2024 Draft Strategy Options with Suggestions

Every year, it’s easy to walk into your fantasy drafts with your short list of players you don’t want to leave your draft without. Whether it’s a first round guy like Ceedee Lamb or Breece Hall, or players further down the board like Isiah Pacheco, Jaylen Waddle, and Diontae Johnson, it’s almost impossible to get all of your favorite targets (let alone half of them) onto your actual fantasy team by the end of the draft. You get sniped, there’s a run on the position you’re targeting just before you get on the clock – we’ve been there and done that more times than we can count, and you’ve probably been left to pick up the pieces more than once in your drafts before. The truth is, the fantasy gods are not always fair and there’s no guarantee that your favorite sleeper pick at running back is going to just fall into your lap. It takes a little bit of planning and foresight to get the most out of each of your drafts (and to actually be able to grab your guys when it’s your turn to pick), regardless of whether it’s a redraft, dynasty, keeper, or even best ball league… and that’s where implementing a draft strategy comes in.

Your strategy is the backbone of your approach to each and every pick in your draft, and it’s based in an understanding of which players are most likely to be available at any given point during one. Got a mid-1st round pick in your drafts this year? Picks 5-8 seem to be the sweet spot for one of the league’s top fantasy running backs – outside of Christian McCaffrey, of course. Given that start, you might consider the Hero-RB approach, which we’ll talk about more in-depth later on. On the other hand, maybe you have a pick at the turn and two premier running backs are staring back at you at the top of the draft board – you could opt to follow the Robust-RB draft strategy and grab both Saquon Barkley and Kyren Williams, and then triple down on the position with your third round pick by taking a player like Travis Etienne. The strategy you enter your draft with is likely to be based loosely around where your pick falls in the draft order for the first round, and you can use your strategy to help you predict which players (especially those you want to target!) are most likely to be available every time you get on the clock.

So what are these draft strategies, and what do they look like in action going into the 2024 season? We’re glad you asked. Let’s start with the Hero-RB strategy.

Hero-RB

At its core: We’re essentially hitching our championship hopes on one of the few true bell-cow running backs to be the anchor of our fantasy team on our road to glory. The running back we take in this build is almost guaranteed to be one of those taken in the first round – this year, we’re picking between Christian McCaffrey, Bijan Robinson, and Breece Hall, with names like Kyren Williams and Jahmyr Gibbs mixing into the conversation, as well. Ideally, one of these running backs will be dependable and give us RB1 numbers week-in and week-out en route to a finish at the end of the year as a high-end RB1. You grab that guy early, and you’re free then to focus on other positions using the rest of your premium draft capital from round 2-6. 

The easiest way for this strategy to make sense is if your draft spot is within the first 7 or 8 picks. The best candidates, as we outlined before, include CMC, Breece, and Bijan, but we could make the argument that guys like Jonathan Taylor, Saquon Barkley, and maybe even Derrick Henry on that Ravens offense could fit the bill to be your workhorse utilizing this strategy, as well. 

Once you have your so-called Hero RB, the flexibility you’re afforded the rest of the way at the top of the draft will probably have you breathing a sigh of relief every time you come on the clock. You’re able to draft whatever position you want since you addressed one of the most scarce and volatile positions with your top pick, and you’re not leaving your tethering your championship hopes on a rag-tag group of late-round running backs. The only downside to the Hero-RB strategy, though, is that your eggs are pretty much all in one basket at the running back position. If your bell cow goes down, your fantasy championship aspirations could come down to your ability to consistently and efficiently work the waiver wire/trade block. 

Not interested in running the risk of jumping through FAAB hoops in the event your top fantasy pick goes down? The next strategy ensures that you’ll always have a quality option at running back, regardless of how many times the fantasy gods strike down your starters.

Robust-RB

At its core: RB is one of fantasy football’s scarcest positions, so why leave anything up to chance? In this draft strategy, you double and sometimes even triple-dip into the top of the running back market, oftentimes with two/three of your first three selections or with three of your first four. For example, let’s say you have a mid-1st round pick. You draft Breece Hall in the first, and the draft comes back around to you in the second and you take Kyren Williams. You’re already in great shape at this point, and you’d be set to draft as you please from Round 3 on… but then a running back like Derrick Henry or Isiah Pacheco is still available, and the temptation to just load up on running backs becomes overwhelming. You take three running backs to start your draft and create an almost bulletproof plan at the position going into 2024. What could be better than that?.

The primary rationale behind this strategy for many is the amount of quality options available in the middle rounds at other positions like TE and WR. And that group isn’t wrong – the middle rounds are littered with league-winning picks based on the draft value alone. There are way more relevant fantasy wide receivers in a given year than running backs, so it makes sense to load up on premium talent at a scarce position. Then, later on while everyone else desperately scrambles on the waiver wire all year in hopes of replacing their hurt Hero RBs , you won’t have to be as desperate because either A) all of your running backs are still healthy, or B) you were able to replace one hurt stud running back immediately with another stud RB.

