2022 Fantasy Draft Strategy: Standard, Superflex, Half-PPR, and Full-PPR

Winning a fantasy football league requires three things: a well-prepared fantasy draft strategy, careful attention to waivers, and luck. You can’t coach luck and attention to waivers just requires time. However, we can help you prepare for your upcoming draft by analyzing how to go about building a draft strategy based on 2022 data.

In this article we present two separate lines of analysis to help you plan for your upcoming fantasy draft.

1. First, we look at the points above replacement level at each position for player’s available at a given pick. For example, comparing the points above replacement for the best RB, WR, TE, and QB who is typically available at the 10th pick can help you decide which players will contribute the most to your total and your chances of winning.
2. Then, we use a new metric – differential value – to help you determine which positions are the best to take at each draft pick. The idea is based on prioritizing positions where the talent drop-off by your next pick or two is the largest. This helps you build a draft strategy by making the best possible picks in the moment to set you up to maximize value at your next pick or two.

This is a bit different from how we analyzed draft strategy last year, but we believe this is a better methodology. To skip ahead to our conclusions, click here to read our 2022 fantasy draft strategy.

Point Above Replacement as a Guide for Draft Strategy

Quarterbacks score the most points in fantasy football. However, in regular leagues (where you start one quarterback) the first quarterback is rarely drafted before the late second round or early third round. Why is this the case?

The idea is that even though quarterbacks score the most, the difference from the best QB to the 6th best QB is not large enough to warrant spending an early pick on the QB. Fantasy football is an adversarial game. The goal is to score more points than your opponent every week. Thus, we don’t care purely about how much a player scores, but rather how much more your player scores than your opponent’s player at the same position. This is the basis for our draft strategy.

So, the proper way to analyze value in fantasy football is to compare one player against an ‘average’ player at the same position. Therefore, in all of the following analysis we compute a player’s value by taking their projected points scored and subtracting off the replacement level points scored. We determine replacement level by the player at that position who should be the worst player who still starts week-in, week-out.

The following replacement levels were taken by looking at mean points-per-game of the 30th best WR and RB and the 12th best TE and QB from 2021 data. In superflex leagues, the replacement level for a quarterback was determined by looking at the 24th best points-per-game.

Position	Standard	Half-PPR	Full-PPR	Superflex Half-PPR
WR	8.7	11.2	14	11.2
RB	9.4	10.5	11.7	10.5
TE	6.4	8.5	10.4	8.5
QB	19.2	19.2	19.2	14.7

Notice that in superflex, quarterbacks are about 4.5 points more valuable simply because more of them have to start in a given week.

2022 Fantasy Value Above Replacement Charts

Winning as many games as possible in fantasy is roughly equivalent to accruing as much ‘value above replacement’ as possible in your starting lineup. Therefore, you can form a fantasy draft strategy by maximizing the value above replacement you get at each pick. So, we computed exactly this value – the value above replacement at each pick in the top 100 separated out by position. We used average draft position tuned to each different format to determine which players were likely to be available at each pick.

First, though, a comment on how we computed these values. To project how much an individual player will score in the upcoming season, we scraped each of the expert’s projections from FantasyPros and took the median projection from the bunch. Doing things this way takes advantage of the ‘wisdom of the masses’ effect that we’ve talked about at length before.

Each of the figures below shows value above replacement for both the top 36 (left) and top 100 (right) in standard scoring, half-pppr, full-ppr, and superflex half-ppr scoring.

Standard Scoring Value Above Replacement

Immediately in standard scoring two things stick out to me. First, the early running backs are so unbelievably valuable that no other position should even be a consideration until at least close to the 10th pick. This largely agrees with general consensus – early running backs are the most valuable – but this is perhaps a bit more extreme than most people might guess.

A second takeaway here is that because the red quarterback line is almost always the highest, this means that quarterbacks are almost always drafted later than they should be. The quarterback line being the highest means that at each pick, a quarterback represents the best value over replacement of any position. I’ve always thought that quarterbacks are underrated and this data supports this fact.

Finally, and we’ll see this a lot in the next few graphics, the purple wide receiver line is nearly always the lowest. This means that receivers are generally drafted earlier than they should be. This is a product of the depth of the receiver class – you can get good value much later in the draft.

Half-PPR and Full-PPR Value Above Replacement Charts

In the PPR formats, the conclusions are largely the same. Early running backs are still the same elite value. However, there are a few key differences that should influence your fantasy draft strategy in 2022.

First, while running backs are still the clear best value in the first picks or so, the tight-end position becomes an elite value in the first round after the first five picks. This is, of course, predicated on Travis Kelce still being available. I made largely the same conclusion last year: getting a top 2 tight end in the back half of the first or early in the second is an excellent draft strategy. The fact that we’ve made this conclusion two years in a row simply reaffirms this claim. Grab an early TE if you can.

Second, wide-receivers are even more over-drafted in the PPR formats because the purple line is even further below the rest. Why is this the case? Most people think that because wide receivers become more valuable with points per reception that they should be drafted earlier.

