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2014 Fantasy Football Strategy: Know the Room

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By @SicEm18

Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

Martin Scorsese once said – about movies – that “[they're] about what’s on the screen, and what’s off [it].” The same can be said of fantasy football. Your team is just as much about who’s on your roster as much as who is not. You need to pay attention to who won’t be on your team — who will be on other teams — just as much as you need to draft your roster. What you need to do is survey the room to know who you can draft to optimize your squad.

This advice is more for offline drafts (or online drafts with people you know), because you can’t quite tell which GMs have fan biases (unless of course they have giveaway usernames like “WhoDey” for example) like you can with your peers. What surveying the room means is know who has a tendency to draft certain players.

Take advantage of those biases that your league-mates unwittingly draft with. If there’s no player at your current draft pick that you feel 100 percent confident in, look at drafting someone that you know other people are confident will succeed.

For instance, you’re drafting third in the fourth round. You already have a QB and two RBs, but you don’t see any WR that you really like whose ADP falls near your position. I’d advise you drafting a TE here, but the GM after you is a big Andre Johnson fan (and he doesn’t have any WRs yet, either). Draft him, knowing that you have a strong chance of trading him away.

Or maybe you live in Wisconsin, and your fantasy league predominantly consists of Green Bay Packers fans. Using ADP can only get you so far in drafts, because it accounts for a national average. Something that should be considered is that a player from a in-state team will likely go a round earlier than projected. Don’t fall into this trap as a fan. But if another GM has a player that you want and there’s a player left on the board from his favorite team in the right range, you can draft him with the intent to place him on the trade block.

The opposite could be said, of course. Drafting in a biased league that favors one team will also have a tendency to pass on rivals of their team. In the case of living in Wisconsin, you may be able to draft players like Brandon Marshall, Alshon Jeffery, Cordarrelle Patterson and Matthew Stafford among others below their ADP because of their rivalry with the Packers.

Of course, if you play in a more competitive league, biases are less likely to occur in drafting and therefore trades based on fandom aren’t likely. But if you’re in a more friendly league, this can certainly work. I’ve been in leagues where a GM trades for every Atlanta Falcons player, so there’s always a chance someone will give up their roster to get their favorite players. But unless you can get the entire Denver Broncos roster, don’t let biases set in — thrive off of others who do fall into their own trap.

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