There's an old fantasy football saying that "you can't win your league in the first round, but you can lose it". The idea is that for your early picks, you should focus most of your energy on eliminating downside risk and avoiding busts. As long as your first few picks are productive contributors, you should be able to get enough value late in the draft to contend for titles. But if your early-round picks turn into giant goose eggs there's little hope of taking home a title.
It's important to note that of course you can neither win nor lose your league in the first round. Plenty of teams that drafted David Johnson last year still won it all thanks to later pickups of guys like Lamar Jackson and Chris Godwin. Similarly, plenty of teams drafted Christian McCaffrey only to miss the playoffs entirely. Fantasy teams start 8-10 players in any given week and there's only so much any one of those players can do to move the needle one way or another.
But to whatever extent the statement can be evaluated, I think it is maximally wrong. Good first-round picks go much further toward winning you a title than bad picks go to costing you one. Here's why.
Player Value Increases Exponentially
Most people these days have heard of the "normal distribution". For many traits, observed results tend to cluster around the average with extremely high results about as common as extremely low results. When you graph a normal distribution, you get the famous "bell curve". Here's what that looks like:
Height is a great example of something that follows the normal distribution. The average American man is 5'10", men who are four inches taller (6'2") are about as common as men who are four inches shorter (5'6"), and it's quite rare for anyone to be more than a foot taller or shorter than that average.
Fantasy football results do not follow the normal distribution, though, with players clustered around some average and top overachievers about as rare as massive disappointments. Instead, they follow something called a "power-law distribution", where players cluster around the low end with impactful outliers tailing off to the right. Here's what that looks like:
In this image, the green-shaded area represents roughly the same number of data points as the yellow-shaded area. The middle of the distribution is much, much closer to the low end than it is to the high end.
Data that follows a power-law distribution gives rise to something called the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of the observed effects arise from just 20% of the observed causes. For example, about 80% of all political donations come from just 20% of all political donors. In business, about 80% of sales come from about 20% of clients. And in fantasy football, about 80% of all fantasy value comes from just 20% of all fantasy-relevant players.
In the history of the NFL, here's how many times a running back has reached various scoring benchmarks in PPR scoring.
- 450+ points: 3 times
- 400-449 points: 7 times
- 350-399 points: 35 times
- 300-349 points: 92 times
- 250-299 points: 198 times
- 200-249 points: 443 times
- 150-199 points: 788 times
This is a classic power-law distribution. Low-end performances are not as rare as high-end performances. They are much, much more common.
Under a normal distribution, it makes sense to devote as much energy to avoiding downside as you devote to seeking upside because the bad things are just as bad as the good things are good. The worst busts would hurt just as much as the biggest hits helped.
Under a power-law distribution, though, downside is capped while upside is unlimited. Just look at the graph above: the distance from the middle of the distribution (where the green meets the yellow) to the bottom of the distribution is quite short. The distance between the middle of the distribution to the top is much greater. Or, put differently, good outcomes are potentially much more good than bad outcomes are bad. Home run draft picks will increase your title chances far more than strikeouts will decrease them.
How Does This Look in Fantasy Football?
There are a lot of different ways one can calculate a player's fantasy value. My preferred method is to compare that player to a waiver-wire replacement. In other words, if you had two identical teams except the first team had the player in question, and the other team was forced to scrape together whatever production it could off of waivers at that position, how much would the first team outscore the second team by? That's how much value that player added.
By my best estimate, here's how much value each of last year's first-round picks added in a relatively typical PPR league, sorted from most to least.
- Christian McCaffrey - 317
- Michael Thomas - 227
- Ezekiel Elliott - 158
- Julio Jones - 135
- DeAndre Hopkins - 130
- Saquon Barkley - 119
- Alvin Kamara - 114
- Davante Adams - 102
- Nick Chubb - 101
- LeVeon Bell - 71
- James Conner - 49
- David Johnson - 16
The two worst first-round picks, David Johnson and James Conner, were absolutely disasters who hurt your chances of winning a title. On average they added about 32 points of value over just not drafting a running back at all and playing waivers all season. The median first-round picks, Alvin Kamara and Saquon Barkley, gave you a 116-point advantage, which is 84 more points than the Conner/Johnson owners got, an advantage of more than five points per week.
But Christian McCaffrey added 317 points of value, while Michael Thomas added 227. The top two picks averaged a 272-point edge, nearly ten points per game better than the median 1st-round picks. An "average" first-round pick was almost twice as close to a complete bust as it was to a top pick.
Some more examples. Julio Jones finished last year as the #3 fantasy receiver. If you spend your first-round pick on a wide receiver and he finishes 3rd at the position, you have to consider that a successful pick; certainly it's not an example of losing your league in the first round. But Jones was closer in value to #35 Cole Beasley than he was to #1 Michael Thomas.
Ezekiel Elliott finished last year as the #3 fantasy running back, about three points behind #2 Aaron Jones. An owner who paired Ezekiel Elliott with Julio Jones-- the #3 overall running back and the #3 overall wide receiver-- would have scored 586 fantasy points from those two positions. An owner who paired Christian McCaffrey with Zach Pascal, last year's 55th-ranked fantasy wide receiver, would have outscored them by more than 20 points.
Christian McCaffrey was an outlier last year, turning in one of the greatest seasons in fantasy football history. (His was one of those three 450+ point campaigns I mentioned earlier.) But it's typical for the difference between a great first-round pick and an average first-round pick to be 100+ points. In 2018, by my best estimate, Melvin Gordon was the 6th-best fantasy back, providing a 166-point advantage. Todd Gurley outperformed him by about 80 points. In 2017, Devonta Freeman was a mild disappointment; the 5th running back off the board, he finished 12th at the position by adding about 72 points of value over a waiver replacement. That placed him far closer to David Johnson (who gave his owners about four extra points before suffering a season-ending injury in Week 1) than it did to Le'Veon Bell (whose owners enjoyed a 204-point advantage).
In fact, in nine of the last ten seasons, the 6th-most-valuable running back was closer in value to the 24th-most-valuable running back than he was to the most-valuable running back. (2018 was the lone exception.) In half of those seasons, the top running back either doubled up the value of the #6 running back or came within a touchdown of doing so. Wide receiver shows similar patterns.
What Does This Mean For You?
Knowing that production follows a power-law distribution and good picks are disproportionately more rewarding than bad picks are punishing, how should this change how you draft? Probably not a whole lot. The thing is that the players drafted high tend to be drafted high for good reason; Christian McCaffrey, Saquon Barkley, Ezekiel Elliott, and Alvin Kamara have combined for 7 of the 12 most valuable fantasy seasons over the past four years (despite McCaffrey and Kamara entering the league three years ago and Barkley entering two years ago). They are not just among the safest picks on the board, they also have the highest upside.
And after that, I think it's hard to say just who has the highest upside. I doubt anyone expected Chris Godwin to finish as the second-most-valuable fantasy receiver last year, but that's what happened.
But on the other hand, if you think Clyde Edwards-Helaire has league-winning upside, his downside risk becomes less important. If I had a crystal ball that told me that there was a 50% chance Edwards-Helaire finished first at his position and a 50% chance he finished 50th, that risk profile would easily be worth a first-round pick to me. Moving from the 3rd-best running back to the 2nd-best running back to the best running back typically involves huge jumps in value, much larger than the gaps we see between lower-ranked running backs. The further up the ladder you get, the more valuable each additional rung becomes.
So while busts undoubtedly hurt your title chances, they don't hurt nearly as much as home runs help. You can't lose your league in the first round, but with the right pick, you can sure get an awfully long way towards winning it.
