2024 Draft Guide: Unspoken Edge

By Tony Kneepkens >>

Knowing your specific league’s settings can be as important as your “player takes” as you prepare for your fantasy draft, negotiate trades, and consider waiver pickups throughout your fantasy season. Specifics like the number of teams in your league, the number (and makeup) of starters and bench spots, and matchup and scoring settings can change the actual and perceived value of many players within their position groups and the value of the positions relative to one another. It is essential to know and understand your specific league’s settings so that you can make adjustments to the player pool, but it can be equally impactful to know how other managers in your league might react or potentially over- or under-react to unique settings.

Here are a few examples of different scoring settings you might encounter and how they might impact your player pool or draft strategy:

1. In PPR leagues we might consider drafting and/or starting certain role playing RBs who don’t play on early downs or near the goal line, these players would have considerably less (likely close to zero) value in leagues that don’t award point for catches, even less yet if carries are worth points and catches are not.
2. In leagues that award “big play” or “long TD” bonuses, it is probably logical to break ties at the WR position to favor players who have a higher average depth of target or who play in offenses or with QBs who prioritize deep passing concepts.
3. Some leagues have position-specific scoring, such as 1 point per reception for RB/WR but 2 points per reception for TEs. This should move the group of elite pass-catching TEs up our draft boards and we might consider adding some lower ranked TEs to our player pool than in a standard scoring format.

The examples above are all impactful to an extent, they shift players with different skill sets within their position groups and in some cases, we might even add or completely remove players from our player pool based on the specific settings.

With all of that in mind, here are the 6 Most Important League Settings To Know And Adjust For Before You Draft: