Blair Andrews’ FFPC redraft strategy session breaks down all the dos and don’ts to help your high-stakes team win $1 million.
If you want to win a million dollars playing fantasy football, there aren’t many more accessible ways to do it than the FFPC FantasyPros Championship. This contest features the same top prize as its sister contest, the FFPC Main Event, and has an ever larger prize pool. However, it costs only $350 to enter (as opposed to $2000).
While there are contests with lower buy-ins such as Underdog’s Best Ball Mania 5, in that contest you are competing against 672,671 other teams. In the FFPC FantasyPros Championship, you are competing against at most 20,003 other teams. That means you’re at least 33 times more likely to win the top prize in the FFPC FantasyPros Championship than you are in BBM5. However, the buy-in is only 14 times more expensive, a great value even with the $1.5 million in BBM.
The other benefit of the FPC is that you’re not stuck with the team you draft. You can overcome a suboptimal draft with smart in-season management. If one of your early picks gets injured, your BBM5 team is probably dead. But your FPC team still has a chance if you’re able to replace his production through savvy waiver-wire pickups and lineup decisions. Nevertheless, the draft is still important, as it sets your team up for success in the early going that can carry you through into the postseason.
Check out all our recent coverage on the FFPC FantasyPros Championship and then draft a team:
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- Shawn gives you his five best picks in FFPC $350 redraft contests, including:
- A League-Winning Late-Round WR Who Is Cheaper Than Jalen Tolbert But Has More Upside
- An Unfashionable TE About to Jump to Elite Status Who Shouldn’t Be Going After Tyler Conklin
- A Better Vertical Option Than George Pickens at a Fraction of the Cost
- A Young Receiving Star Who Gives You Brandon Aiyuk’s Upside but at a Discount and Without the Drama
- and stay tuned for the No. 1 best pick in the FPC!
- I’ve been preparing drafters with the 10 Best Value Picks in FantasyPros Contests and a look at the 6 Elite WRs and 6 Lottery Tickets to Help You Build a Juggernaut.
- Shawn gives you his five best picks in FFPC $350 redraft contests, including:
Hasan Rahim, Kevin Szafraniec, and I recently competed in an FFPC FantasyPros Championship draft on the Fantasy Football Report.
Today let’s look at our three-person FPC draft in action to see what we can learn from how each team approached the contest.
Principles for Draft Evaluation
Roster construction still matters for redraft teams, but it matters a lot less than it would for a best ball team. Yet we can’t completely ignore sound construction principles. The waiver wire is thinner in a 12-team, 20-round draft than it would be in a typical home league, so it’s important not only to address your starting lineup but also to plan for all eventualities — bye weeks, injuries, and underperformance.
It All Comes Back to the Flex
The FantasyPros Championship, like almost all FFPC leagues, requires two starting running backs and two starting wide receivers. The wrinkle comes at the flex position — FFPC requires two flex starters. Unlike other formats, the tight-end-premium scoring makes many tight ends flex-worthy options. We should still expect the flex position to be filled by wide receivers in most weeks.
The Win the Flex tool uses best ball ADP, so it’s not a perfect analogue for this contest. Still, if we ignore starting lineup requirements and simply ask which position scores the most points in each ADP range, there’s a clear preference for early WRs.
The Importance of Early WRs
Running backs appear to become better picks after Round 4, but by then you could have filled both your starting WRs spots and both your flex spots with higher-scoring WRs. With the RB dead zone in full effect this year, you may also want to refrain from RB picks in the exact range the Win the Flex tool says they are good values. The point is that it’s hard to build a successful team in 2024 without significant investment in early WRs.
That’s not to say that I think every early RB pick is bad. But multiple detours from early WR will leave most teams at a disadvantage. Therefore a constant theme of this article is that most teams should have drafted more early WRs.
Any Team Can Make a Run, But Some Are Better Prepared
Other structural elements like this will come up as we explore the draft and evaluate each team’s approach and draft decisions. The nature of this type of article means I will be focused more on the mistakes and opportunities for improvement than on what each team did right. If you happen to have been one of the people drafting against us, take heart in the fact that I am often wrong. The one predictable element of NFL football is that unpredictable things will happen. Any one of the teams below could be in the running for $1 million. But some teams might have an easier go of it than others.
The Draft Board
Even the 1.01 Can’t Afford a Detour
Team 1 opted for the top WR over the top RB, in a move that foreshadowed CeeDee Lamb’s $136 million payday. With the contract situation sorted out, taking Lamb at the 1.01 is not hard to justify — it was slightly more difficult at the time of this draft.
Apart from a third-round Isiah Pacheco, who is ensconced on my Do Not Draft list (at least at this price), Team 1 is attractive. They have enough later RB points that the Pacheco pick could have likely been better spent on Drake London, Nico Collins, Cooper Kupp, or Deebo Samuel. Early wide receiver firepower is so important in every type of contest, and Team 1 may end up somewhat thin.
Drafting Pacheco instead of one of the WRs isn’t a blunder, but merely an inaccuracy, to borrow chess parlance. Team 1’s WR room is strong, if somewhat fragile. An additional early WR pick would have given them a higher floor, but might not have improved their ceiling as much. If this drafter’s (and the market’s) thesis on Pacheco is right, he’ll provide more than enough scoring upside to challenge for the top seed.
Can Robust RB Still Win?
Team 2 takes the one-pick value in Christian McCaffrey and leans into the RB-heavy build. Their first WR pick doesn’t happen until Round 7. Is Team 2 already dead, or can a strong team be built without investing in early WRs?
The answer is probably that a strong team can be built in this way, but it’s not clear Team 2 has done what they need to later in the draft. Keon Coleman has significant bust risk — perhaps too much for a team that drafted him as their WR2. Players with extremely wide ranges of outcomes like Coleman are better picks in redraft where you can cut them if necessary, but you’d like a higher floor at the position than Team 2 has given themselves.
They tried to address the floor later with picks like Josh Palmer and Jakobi Meyers. The difficulty is that both players might fail to provide much floor, with reasonable outcomes falling well below 150 PPR points. As such, Team 2 will hope to fill their flex position with a RB or TE most weeks. Unfortunately that’s a strategy tilted toward the downside.
Although James Cook does have some nice upside outcomes, drafting, for example, Tee Higgins in the fourth round would have increased Team 2’s baseline expected weekly score.
However, they smartly limited their overall build to only five RBs. They also were able to get an insane value on Rachaad White, who slipped nearly 30 picks past his ADP.
