I love this time of year. The excitement of the upcoming football season and all the promise that it brings. Our favorite players are back from the injuries that derailed them, and the season is full of hope and optimism.

There are rookies from our favorite college or rookies that our favorite team drafted. There are sleepers that we feel great about, and we hope nobody else in our league is on them. We can envision our perfect lineup and the feeling of leaving the draft with a team set to dominate our league-mates.

Unfortunately, to accomplish that goal, I have to stop myself and bring back a dose of reality by looking at the numbers. I don’t want to bury the lead here, so I’ll give you the headline right away, and you can keep reading for the explanation.

Why Hero RB is the Best Draft Strategy

Your best bet at winning a title is to get an elite player at as many positions as possible. This means that getting a top quarterback or tight end is worth the reach. It also means that going Hero RB is worth it, even at the expense of your wide receivers.

Let’s get one big thing out of the way. This may not be possible depending on your draft position and how the board falls to you, but I have recently done a few mock drafts where I had a top 3 pick, and I ended up going RB, QB, TE with my first three picks. The draft worked surprisingly well for me, so I wanted to dive into the numbers a bit to see if it was a feasible strategy.

Aside from the data we will look at in this article, the other reason this strategy works so well is that it is the complete opposite of what others are doing. While you’re grabbing guys like Josh Allen and Travis Kelce, they’re taking someone like Drake London or Devonta Smith. Then, a few rounds later, when the whole league goes on runs for quarterbacks and tight ends, you are grabbing guys like Chris Godwin or Keenan Allen.

Those guys aren’t sexy names, but they’re going to give you good floor production, and your other positions will provide plenty of boom potential. Now, to see if this strategy actually works, I wanted to look at the numbers. I wanted to see what wins, even if it carries a lot of risk. The really simple answer is that elite production wins.

Think about Lamar Jackson in 2019, Travis Kelce in 2022, Michael Thomas in 2019, or Christian McCaffery in, well, any season he isn’t injured. One guy like that can almost single-handedly win your league.

What’s Better? Two top 6 RBs or the RB1 and RB30?

With that in mind, I wanted to look at how common it is for the best players at each position to be that much better than their peers. To measure this, I pulled some data to try to answer this question. Is it better to get great players across the board or to reach for an elite player, even if that means I’m below average at another position?

While somewhat arbitrary, I decided to set the following benchmarks. The best player at each position in a given year is considered “elite,” while the 5th best player is considered “great.” To identify what I thought was a player you could reasonably get as a starter, I took the number of starting spots for that position in a normal league and then added six more (half the league already had a guy on the bench for that position).

For the exercise, I assumed a 12-team, 1 QB, PPR league. Don’t worry if your league uses different settings; the principle still applies. What that means is that for QBs and TEs, where you only start 1, I compared the 1st, 5th, and 18th best players at the position. For RB’s and WR’s where you start 2-3 I decided to compare the 1st, 5th, and 30th best player at the position.

Looking at this over the last five years and taking the averages, here is what I found:

Average PPG difference between QB1 and QB5: 4.38

Average PPG difference between QB5 and QB18: 4.88

Average PPG difference between RB1 and RB5: 6.92

Average PPG difference between RB5 and RB18: 6.82

Average PPG difference between WR1 and WR5: 5.32

Average PPG difference between WR5 and WR18: 5.36

Average PPG difference between TE1 and TE5: 5.22

Average PPG difference between TE5 and TE18: 3.86

How Does this Influence Draft Strategy

This data means that you’re better off having an elite player and a below-average player than two great players at any given position. I don’t think that’s groundbreaking, but I tried to be conservative. If you had asked me before I wrote this article if I’d rather have the RB1 and RB30 on my roster or the RB5 and RB6, I would have taken the latter with very little hesitation.

After all, that would mean I’d have two RBs that are better than half the league’s best RB. But the data tells a different story. You aren’t guaranteed that you’ll get the RB1 or that he’ll be that much better than the rest of the top 5 RBs, but it’s worth it to try.

Now, before I conclude, I want to make a couple more observations that go along with my draft advice. The first observation is that the variance in RBs is noticeably more than that of the other positions. This indicates it is hugely important to get a top RB if at all possible. This is probably only possible if you are picking early in the draft.

When I look at RBs, I only want to draft them at the top if I see a path to workhorse volume, red zone touches, and targets. In my eyes, only Christian McCaffrey, Bijan Robinson, and Breece Hall fit that. Jonathan Taylor is my 4th option, though I don’t like him as much as the other three because Anthony Richardson is going to cut into his rushes and potentially touchdown opportunities.

So, if those three are off the board by your first pick, then this advice doesn’t apply. Unfortunately, you’re already in the realm of getting that RB5 I just mentioned in the last paragraph, and I’d much rather get elite production at another position. Grab the wide receiver that slid further down the board than expected, and work with what the draft gives you.

The second observation is that the one position where the drop from one to five is significantly bigger than the drop from five to an average player is at tight end. Most of this is due to Travis Kelce having some unbelievable seasons over the past few years. To let you in on a secret, he’s still my top tight end for this season.

There may be more parity like there was last year, and I think there are a lot of tight end's with paths to good volume this year, but he’s still the guy to target. If you find yourself able to get one of the three RBs I mentioned in the first round and can get a top TE and QB in the 2-3 rounds, you’ll put yourself in a great position.

This does mean relying on your instincts and knowledge to find gems in the later rounds, but there is lots of value to be had. In fact, I think there is more value at wide receiver than any other position, but that’s another article. When all is said and done, you want elite production at as many positions as possible without putting yourself at a disadvantage at your other positions.

My goal here is to show you that if you truly get the best player at a position, you can go much further down the rankings than you might expect and still be just as good as if you had two guys who were both top-five or so at the position. So shoot for the stars and win yourself that precious fantasy football championship.