Word to the Winners: Fantasy Football Picks

Tiering: How to Maximize Your Fantasy Football Picks Every Round -- By Russ Bliss (updated for 2012)

A current hot topic seems to be surrounding how tiers work in helping you make your fantasy football picks in your upcoming fantasy drafts. With that in mind, let me reprint (with a couple of revisions) the parts of my Draft Strategies and Tactics article in the Word to the Winners section here, as I truly believe that tiering definitely helps you make the right fantasy football picks every round. Also, remember that the Draft Analyzer automatically calculates the tiers for you based on your league's individual scoring system. Consider this reprint to be more of a tutorial for those who have questions about how Tiering works and how to execute your draft by using them.

Tiering is a draft strategy where you lump players into “tiers”. These tiers are groups of players at each position who will all likely finish the regular season with about the same amount of fantasy points. For example, you think there are 3 RB’s (let’s say Arian Foster, Ray Rice, and LeSean McCoy) who are clearly at the top of the class. You’ve decided that each of them stand a good chance of being the number 1 fantasy RB and that they will likely finish very close to each other in the amount of points they’ll score for the year. You would tier these 3 RB’s together on your RB cheat sheet in tier number 1.

You would then create the next tier using the names of the RB’s you feel are just behind the first tier. Maybe you think tier 2 is Chris Johnson, Matt Forte, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Ryan Mathews. Tier 3 could be guys like DeMarco Murray, Darren McFadden, and Steven Jackson, etc. The point is that you keep grouping players into these tiers of projected fantasy points until you’ve exhausted all the names on your RB cheat sheet. Then you do it at every other position.

Now tiers are used the same way cheat sheets are used. You take them to your draft and cross off or highlight the names as they get picked. The object of tiering positions is to make sure you take players from the highest tier when you go to draft someone at that position. For example, it’s round 4 of the draft and it’s your pick. You’ve gone RB’s in the 1st 3 rounds and decided you want to take a WR. Looking at your tier chart, you notice that one player from tier #4 has been taken, but there are still 2 guys left in tier #3 at the position (and none in tiers 1 and 2). You would take one of the guys from tier #3. Which one is totally up to you. When choosing from multiple players in a tier group take other factors into consideration. What are their bye weeks? Are you taking a WR from the same team as one of the RB’s you took? Who has the more favorable schedule the weeks of your league’s playoffs? When you’ve answered those questions, you should have a clear idea of which one of the two players to select. Even if the name is listed lower in that tier, you’ve still projected that you’ll get about the same amount of points from either one so where a name is in a tier doesn’t matter.

Now, tier groups at each position do not correspond to tier groups from other positions. There is no definitive point where the top tier of one position becomes more valuable than a lower tier at another position. The tiers for each position are independent from each other. It is up to you to decide whether the second tier of QB’s is more important than the fourth tier of RB’s, or the third tier of WR’s.

Also, Tier groups have NOTHING to do with what round you should be taking someone. You can easily go through every name in RB Tier’s 1, 2, 3, and maybe even 4 before the first round is completed. The number of a tier group does not correspond to a draft round value.

It is also important to recognize when a tier group is about to “close” (when all the names in that tier are going to be crossed off). Let’s say you’re in a 12 team league and drafting 10th. It’s the 5th round of a serpentine style draft. You know that there will be 4 picks after yours before you pick again. You still need your starting QB, but could also use a decent 3rd RB. You look at your tiers for those two positions and notice that in tier group #3 for QB’s, there are still two names left in it. On the RB list, there are 2 names left in tier group #4. One of the teams picking after you already has drafted a QB. It’s a safe bet that he isn’t going to take a backup QB with his picks this early. That means only one QB is likely to be selected, and therefore you’re still going to be able to get one of the two left in QB tier #3 with your next pick. Having deduced this you know to take one of the 2 RB’s from tier group #4 in round 5.

The essence of Tiering is that the names of the players are insignificant. It’s the point production of the tier group that matters.

There are no limits to how many names (or how few) can be in a tier at any position. You can have a tier with only one name it, or you can 20 names in it. Just be realistic when creating them. If historically, there are 6-8 WR’s who score about 100 points in your league, you’ll only want 6-8 names in that tier. Putting 12 names in there will lead to mistakes. Usually, there are fewer names in the higher tiers than at the lower tiers. This is reflective of the fact there are only so many Stud and high quality players who score a lot of fantasy points, but a bunch of players who finish the season with roughly the same amount of mediocre fantasy points.

The strength of Tiering is that it can be used in conjunction with many draft tactics. You can use tiers to execute a RB Heavy draft. You can use tiers to execute the Stud WR draft tactic. And no matter what, they’re fairly easy to create and use.

Russ Bliss is FantasyFootballStarters.com's fantasy football lead analyst, a member of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, and since 1997 has been the radio host of "The Red Zone, Talking Fantasy Football and the NFL," in Phoenix, Arizona.

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