The Complete Guide to Fantasy Football for Beginners Part 3: Drafting your Squad

Drafting a Squad: Basics

The day of the draft will be what can decide your whole season. Yes, you can make changes to your roster throughout the season, but starting with the best lineup you can choose will set you perfectly on the path to glory. 

Most lineups will go like follows: 

1 QB

2 RB

2 WR

1 TE

1 FLEX

1 DEF

1 KICKER

The flex position allows you to put in any tight end, receiver, or running back in that extra spot. If you want to start tight end Dalton Kincaid but you already have Travis Kelce in that TE spot, that’s where the flex spot comes in. 

One of the keys to building the best squad is to maintain a good balance and maintain talent in each position. If you have five top running backs but only one good receiver, you’re not allowed to plug a running back into that WR spot, and even while using the flex you can’t start more than three running backs anyways. When drafting, you should focus on what you need in your lineup and avoid overstocking at one position. 

Drafting is another part of fantasy football that can change from league to league. For the sake of this guide, we will be using what’s known as a Snake Draft. To explain what a snake draft is, we will be using a 6 player league as an example. The 6 players in this league are Tom, Mike, Aaron, Joe, Dan, and Drew. Whoever gets the first pick in one round will get the last pick in the following round, and vice versa. 

In this table, you can see that Peyton had the first overall pick, followed by Joe. Aaron closed out round 1. However, you can see that in round 2, Aaron had the first pick and Peyton had the last. Then in the third round, Mike received the first pick again. This is a snake draft, which is the most common draft format and ensures that the draft is fair for each player and no one manager has an advantage.

When you start a draft, there are plenty of mock drafts online and most fantasy platforms will have tools that will tell you which players are expected to be first round picks, so you have an idea of who to choose once you go on the clock. Whichever pick you get, make sure you choose someone who you know won’t be there for long. It’s a waste to choose a player in round one who isn’t expected to go until round six, so don’t be that guy.

The first 5-6 rounds will be the most important rounds of the draft, because these are around where you choose your starters. On a lineup, you have your starting lineup which I showed earlier, and then you have a certain number of bench spots for protection. If your star QB gets hurt before the game, you have a substitute waiting on your lineup that can fill in. This doesn’t mean that the first several rounds aren’t important, however, because your starting lineup will generally be much better than any players on your bench. 

Before you reach the halfway point in your draft you should have your starting lineup fully filled, excluding defense and kicker. If you wait until late in the draft to focus on a position, you’ll end up being held back each week because your starters aren’t nearly good enough to compete with other teams. 

For the rest of the draft, you should focus on building up your substitutes, which includes players that won’t win you games but can provide you a stable floor in a pinch, so you won’t be destined to a loss even when your star players are on bye weeks. 

Your draft is up to you, and you have flexibility in many decisions. In this next section, we will go over tips and strategies to maximize your draft potential and start the season off on the best foot. 

Drafting a Squad: Tips and Strategies

It’s easy to draft a lineup, it’s not easy to draft a good one. If you want to win your league, you need to know how to utilize the draft to build the best possible squad, meaning your team is both well-rounded with high-upside guys as well as superstars that will deliver consistent output each week. In this section, we will be providing proven strategies as well as some useful tips that could win you your league.24

The first tip is a common mistake I see all the time, and it’s arguably the worst mistake you can make in your draft. Do NOT overspend on a quarterback. Quarterbacks score more points than any other player, which trick many into believing that they should be taken in the first two rounds. This isn’t true at all. Yes, quarterbacks are the highest scoring position, but that’s because a quarterback in general receives so much more volume in an offense than any other position. There are plenty of quarterbacks that can be consistent starters, so don’t think you need to draft the top guy to be a contender. Instead, get your hands on the premium talent at WR, RB, or TE, because finding a consistent starter at these positions is so much more difficult than QBs. For an explanation, look at this graph below using stats from 2023. 

If you look at this above graph, you can see how many players from each position averaged at least 18 points in 2023. There were 12 quarterbacks who reached the margin, while only 7 players from every other position achieved this. A RB or WR who averages 20 is much more valuable than a QB who averages 20. Ideally, the earliest you should be drafting a quarterback is the third round. 

The second tip is to plan your bench carefully. A mistake I see many players making is that they only focus on the draft until their starting lineup is filled and just auto-select their bench. The truth is, a strong inventory of substitutes can be crucial for the later stages of the season, and there’s an important key to how you draft your bench.

Most rosters have 9 starting positions and 7 bench spots. When you draft a bench, completely disregard the kicker and defense. Both of these positions are easily replaceable through free agency and will just waste a spot on your substitute lineup. You should solely focus on offensive players. 

You don’t have to follow this exactly, but here’s a good guideline for how to organize your bench spots. With the seven available slots, a good bench can have two backup QBs, two backup RBs, two backup WRs, and a backup TE. This allows for safety in all the important positions, but it’s not as simple as that. 

