Draft Guide: Seven Sleepers

By :: Mike Johnson (@mjohnson_86)

A fantasy football draft is usually made up of somewhere between 14 and 20 rounds, but within all of those rounds are different points in the draft and different things we want to target ::

• In the early parts of drafts, we want to target studs whose performance we can count on. In your standard fantasy football “home league” you aren’t likely to win your league in the early rounds, but you can lose it.
• In the middle rounds of your draft, we want to be targeting players who have underrated upside and could end up producing as well or better than those players taken in the early rounds.
• The late rounds of drafts are where you can really hit home runs, however, and make the rest of the season much easier on yourself by hitting on those “Sleepers” who your competition is overlooking. Most late-round picks don’t work out and end up being dropped by the team that drafted them at some point due to lack of performance, injury, or trying to cover bye weeks. You can win your league without hitting on late-round picks, but boy it sure is easier when you do hit a couple.

In that spirit, here are my Seven Sleepers who I am seeing selected in the last rounds (or not at all) in a lot of standard “home leagues” that have the potential to get off to a hot start and give your team a boost and/or become a staple of your team for the long haul. The thing to remember with these players is if they don’t work out it isn’t a huge deal, as you can easily drop them and pick someone else up off the waiver wire. However, when these picks DO hit, they can alter the entire direction of your season.

1. Marvin Mims, Jr., WR, DEN

This is a truly explosive player who played most of 2024 in a part-time role as the Broncos rotated several wide receivers in their WR2 and WR3 spots behind Courtland Sutton. However, Mims ascended at the end of the year with 20+ PPR points in three of his last five regular-season games and has been operating as the clear WR2 in camp according to beat reports and the usage for the first-team offense in Denver’s first preseason game. Currently ranked outside the top 150 on multiple major season-long draft sites, Mims could be a massive hit this year and we should have an answer early in the season.