Fantasy: Using Tiers During Your Draft

We are quickly moving into fantasy football draft territory! The CBA is a few days (hopefully) from being agreed upon, and about a week from being ratified (fingers crossed).
 
All signs point to the NFL season starting on time, meaning you can start cancelling your weekend antiquing plans, family outings, kids’ soccer games, potential births (yours or a family member's), weddings; basically anything that might take you away from the couch or stadium on Sundays, Mondays, and some Thursdays and Saturdays. But first and foremost, you absolutely need to start preparing for your fantasy football draft, which should be taking place in the next six weeks or so.
 
Today I want to introduce you to tiers, and why you should use them while drafting. Simply put, a tier is a level, or rank of some category arranged one above another. Within each tier you can have multiple items which should be of the same quality. You could have tiers of anything you want: food, vacation places, pets, office supplies etc. Let’s take food for example. My food tier pyramid is listed below.
 

As you can see, I have a New York strip steak in Tier 1, while a Cuban sandwich is in Tier 3. When I go to a restaurant, and both things are on the menu, I will order the strip, every time. It’s a higher ranked food for me. Even if I see the waiter bringing a Cuban to a neighboring table and it smells amazing and I hear the people talking about how delicious it is, or if I came to the restaurant wanting to order a Cuban, craving a pork, ham, pickle combination, I will still order a New York strip if its on the menu. It’s in a higher tier of food for me, and I will always get more enjoyment out of a steak than a Cuban.
 
If I order the Cuban, I know I’ll regret not getting the steak – “how could I make such a mistake!?!” I’ll cry later, and it’s not because I don’t like Cubans (I really do like them a lot), but because I really, really, really enjoy a New York strip seared to perfection with mashed potatoes on the side.
 
Now, if I went to the same restaurant and soft shelled crab was on the menu (also Tier 1), I might have a tougher decision to make and would consider other options including price, reputation of the restaurant or maybe a beer and food pairing.
 
Currently, NFL and NBA teams use tiers to prepare for their respective rookie drafts, categorizing the players available to them into tiers based on a variety of different criterion, but generally focused on talent/ability level and projection.
 
Players, like our food scenario above, ranked in the top tier are better than those in the second tier, who are better than players in the third tier and so on, and so on. Within each tier, the players are believed to be of similar ability levels and the marginal value of drafting players within the tier is insignificant and teams will draft for need within the tier.
 
The basic premise of the tier system is to avoid reaching for positional need over talent, so that if a superior player is on the board at defensive tackle, corner back, or offensive line, you don’t reach for a marginally talented quarterback (apparently the Minnesota Vikings are unaware of this concept, as evidenced by the first round of the 2011 NFL Draft) because it's a position of “need”. It’s a system that professional teams are using to prepare for their drafts, and can be easily implemented in fantasy sports as well.
 
For example, you’re picking in the fourth round of your fantasy draft on August 31. You’ve already selected Adrian Peterson, Reggie Wayne and Miles Austin and are looking for a second stud running back to lock into your starting line-up – you’ve always read that running back is the most important position in fantasy football and you need to have two studs in order to compete (note: this is not true anymore, but it is what you believe in our make-believe scenario).
 
The running backs available are Felix Jones, Mark Ingram and Jonathan Stewart. Jones and Stewart rank in your third tier, Ingram in the fourth – a tough decision looms. But wait! Michael Vick is also still available, and you have him ranked in your second tier! Who do you choose: a running back from Tier 3, or a quarterback in Tier 2? It’s actually an easy decision: you’ve done the research all off-season, you believe that Vick can repeat or approximate his passing performance from 2010 and have him as your first ranked quarterback, but more importantly, as a Tier 2 player. You draft Vick – crisis averted.
 
“But wait!” you’re thinking, “what if I have a Ttier 2 running back available!?! Who do I draft then – Vick or Peyton Hillis?” I say you draft Hillis in that situation, ranking the players within each tier based on positional scarcity (for more on scarcity, stay tuned for the Pro Football Focus Fantasy Draft Guide, which will be coming out soon), but how you rank players within the tiers is up to you.
 
For the tier system to work you will have to do some pre-draft preparation as the whole idea of the strategy is to avoid making decisions on the fly, or getting caught in “the moment” of your draft. You could scour offensive depth charts, examine each player’s situation, the offensive tendencies of each team, and then rank each and every one of the NFL’s offensive players by position, then divide the positional rankings into tiers. Or, if you have less time, you could look at someone else’s rankings (maybe Alex Miglio's Auction Values) or projections (Mike Clay's 2011 projections are posted) and divide players into tiers that way.
 
You can also check out my tiers of Pro Football Focus’ Top 150 (also compiled by Alex Miglio) below as an example. Or, better yet, ask some of our PFF Fantasy Staff on Twitter.
 

Notes:

–    For clarification, if I get one of the first five quarterbacks (Vick, Rodgers, Rivers, Brady, P. Manning, Brees) I never draft a QB2 (and therefore cross off the rest of my quarterbacks from my tiers). When I draft the next tier (E. Manning, Romo, Schaub) as a QB1, I’ll consider taking a QB2, but probably won’t. I avoid anything outside of the Top 9 quarterbacks as a starter like the plague.
 
–   Tight ends are similar to quarterbacks for me. I target a Top 4 guy at the right spot and if I land one, I cross the rest of the tight ends off my tiers.
 
–   The tier strategy is more important for snake drafting than for auctions. In a snake draft you’re constrained as to who you can draft by your slot, whereas in an auction you can choose where you spend your money. That being said, during an auction you can get a better idea of how you value players compared to the market value with your tiers as a guide. (ex. I have L. McCoy ranked in the top tier, and if the other players in that tier are going for $40+ and McCoy is settling in below $35, that’s good value for me).
 
–  Make your tiers your own. As you can see, I heavily value the top wide receivers and prefer them over most running backs while I’m very low on receivers below the top-13 or so guys. Personally, I don’t think you can count on week-to-week production from the receivers from Tier 10 and on, but you may feel very differently.