With each position, find a consistent backup that won’t produce superstar numbers, but will provide a high enough floor that you can rely on each week. With the second substitute, you should ideally find a young player with high upside. Every single year there will be unknown players that turn into superstars near the end of the season, such as Rashee Rice in 2023. The Chiefs WR was a second-round rookie and started the season extremely slow, but ended the season with six straight double digit games. Having one of these players on your team can be what separates a good squad and a championship squad. 

Finding the next hidden gem is never easy, but you should try to find a player with breakout potential. Signs of this potential can be a player who had a massive change in their offense, someone who recently moved teams, or someone coming back from injury. It’s not a light process to find one of these top sleeper picks, but with some quick research and a stroke of luck you can win your league. Worst case scenario, you cut that player off your team or trade him for some cheap value. 

This third tip is about how to manage your defense and kicker, which has been briefly touched on a few times earlier in this guide. In simple terms, the kicker and defense should be your last two picks in the draft and no earlier. Even if you see other teams drafting them earlier, hold out and focus on the rest of your team. Truth be told, you likely won’t even use the same defense or kicker year-round if you are serious about winning. A defense receives value almost entirely from their opponents in the NFL, because even the best defenses won’t produce in fantasy against top offenses. 

What I like to do is cycle out my kicker and defense each week, so I don’t focus on who ends up on my team after draft day. By signing and cutting these positions before every game, I can account for who they are matching up against and whether or not the matchup is truly worth putting them in my starting lineup. You don’t have to do that, but it’s important to know that there is no kicker or defense that is valuable enough for you to take in the last few rounds. Even the best kickers, such as superstar Justin Tucker, won’t do well if the offense doesn’t get them in field goal range enough. 

The final tip is to not mix up talent with production. There are plenty of extremely athletic and skilled players in the league, but for those new to fantasy football, you may be tempted to think that the players who perform the best on the field will perform the best in fantasy. While this is partially true, it’s important to look at a player’s surroundings and environment to truly determine if they belong on your roster.

To give an example, I firmly think Patrick Mahomes is the best quarterback in the league. He’s won MVP multiple times, has two superbowl rings, and his ability to accurately dish the ball out in any situation is superhuman. If I had never played fantasy football before, I would think that Patrick Mahomes is the obvious choice for the first QB to be drafted. This is not true. Mahomes may be the most skilled player at the position, but I’d prefer Josh Allen or Jalen Hurts. In most fantasy leagues, a player receives more points for rushing yards/touchdowns than they do for passing stats. A rushing touchdown is normally worth six fantasy points as opposed to four for a passing touchdown. Mahomes is one of the most prolific passers we have ever seen, don’t get me wrong, but he doesn’t scramble nearly as much as some other quarterbacks do. In addition, his weapons on the Chiefs were good but not great, and he didn’t have the same star players surrounding him as some other quarterbacks did. Consequently, Mahomes actually finished behind seven other quarterbacks in 2023 in terms of total points scored. Are there seven quarterbacks better than Mahomes? No way, but it just goes to show that ability doesn’t always correspond to output. 

When deciding who are the best players at a position, make sure to analyze the following factors: Talent, Age, Consistency, and Team. Talent refers to how skilled/gifted a player is known to be, meaning their actual ability. Age is self-explanatory, because it is known that performances can begin to decline as players get older, so it’s important to take this into account. Consistency is how often a player has proven to perform. Mike Evans is a prime model for a player with good consistency. He’s been in the league for 10 years and has superbly surpassed 1000 yards every single time, making him a safe pick in 2024. Team basically means what team do they play on? How good are their surroundings? Do they have no help to succeed? Do they have too much competition for volume?

By following these 4 keys, you can almost always predict which players will succeed and which players will struggle, and you’ll be prepared before your draft. This doesn’t mean there won’t be surprises, every year has unexpected players overperform and unexpected players underperform. But with these guidelines, you can have a good blueprint of who belongs on your roster and who belongs to the streets. 

A major mistake I would avoid is drafting two offensive playmakers on the same NFL team. To show what I’m talking about, I wouldn’t recommend drafting both Amon-Ra St. Brown and Sam LaPorta from the Detroit Lions, because they limit your ceiling. If St. Brown has a really good game, it’s likely to the detriment of LaPorta’s output in that same week. Both players, despite being top fantasy options, compete for targets and can cancel each other out if you choose to add both to your roster. The only exception is Quarterback/WR duos, which can actually dominate leagues if you choose the right options. My favorite pairing this year is Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb from the Dallas Cowboys, who were both consistent starters last year and can work to raise your ceiling each week rather than lower it. 

Regardless of how you choose to draft your lineup, just remember that you have a whole season to tweak and change your team. Your lineup before the games start is just a baseline, you will have plenty of opportunities to trade or sign free agents if your players don’t reach their goals. Make prepared decisions, and just know whatever happens in the draft is a small portion of the competition. A good draft will merely set you on the path to success, a bad draft takes you off the path and you can always find your way back.