Blair Andrews compares ESPN average draft positions against those in FFPC Main Event and FantasyPros Championship drafts to find the best current values in ESPN leagues.
Even with the huge prize pools available in the many high-stakes contests — including one that represents your most cost-effective chance to become a millionaire playing fantasy football — still there’s nothing like the feeling of winning your home league. And since you’re a RotoViz reader, you’ve got a big advantage over the competition.
- Mat Irby has highlighted a group of WRs you can get in the middle rounds who are poised to bring home fantasy titles.
- Shawn Siegele’s Zero-RB Candidates Countdown highlights the best middle- and late-round RB opportunities for all teams, Zero-RB or not.
- In Part 1 he highlighted players who are likely not even being drafted in most home leagues.
- In Part 2 he focused on players who go in the final few rounds of home leagues but who provide the upside of much earlier picks.
- In Part 3 he gave you his favorite options in the middle rounds who could vault into Round 1 in 2025.
- Dave Caban’s deep dive into the projections can help you find options late in drafts with very reasonable chances of scoring a ton of fantasy points.
- Dave’s auction strategy guide is must-read material for anyone preparing for a home league auction.
- Part 1 provides general strategy advice on how to think about auction values and team construction.
- Part 2 gets into the dynamics of player pricing and offers guidance on how to navigate changing values during your auction.
- Part 3 focuses on common mistakes people make in auctions and how to overcome them.
- Part 4 offers a way to think about auction value tiers using ESPN’s average auction values.
- Part 5 recaps how Dave attacked an expert auction and how he adjusted his strategy in the face of unexpected events.
Today I’m going to look at some of the best values in ESPN leagues by comparing where players are going in ESPN drafts to where they are going in high-stakes FFPC drafts. Of course it’s possible that the sharks are getting things wrong. But FFPC ADP represents the collective thinking of drafters who have the most skin in the game. As such, they are theoretically the most highly motivated to get things as right as possible. Following the lead of high-stakes drafters isn’t a foolproof method for winning your home league, but in cases where FFPC ADP and ESPN ADP diverge widely, there are opportunities for value.
With that in mind, here are some of my favorite ESPN values, presented in order of ESPN ADP.
Drake London
ESPN ADP: 34.9 (WR14)
FFPC ADP: 18.8 (WR10)
London slips to the end of the third round in ESPN leagues, but is entrenched in the middle of the second round in FFPC leagues. In even more WR-heavy formats he’s a borderline first-rounder. London’s difficulty has never been with earning targets. Rather, he’s been the victim of poor offensive design, poor QB play, and poor TD luck. The FFPC community is betting aggressively that the QB and offensive coordinator changes will enable London to emerge as a top-ranked WR. The ESPN community prefers more proven options like Davante Adams, Michael Pittman, and Mike Evans.
Of course, there’s certainly an argument to be made that if he were really as good as high-stakes drafters think, he could have overcome some of these challenges. Yet one could just as easily argue that London’s upside surpasses that of the options going ahead of him in ESPN leagues, and that the nonspecialists underestimate the bust risk for the older veterans.
Cooper Kupp
ESPN ADP: 46.6 (WR20)
FFPC ADP: 24.2 (WR12)
It could be the case that ESPN drafters are slow to react to the news of Puka Nacua’s injury, but even that doesn’t fully explain the nearly two-round difference in Kupp’s ADPs. This is a particularly interesting case, as we tend more often to see that casual markets overvalue veterans and undervalue rookies and young breakout candidates. In this case, the casuals might be underrating Kupp’s staying power atop the WR ranks.
Nacua is expected to be ready for the season opener, which has kept his FFPC ADP from slipping too much. But if he’s limited to start the season and Kupp can start hot, we could be looking at a situation in which we wished these ADPs were reversed.
