Welcome to a whole new fantasy football world!
I’m talking about the FOX Fantasy Quick Challenge Fast Draft, where you can invite one person, a handful of people or a whole group of people, to draft against you for a one-week championship.
But drafts for a setup like this are much different than for a standard full-season fantasy draft. For instance, you don’t draft backups. You don’t draft for “potential.” You don’t draft Defense/Special Teams. It doesn’t sound like much, but those little quirks change the draft considerably.
We’re going to use a four-team draft as an example in this column. But remember that you can have as many as 20 teams in a draft. We’ll talk about strategies for that in a later column.
The first round
Realize that in the first round of your typical fantasy football draft, you’re going to draft the best players in the first round. It sounds ridiculous, but I say that to make a point. You don’t always draft the best players in the first round of a Quick Challenge Fast Draft. You want to draft the players that will exploit their matchups the most – compared to other players at their position.
With four teams in the draft, there will ONLY be four quarterbacks taken, along with eight running backs, eight wide receivers, four tight ends and four kickers.
You’re looking at the top eight running backs as the only RBs starting each week. The worst you can do, is start the seventh- and eighth-best fantasy RBs in the league. So it’s not always paramount to load up on the best RBs early on, like in seasonal leagues.
Same with QBs – you don’t have to kill yourself to get Tom Brady, Drew Brees or Peyton Manning, since you might do just as well with Aaron Rodgers or Matt Schaub against much easier matchups. Plus, since you waited, you can pick a player at another position in the first round, improving your team further.
In the first round, figure you want the best player with the best matchups. You don’t want JUST the best player (Adrian Peterson should not always be the No. 1 pick – especially if he’s playing Pittsburgh on the road). And you don’t want JUST the players with the best matchups (Would you really want to draft Alex Smith in such a thin draft, just because he’s facing the Titans?)
Want a good cheat sheet? Go to the FOX Fantasy Quick Challenge Salary Cap game and look at the dollar amounts at each position. By going there now, here are their most expensive players, which could be looked at as a mock Fast Draft.
So right off the bat, you see that there are five QBs in the top 10, which means one of those studs won’t get drafted in your league. Yet there are only two wide receivers in the top 10. You could plausibly draft a top RB in the first (Peterson or Rice), follow that up with a top wide receiver in the second (Colston or Fitzgerald) and then take the worst of the top four QBs (Favre or Roethlisberger).
The point here is – just because everyone in a four-team draft will end up with a team of superstars doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strategize. Your first-round pick can make your second- and third-round picks even better.