And if you look down the board beyond round 3, the ways you could flesh our your roster aren’t that bad at all.

A few potential selections and their respective ADPs by round for those of you who deploy this strategy:

• Round 4: WR Cooper Kupp, WR DK Metcalf, WR Devonta Smith. You can choose to go TE Trey McBride as well.

• Round 5: WR Tee Higgins, WR Amari Cooper, WR Keenan Allen – and maybe Tank Dell if you’re picking early in the round.

• Round 6: WR Rome Odunze, WR Rashee Rice, WR Christian Kirk - but he’s going a lot earlier in Round 6. WR Terry McLaurin is also finding a home here on the draft board, and at this point in your drafts, WR is starting to get a little dry. 

• Round 7: WR Chris Godwin, WR Jayden Reed, WR Hollywood Brown, and WR Calvin Ridley constitute Round 7, which is a round that is somewhat of a gold mine based on those names I just mentioned.

• Round 8: WR DeAndre Hopkins, WR Diontae Johnson, WR Brian Thomas Jr, and WR Jaxon Smith-Njigba.

To be perfectly transparent, going this route in drafts might not be more appealing than the zero RB route or the hero RB route. If I had to choose one strategy, it’s usually zero RB or hero RB, but I’m mostly flexible - if Amon-Ra falls to the 8th pick in the first round, I’m taking him. If Breece falls, I’m taking him. And then I adjust from there. I’m all about value, I’m always looking at who falls and thinking about who can I combine them with on my next pick. I’m all about building a balanced team – of course, this year I do happen to like taking a TE early, and I’m fine taking a QB early in specific lulls (mostly the Jalen Hurts/Anthony Richardsons’s of the world. 

And of course, then there’s the Zero-RB strategy, which features a total bailout at the running back position in favor of other positions.

Zero-RB

At its core: It’s exactly what it sounds like. You eschew choosing any running backs with your top selections in the draft and instead opt to throw darts at names in the later rounds while building elite WR, TE, and even QB rooms. The running backs you do target most likely won’t be averaging RB1 points to start the season, but the goal is to at least grab one or two running backs who can appreciate/break out and end up being Top-24 guys by the end of the season. You can also spam running backs later in the draft then to build some depth and give you some chances to hit big on a late round guy - and it does happen; just ask Kyren Williams’ managers from last year. 

The game plan for your RB-depleted roster is to allow your high-end WRs that you drafted in the early going to hold it down for you on a week-to-week basis, while also  potentially compensating for your weakness at RB. Maybe you draft a TE early that gives you such a massive advantage over the other TEs - we call it positional advantage - that it opens up another avenue for you to overcome the weakness at RB. And then if you have later round RBs that end up hitting, your team can end up being a juggernaut. It definitely takes a little research and a stroke of luck, but the skill is identifying 1 or 2 RBs in the draft who end up hitting big and being efficient in your waiver wire management.

One of the advantages of the zero-RB strategy is that you can avoid being hit hard when a RB gets hurt – because you didn’t invest any premium capital in the position that gets injured most often, your team’s overall ceiling won’t come crashing down even if the first RB you drafted is sidelined. It also takes all of your earlier selections panning out in a big way, but a good zero-RB build with a top QB-WR stack can very easily push for a championship bid in 2024.

All that being said, you shouldn’t live and die exclusively by your draft strategy – ADP is called ‘average’ draft position for a reason, and not every board across all of your leagues will fall according to the book. We all know that one guy who’s drafting Malik Nabers way earlier than he should be just because he saw clips of him tearing it up in Giants camp… fantasy drafts are unpredictable, and as a result:

Two generic rules should be kept in mind at all times, regardless of the strategy you deploy:

1. Be Water

That is, don’t be afraid to take what the board is giving you, and don’t cling to your draft strategy if the way the board is falling makes your approach to the draft obsolete. If both Bijan Robinson and Breece Hall are off the board by the time you’re on the clock and you were planning on utilizing the hero-RB strategy, it might be time to pivot to the Zero RB or even Robust-RB strategy, especially if there are players that are falling further than they normally would based on their ADP. Remember, even the best battle plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy – in this case, you don’t have to be locked into any one draft strategy. Which brings us to the next important general rule of thumb:

2. Draft the best player available at all times when possible

Your draft strategy might call for you to draft wide receivers in each of the first four rounds (à la Zero-RB), but when Isiah Pacheco inexplicably falls all the way to the bottom of the fourth round, you might get an itch to pull the trigger on your RB1 despite a strategy that is specifically built around the idea of waiting on running back. Not only is this perfectly normal and ok, it’s also the correct move – taking the best player available, regardless of position, should be prioritized except for outstanding circumstances. 

The bottom line is that implementing a draft strategy requires you to be adaptable, prepared, and ready to improvise. But it’s through that preparation and understanding that you’ll be able to maximize the value of every pick you have in your draft and give yourself the edge over your competition on draft day and beyond.