker. Yes, they are hard to call but the elite are not. Build an optimal team and don't load up on anything until you have the best starters you can.
Dorey co-founded The Huddle.com in 1997. He's ranked every player and projected every game for the last 26 years and is the author of Fantasy Football: The Next Level. David has appeared on numerous radio, television, newspaper and magazines over the last two decades.
IAN ALLAN
I am a fan of selecting backup running backs. Stash a few of those guys on your roster — Jordan Mason, Blake Corum, Ray Davis, Zach Charbonnet — and there’s a good chance they’ll blossom into difference makers at some point during the season. In general, I prefer high-end backup running backs rather than modest depth wide receivers.
Allan co-founded Fantasy Football Index in 1987. Since that time, he’s written and edited most of the content published in the magazines, newsletters and at www.fantasyindex.com. Allan is a member of the FSGA Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame and the Fantasy Sports Writers Association Hall of Fame.
KEN HOLIZNA
Don’t overpay for any position. There is no need to panic. Only draft players in rounds where their value makes sense for the rules your league uses, not according to the generic draft site ADP or projected points. Good QBs are falling into rounds 8-10. Rounds 4-6 seem to be a sweet spot for good, not great RBs, if you decide to load up on WRs and maybe a hero RB. As usual, if you don’t get a top-4 TE you can wait and get good value without losing a ton of points at the position later in the draft. Most of all enjoy the process. If it’s more fun to just draft your guys regardless, go for it! I’m pumped for Week 1: Let’s Go!
Holizna is a 29-year fantasy football enthusiast and founder of Faith-Family-Fantasy Football in 2019, a family-friendly, faith-based, G-rated fantasy football platform. Rankings contributor to the 2023 Fantasy Index magazine. Find him on Twitter @holihandicapper
SCOTT PIANOWSKI
If your league starts three wides or multiple flexes, try to get the best receiver room in the league. Find wideouts who start themselves. And while real-life football is all about the quarterback, fantasy managers don't have to sweat the quarterback slot in 2024. You can do well at any price point. Be patient. When you miss a train in NYC, another one is coming in five minutes.
Pianowski has been with Yahoo Sports since 2008, covering a variety of sports. On the rare occasions when the computer is turned off, he enjoys word games, poker, music, film, game theory, and a variety of condiments. He lives in suburban Detroit. Pianowski was inducted into the FSWA Hall of Fame in 2021.
ANDY RICHARDSON
I've got two, both of which I was reminded of in an earlier draft these week. One is that you'll feel better if you load your bench with upside rather than modest fill-ins. Unless you're in a really, really large league, there will be functional, usable veterans at wide receiver, running back (to a lesser extent) and perhaps even backup quarterback available on waivers all year long. So draft the guys who are longer shots but could actually win leagues rather than boring veterans. My personal moment of regret was taking Zack Moss late rather than Dolphins rookie Jaylen Wright. Wright might be nothing, but Moss almost certainly isn't going to win me the league. The second piece of advice is too much information can be as big a problem as not enough. If your pick is approaching you don't want to have three different ranking lists and ADP windows open, because you probably won't have enough time to check all of them (and you might miss the most important one). Have one good resource handy to reference for last-minute debates.
Richardson has been a contributing writer and editor to the Fantasy Football Index magazine and www.fantasyindex.com since 2002. His responsibilities include team defense and IDP projections and various site features, and he has run the magazine's annual experts draft and auction leagues since their inception. He writes a weekly gambling newsletter, Index Bets, during the NFL season and also previews all the games on Saturdays and writes a wrap-up column on Mondays.