Rookie Draft Walkthrough - Part 1

The longest, nerdiest, deepest dive into how we are attacking 2023 rookie drafts you will read in the fantasy industry

It’s been a busy week so far on Thinking About Thinking.

It all started with our pre-draft rankings, which included thorough analysis of all the top prospects in this year’s rookie class.

After some immediate content during and post-draft, on Monday night I released my update post-draft, tiered ranks with notes on each tier.

Today, we get into the nitty-gritty with the Rookie Draft Walkthrough. This is where we go through each tier from both a rankings and ADP perspective and talk through the areas of drafts we want to target and avoid proactively, as well as discussing how I’m constructing my portfolio across each draft.

It’s best not to think of this column as advice. Instead, it is an invitation to follow a line of analytical reasoning and see where the results lead. Regardless of how you rank the players or who your targets are, I think process points we’re going to hit on today are universally applicable, which makes this the most important rookie draft content I’m creating this year.

This piece should be especially useful for “portfolio” dynasty players - those who are playing in several leagues, who are more inclined to viewing your investment in players from an exposure perspective across your leagues vs. each individual team. However, I think core aspects of the portfolio approach - being cognizant of the market, approaching outcomes probabilistically, and trying to maximize expected value - apply universally in dynasty.

First of all, I will be referencing my tiers/ranks throughout, so if you haven’t read my rankings columns here is a quick refresher on the parameters:

Ranking Format

Scoring: Based on Start 10, Super-Flex, 6pt pass TD, PPR, 0.5 TEP: adjust as needed

Tiers: The breaks are inherently subjective. I use numbers to outline breaks between fundamentally different asset classes, and letters to suggest gaps that are less fundamental, but where I would still not consider picking someone below the tier in a certain case based on positional need or exposure management.

• Example: I would under certain circumstances take Jahmyr Gibbs or Bryce Young 1.02. I would never take C.J. Stroud 1.02, but I value Stroud much closer to Young or Gibbs than I do Stroud and Quentin Johnston.

“Base picks" I am expressing the value of each tier in “Base picks.” This should help you discern the range of value I ascribe to a given trade up or down possibility.

• For more on that, check out this piece: effectively a “base” pick is a pick in the following year’s draft with an equal likelihood of slotting into any of the 12 positions.

• As a rule of thumb: 1 Base 1 = 3 base 2s, 1 base 2 = 3 base 3s, 1 base 3 = 2 base 4s (don’t send me 54 4ths for Bijan Robinson though)

Guiding Concepts

Let’s start with a discussion of some strategic levers available to us in rookie drafts.

I recommend reading an article of mine from last year called Heuristics for Dynasty Rookie Drafts if you’ve yet to, or if you find any of the forthcoming terminology confusing. That goes over some evergreen concepts in greater detail than I will today. However, I do want to quickly set out some general themes in my drafting approach before diving into this specific class

Why Diversify?

Diversifying is not inherently good or bad. It is merely a matter of risk tolerance. To me it is a simple question; how comfortable am I with the success or failure of my year being tied to a single player’s result? For me, I am not very comfortable with that given the randomness of the game.

In general, I do not carry more than 3X exposure to any high value asset, while I’m much less concerned with my upper exposure limit on low value assets. However, I try not to achieve these exposure caps by actively trading out of preferred players. Instead, I do so by being cost conscious about my buys in the first place…

Passive Diversification

This is a term I coined and will eventually write a standalone article on. It means diversifying a portfolio of teams in a “passive” fashion i.e. without foregoing market value, or actively choosing deemed inferior options at cost.

The general principles of passive diversification are:

• (A) You prefer to have a diversified portfolio than a concentrated one (at least to some extent)

• (B) You want to cultivate your exposures at the lowest aggregate cost possible

• (C) You want to retain as much buying power as possible throughout rookie drafts

Think about each rookie draft as a shopping spree. You are handed $100 and told to buy anything you like in the mall. At the end of the spree, you can feel free to trade items with the rest of the friends participating.