However, remember that with the exception of the FLEX spot, wide receivers should be compared against wide receivers. Thus, while receivers start to score more points they don’t actually get that much more valuable because all receivers get a boost. Now, don’t get me wrong: receivers are certainly more valuable in PPR formats than in standard formats. All I am saying is that based on the above charts and the ADP I used, people are overreacting and thinking that the difference is larger than it is.

I will point out one last fact that should be hammered into everyone’s brain and incorporated into everyone’s fantasy draft strategy. In all the charts I’ve shown so far, the running back line absolutely plummets around pick 100, around the end of the eighth round. This means that after this point there is nearly no RB value left. So, if you’re approaching the 7th and 8th round and know you need some more RB value, it might already be too late. After that, the running backs are lottery tickets that can’t be started on a weekly basis unless something dramatic happens (an injury) to change their value.

Superflex Value Above Replacement Charts

The only real difference between superflex and regular leagues is that the replacement level for quarterbacks is significantly lower. An economic perspective: because the demand for quarterbacks increases and the supply is constant, the price should necessarily go up. In this format, you regularly see 5-10 quarterbacks go in the first few rounds. In fact, in each of the previous formats running backs were kings for the first half of the first round. In superflex, though, the best overall players are the top few QBs.

Other than the fact that the QB line is much higher, there isn’t a lot to be said for how superflex differs from regular leagues. One problem with using only the above graphics is that it doesn’t actually tell you who to take at each spot.

For example, look back at the Standard format chart and pretend you have the 9th overall pick. If you didn’t know any better you would draft a QB and be happy that you got the best value above replacement of any player available. However, the QB line was flat meaning that you could have gotten the same value at your next pick, 16th overall. Therefore it would have been better to wait a while to draft the quarterback. In the next section we formalize this idea to help you decide who to draft at each pick.

Differential Value as a Fantasy Draft Strategy

Our proposed draft strategy is to use the idea of differential value to determine which positions are the best to pick in each round. Differential value is nothing more than the value you get from a ‘typical’ player at your current pick minus the reduced value you would expect to get by waiting a round or two. Here’s an example.

Nearly every league will start with a running back being taken first overall. This is because the value of an elite running back compared with the running back you would get at the 24th and 25th overall pick is massive: an expected difference of about 10 or 11 points per game. On the other hand, the difference between the best receiver and a typical receiver available at the 24th/25th pick is around to 7-8 points. So, you lose more value by waiting on an RB than you do by waiting on a WR. Therefore, you should take the RB with your first overall pick.

The same analysis can be applied to help decide which position to pick at any point in the draft. We computed this differential value metric – basically fantasy PPG lost by waiting on a specific position until your next pick or two – for each of the few major formats in 12 team leagues. The following graphics summarize our results.

Now, how can you use these in your draft? There are a few ways.

Suppose you’re on the clock at the 20th pick in a full-PPR single quarterback league. Here, the value lost by waiting on specific positions is: QB=5.5, TE=4.5, WR=RB=2. This means that you should take a quarterback at this spot pretty comfortably.

Another example. What if you know you want to take a first round receiver in half-PPR? Well, using the half-ppr chart above you can tell that this is a bad idea if you pick anywhere from 1-4. However, if you pick 5-8 taking a receiver is actually the best pick you can make! So, if you know you want a receiver, you can either pick a draft spot that accommodates this or, perhaps, trade for the appropriate pick.

What if you are trying to plan when the best time to take a quarterback in PPR is? The QB line is on top (meaning the best positional value) around pick 75. This might suggest to you to wait on QB until the end of the 6th round/beginning of the 7th round.

No matter how you want to go about things, using these charts can lend insight and make what may seem like a hard choice just a little bit easier. The best part about using differential value to guide your draft strategy is that it takes into account where players tend to be taken. Every good draft strategy incorporates the expected behavior of your opponents, and this does exactly that.

Using Differential Value in Real Time and Final Thoughts

The differential value charts shown in the last section are computed with the projected ppg of players who are typically available at a given pick. There are a few ways, then, in which this analysis should be taken with a grain of salt when forming your own draft strategy.

First, the value charts assume that the expert’s projections of points per game are roughly correct. If you personally are incredibly low on Travis Kelce this year, then you have to trust your gut and not take a tight end in the mid first. That is, these charts are meant to help you identify which positions are good values in certain pick ranges.

Second, if players drop far past their ADP, then these charts might become less accurate. For example, in superflex, taking Josh Allen with the first few picks isn’t recommended. However, if Josh Allen drops to the fifth or sixth pick, then all of a sudden his differential value becomes much higher.

Finally, these charts use average projected points. This will slightly penalize guys that are high risk/high reward like, for example, Tony Pollard. If you are drafting Tony Pollard, you aren’t hoping for the 5 ppg he will score if Zeke is healthy. Instead, you’re hoping for the chance that Pollard will score 15 ppg on the off chance that Zeke is hurt or otherwise loses the starting role. This is why our charts only go up through the first 100 picks or so when you are still drafting players to be starters. After the first 100 picks, your draft strategy has to be based on maximizing the probability that you find a diamond in the rough.

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