In The Fantasy Football Growth Mindset, Blair Andrews highlights some strategic principles and tactical motifs you can use to quickly improve as a fantasy football player. First, a controversial topic: the “Do Not Draft” list.
The fastest way to improve at fantasy football is to use a strict “Do Not Draft” list.
Even if you disagree with the implicit premise of that last sentence — namely, that some players are not worth drafting at any cost — there’s still a significant practical benefit to simply crossing players off your ranking sheet. The alternative viewpoint — that every player becomes a value at some point in a deep enough draft — is theoretically true. Yet it can also lead to poor tactical decisions.
The alternative viewpoint — we’ll call it “Eventual Value Theory”(EVT) — takes as its starting point the assumption that each (relevant) player has a baseline projection which will, at some point, make them more valuable than the other players still on the board. All you have to do is to figure out the proper baseline projection and then don’t overpay for it. While there’s some truth to this assumption, it doesn’t account for a number of complicating factors.