On one hand, you must be prepare to keep every item you buy for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, you can trade items, so spending inefficiently lowers the desirability of your haul after the fact.

For example, you have $40 left and can buy a $30 bracelet or a $40 necklace. Nothing in the mall is less than $10 so this is your last purchase either way. Maybe in this instance you are so sure you like the bracelet and want to keep it forever that you’ll buy that item and eat the $10 as a sunk cost. But what if you had 20 shopping sprees? 50? 100? Might you want to mix in higher priced items and try to increase the value of your haul via trade?

ADP follows a roughly normal distribution. This means that in several leagues a player will be selected above and below their average ADP. Therefore, even if you *only* select a player at or past their ADP, if you select them at or past their ADP every time you can, you will likely wind up with a position well exceeding market-neutral. Especially in later rounds, you often have multiple players available to you past-ADP at every pick.

For your targets, rather than drafting them where you have them ranked, you should instead aim to draft the players you have ranked most ahead of ADP, at their ADP, a higher percentage of the time. For players you rank at or behind their ADP, draft them when you have a chance to take them at or behind ADP and there is no player in a higher tier available. This will naturally exclude the possibility of drafting some players whom you have ranked substantially below ADP, but will allow you to passively mix in others on the occasions they fall.

You’ll see plenty of examples of how I’m actioning this in each tier. The advantage of passive diversification is we are effectively paying for a discounted insurance policy on the chance our stances are incorrect (as they often are).

We could take “our guys” every time according to our ranks. But that inputs significant risk to our portfolio. We could also make active choices to go against our ranks to ensure we hit our target exposures. But this results in us allocating our buying power inefficiently. This approach helps us ensure we generate strong positions of our top targets, while making sure our bets on players we are less interested come on the occasions they are most price efficient.

“The Base Line”

This is another Jakobism I use to describe the point in a draft where you’d prefer a base 1st straight up over a given 1st round pick in that class. For more on base picks check out this piece. However, seeing as a “base pick” does not truly exist in the way it’s defined, the base line is ultimately subjective. In general, the base line = the point of the draft where you are reasonably assured of a similar quality of prospect if the pick conveys low the following year, and are paying the hold tax for the upside of a superior bet.

The front half of rookie drafts is typically populated by all-purpose RBs with elite draft capital, and highly drafted QBs. Occasionally, transcendent WR prospects intersperse themselves among this group. The back half of the first is typically filled by the “good” WR prospects: those with strong draft capital, reasonable production profiles, but of which there are a handful of reasonably comparable WR prospects in most draft years.

Because the typical floor for a 1st rounder is a WR prospect like this, it’s typically best to re-roll the pick for a future 1st (plus any additional asset you can get) if that 1st is close to a “base” 1st or at least projected in the middle. You’re paying the hold tax by deferring the asset for a year, but gaining the upside of the pick coming in higher than expected and granting you a higher-scarcity asset.

Liquidity and Speculation

Below is a tweet from last year’s rookie draft cycle that I featured in my Heuristics article.

I don’t only put this here because it was proven correct (Ridder is valued above the 2023 2.02 currently on fantasy calc), but because I think it taps into a general philosophy I have on rookie draft strategy. Drafting a player is one active choice. Holding them is another active choice every step of the way. I discussed this in my ranking update in relation to WRs like Josh Downs and Cedric Tillman vs. comparable RBs in each’s respective range.

In my drafts I am targeting the RBs more heavily than Downs and Tillman, even higher than my own rankings would advise, because once we are past the point of a draft where long-term core assets can be expected from your pick slot, I am not focused on getting the best player for the next five years in my rookie draft. I need the player who provides the most value for my team in the immediate future, either due to production, resale value or both. When the base expectation for a pick is that they provide no significant value over replacement -as typically becomes the case in the mid-second round - the way to evaluate each pick has to change. Rather than judge them against one another, I weigh their plausible ceiling range both by resale value and production vs. that of a replacement level starter. The asset I perceive to have a wider chunk of their range above replacement level is the asset I am targeting.

Alright.. Time to get into the draft, tier-by-tier.