Main Event Draft Review

Walking through my biggest draft of 2023 thus far

This Thursday I drafted my first of three Main Events, with co-managers Ron Stewart and Liam Murphy. This draft was live streamed on Ron’s Youtube channel so make sure to head over and watch if you’d like to see our draft, and gather more of their perspective. 

I haven’t written up any of my drafts this year but I’d been wanting to, and felt this was a good one to do because (for the most part) I was aligned with my co-managers on each pick, we wound up drafting a ton of my top targets, and did it in a unique structure I don’t typically draft. If you’re drafting in the Main Event, any high stakes format, or even your home league, I hope this will be an informative article, on how to manage your draft room and respond to an unconventional structure on the fly.

For those unfamiliar with the FFPC Main Event, here are the details. 

It’s a $2000 entry tournament that consists of both a standalone 12-person league, and a “sprint” for the $1 Million grand prize. 

From Weeks 1-12, you you play a standard H2H, managed redraft league, with the league playoffs set for Weeks13-14. To make your league playoffs, you either need one of the two best H2H records, or be top-two in total points scored from the remaining 10 teams. Prizes are available for the first and second place finishers in each league.

The “sprint” is a three week, total points playoff from Weeks 15-17, for which you need to either finish first in your league in total points, or win your league playoffs to qualify. 

The scoring settings are PPR, 0.5 TEP, with four-point passing TDs and 0.5 points per passing yard. The roster settings are 1QB, 2RB, 2WR, 2Flex, 1TE, 1K, 1DST. You have access to waivers throughout the year.

This format pushes you to play differently than Underdog in a few major ways:

• Managed leagues increase the replacement level necessary to earn a spot in your lineup. This affects decisions throughout the draft, but especially pushes you toward more bets on reserve RBs and youth upside at WR or TE in the middle and late rounds rather than adding projectable route volume. (Think Marivn Mims / Rashee Rice vs. Jakobi Meyers, Juju Smith-Schuster)

• The condensed regular season forces you to consider carefully how many bets you can stack without a strong early-season projection, and balance that against the late-season upside you need to take down the sprint

• The 2RB / 2WR / 2Flex / TEP roster offers flexibility in how you structure your teams. Depending on how the draft falls in relation to your player preferences, you are able to start RB-heavy, WR-heavy, or attack multiple early TEs with true three-position viability In the flex

• The ADP on FFPC tilts toward a higher price on middle-round RBs and TEs, allowing for a longer WR window than on Underdog.

Our team, drafted from the 10th overall selection is: (draft round)

QB: Lamar Jackson (3)

RB: Tony Pollard (2), Travis Etienne (4), Breece Hall (5), Kendre Miller (15)

WR: Stefan Diggs (1), Brandon Aiyuk (6), Jordan Addison (7), Jaxon Smith-Njigba (8), Rashod Bateman (9), Kadarius Toney (10), Odell Beckham Jr. (11), Jonathan Mingo (13), Jameson Williams (14)

TE: Luke Musgrave (12), Michael Mayer (16), Dawson Knox (17), Cole Turner (20)

K: H. Butker (18)

DST: KC Chiefs (19)

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I will mention some of the top alternatives we discussed in each round, but here is a snapshot of the draft board to follow along for context. If there are any players we could have selected that I don’t mention, just let me know in the comments if you’d like me to explain why we didn’t go that route.

This will be more of a strategy article. Don’t expect a complete write-up on each player taken.

Pre-Draft Plan

Liam, Ron, and I talked pre-draft to formulate a plan through the first six rounds. Here were some of the main points:

We mostly agreed the WRs available at the 3/4 turn (Keenan Allen, Deebo Samuel, DK Metcalf, Amari Cooper, Christian Watson etc.) are avoids compared to the RBs and elite QBs available. In my first six high-stakes drafts, I’ve started WR-WR through two rounds to open myself up to freely attack RBs, QBs and TEs through that tier.

However, the WR window extends further in FFPC than Underdog, with some of my favourite young bets reliably available into the 9th round (Rashod Bateman, Treylon Burks, Elijah Moore, Quentin Johnston). This makes me open minded to a more RB-heavy start if we feel they’re the best picks on the board early on. There are exciting early RBs — especially Bijan Robinson, Tony Pollard — and I don’t want to preclude them from my portfolio. We were all fairly excited about the prospect of drafting one of Robinson or Pollard, and then letting the draft determine if we began balanced or RB-heavy depending who fell to us in Rounds 3-6.

Another aspect of our pre-draft strategy that came to fruition was the viability of pairing late TE with early-RB. Due to the nature of the positions, drafting an early-RB team typically requires drafting fewer total RBs+WRs than an early-WR team. 

On a previous team this year, my co-manager (@CamsNotSober) and I drafted hero-RB, without an early TE, and it became difficult to pair, because the optimal range to select upside late-TEs and ideal Zero-RB RB targets has a lot of overlap. Typically you still want to be drafting 6-7 WRs at least regardless of opening, and you find yourself feeling claustrophobic in the middle rounds trying to address multiple weak points in your lineup.

When you start with multiple early RBs, you don’t need to continue devoting selections to the position in the late rounds, and can transition more seamlessly from building out your WR depth to stacking TEs from the middle to late rounds.