Fantasy football leagues often aren’t won thanks to the efforts our #1 pick. Or even our #2 or #3 picks. The reason for this is because those guys are supposed to be excellent. They are supposed to blow it up week in and week out, that’s why we spent our first picks getting them. Okay, maybe Chris Johnson last year won some people their league because he so outperformed even the other top players, but he’s the exception. Normally top players live right up to expectations and no higher. And since everybody gets a few top picks in a round by round draft, nobody gets much of an advantage with them.
Instead winning comes down to your mid-draft picks who then exceed your expectations and become studs. A guy who picks a running back in the 7th round, only to see that player finish as a top five runner at the end of the year has essentially gotten a second first round pick in exchange for his seventh. If you play such an owner and your team has no over-producers like that, he has the advantage. And over a course of a season that advantage will take him into the play-offs against the rest of the lucky owners who also have an advantage.
I tell you all this because it explains the basic concept behind a good fantasy football bench strategy. The guys you put on your bench aren’t just there to fill in on bye weeks or replace injured starters, although they can do that too. But really what you hope for is for one or two of them to break out of the lowest rungs and become a valid fantasy starter. Someone who you can bring off your bench to replace an underperformer or trade to fill a hole in your team. Try to draft bench players with potential.
First, let’s try to cut down on having too many positions on our bench. When you start at fantasy football it makes logical sense to get at least one back up for every position. That’s what you’d do with a real sports team. But since this is fantasy sports we’re allowed one of those sneaky work-arounds in the form of the waiver wire. We don’t need a back-up defense, or kicker, or tight end on our bench because we can always grab an undrafted one when we need them. Then toss them back as soon as we don’t. While it would be nice to hedge our bets with these positions during the draft by getting a back up in case our starter is a dud, it’s really not worth using up a bench spot that could be filled by a running back or wide receiver.
Running backs and wide receivers are the real, albeit volatile, stars of the game. Tight ends, kickers, defenses don’t produce any huge stars. The best of these positions will get around 150 points, while the normal ones will get around 120. A nice advantage but a slim one. The best running backs meanwhile score 250 to 300 points a season, blowing away the average starters by a hundred points. Now, no bench RB or WR is likely to finish in the top ten of their position at the end of the season, but there’s a chance they might come close. And that can equal a big advantage over your competition.
So try to take as many high-potential running backs and wide receivers as you can for your bench. It’s up to you if you want a back-up quarterback, but like with kickers and defenses you don’t really need one. Quarterbacks score a lot of points, but they’re also pretty predictable. The odds of you picking a top ten dud and then an eleven through twenty stud who will save you are slim. So get three or more RBs and WRs each as your backups. Think of each one as a lottery ticket for your fantasy team.
Of course you want to screen through the barely draftable runners and receivers to see which ones have the most potential to over-perform. Plenty of sleeper articles are out there on the web for you to look through and find names. Read them all and consider their arguments. If you’re doing a round draft you won’t be able to target any one player specifically unless you really reach back to take him, so have extras in case your favorite guys get taken. Note, this is why experts say wait for the last two rounds to draft a kicker and defense, so don’t lose the chance to draft your favorite sleepers. While I don’t at all recommend you have to wait till the last round to draft a kicker (the experts who do are largely guys who had a good streak ten years ago and assume the rules of fantasy football will never change even though they are no longer still winning), a kicker probably isn’t going to win you your league. A sleeper might.
Not surprisingly, it tends to be the very high rated sleepers/low level starters who actually blow up. These are the guys you’re going to be taking at the end of the first six rounds or perhaps seventh and eighth good bench player rounds. Later players can over-perform of course, but the higher a player starts the higher he’s likelier to go.
Of course after your draft is over you’re job of finding sleepers isn’t over. It’s quite likely that some of this year’s break out sleepers will go completely undrafted. Someone will go down with a bad injury and a replacement will get his chance, or a coordinator’s strategy will change and a committee player will suddenly become “the guy” for his team. Some of these things are just impossible to predict, so stay vigilant! Watch the league for new stars, injury reports, and the like. And add new bench guys to replace old bench guys who look like they aren’t making it.
Bench strategy is pretty simple, that’s all there is too it. Stock up on high upside running backs and wide receivers and hope that one or too proves the experts wrong and becomes a star. Don’t be afraid to try and trade a good player if you’ve already got good players at his position that don’t need replacing. Odds are you’ll have a weak spot at a different position that someone else’s player could fill. Now get out there, and good luck!
