With fantasy draft time back again, I’ve compiled the three most important tips to keep in mind for your draft, whether you’re a veteran fantasy manager or new to the game. The three tips below will help you feel confident in your draft and be well on your way to that coveted fantasy championship.

1. Make Tiers for Your Positional Rankings

Tiers have become increasingly utilized among professional fantasy football analysts, but too many average drafters continue to rely on simple rankings. While some of what fantasy football analysts do is outside the scope of what an average fantasy football player should be doing – for example, not everyone has time to complete in-depth player projections for the whole league – tiers don’t take much longer than a regular set of rankings.

For those who aren’t familiar with tiers in your rankings, it’s a very simple concept. First, you complete your rankings like normal, divided up based on position. Once you have your top 50 running backs ranked, for example, you break up those rankings into tiers of players that you’d be (roughly) equally happy in drafting. Do you struggle to choose between Jonathan Taylor, Saquon Barkley, and Kyren Williams, but you know that you like them significantly more than Jahmyr Gibbs despite Gibbs being right behind them in your rankings?

Then Gibbs is in a tier behind those other running backs. You can have as many or as few tiers as you’d like, but I think tiers that have roughly 3-8 players for running backs and wide receivers are ideal. For quarterbacks and tight ends, you may have more two or even one-player tiers.

The benefit of tiering based on positions is that it’s simply too complicated to compare across positions. Is Lamar Jackson more valuable than Cooper Kupp? That’s a much more difficult conversation than comparing Jackson and CJ Stroud.

When it’s your pick, look at your positional tiers and see how many players are left in the top tier for each position. If there are six wide receivers left in your top tier but only two running backs, then you’re likely losing more value by taking a wide receiver there than a running back. There’s a good chance that when your next pick comes around, 1 of those six wide receivers is still available, but it is unlikely that either of the two running backs is still there.

2. Use ADP But Don’t Let ADP Use You

ADP is a valuable tool and should be used as such. In most leagues, fantasy managers will anchor their decisions to ADP. That means that even if they like a player way down the board more, they’ll take a player with a higher ADP. For that reason, you can get a general understanding of where players will be available.

The above point is likely obvious to you if you’ve been playing fantasy football for a few years. What may be less obvious is that ADP can hurt you in the middle, especially in later rounds. Once you’ve reached round 5, don’t be afraid to reach for a player that you really like, even if it means taking them a round ahead of ADP. At the end of the day, fantasy football is supposed to be fun, and it’s a lot more fun having the players you like on your team rather than the players who are consensus picks.

There’s no better feeling than planting your flag on a player ahead of ADP and them having a breakout season. Inversely, there’s no worse feeling than waiting on a player you want because they’re too far back in ADP just for them to get picked one slot ahead of you.

Once your starting lineup has been filled and you’re picking players for your bench, don’t bother looking at ADP. At this point, you should be targeting the players that you’re most excited about and that you think could break out. If that means taking a player two or even three rounds ahead of ADP, that’s no problem at all. While someone may have made fun of you on draft night for taking Raheem Mostert in the 8th round when his ADP was in the 11th round, you’d be the one laughing at the end of the season when you had the RB2 in all of fantasy and got them in the 8th round.

Even if those players don’t end up hitting, it doesn’t really matter. In most leagues, over 50% of the players on your bench when you start the season won’t even be on your roster at the end of the year. And that brings us to my last and most important tip.

3. Don’t Get Attached to Your Last Picks

Too often, we draft with rose-colored glasses. We see the best-case scenario for the players we pick and expect them to all come true. Then comes the dream-crushing reality of week 1. That rookie wide receiver you got in the 12th round, who you expected to be the best player on his team, had two targets. That 2nd year running back who was going to take over the backfield and be a workhorse didn’t see any goalline or third-down work and finished with four fantasy points.

The reality is that the final 2-4 picks of your draft don’t work out most of the time, and that’s okay! This isn’t best ball; at the end of Week 1, you can go to the waiver wire and pick up better players that excelled in their first game.

Time and time again, we see that the waiver pick-ups after Week 1 and Week 2 are the game-changing players, not the players available on the waiver wire in Weeks 5 and on. The biggest reason players miss out on those top waiver pickups in Weeks 1 and 2 is that they’re still too attached to the players they drafted. That rosy outlook for the round 13 running back is still in your mind, and you can’t let it go. “He’s going to breakout next week; it was just a slow start” is the type of reasoning that would lead to you not picking up Kyren Williams or Puka Nacua last year.

So how do we avoid this? At the end of your draft, pick players that will either break out in Week 1 or will be a clear bust. This is easier said than done, but there are some general ideas to keep in mind here.

While rookies are usually great upside picks late in drafts, they can often start slow and then break out later in the season. That means they’ll likely sit on your bench for the first three weeks before you drop them ahead of Week 4 just for them to break out that week. Back in 2020, I had a friend who was excited about a rookie wide receiver going in the 9th round of drafts, but after two weeks in a row of only three targets, I… I mean, my friend… dropped him. That player was Justin Jefferson, who went on to be the WR4 that season, and I will never forgive myself for that mistake.

If you’re going to take a rookie wide receiver late in the draft, be prepared to hold them on your bench until at least Week 6. To avoid making the same mistake I did, ensure that you have at least two other players on your bench that fit the mold below so you can confidently drop after Week 1 if things don’t go well and don’t have to give up on the mid-season rookie breakout.

Look for players who are in a competition for a key role through camp. Josh Palmer is going late in drafts this year but could be the top wide receiver for the Los Angeles Chargers to start the season. After Week 1, it should be clear whether he’s the top receiver for the Chargers and a player that could fill in at your flex throughout the season or is behind rookie Ladd McConkey in targets and can be sent to the waivers.

Running backs in uncertain backfields provide this same clarity following week 1. Sean Payton is known for offenses that involve running backs in the passing game a lot. It’s uncertain whether Javonte Williams will get the passing down work and become a workhorse, or Jaleel McLaughlin will be the beneficiary of 5-6 targets a game.

If McLaughlin is out there for 30%+ of snaps and sees 5+ targets in Week 1, you have a great backup running back for your bench, and if Williams sees most of the passing work, then McLaughlin can be sent to the waivers without worry. This is a strategy that even some of the most experienced fantasy managers fail to implement and it’s a great way to get an advantage over your league mates.