Goosebumps slowly surface just as the hair on the back of your neck forcefully stands at attention.

A cruel whisper of doubt slowly slithers up your neck and slams right into your earhole. The panic sets in.

“He took my guy! Who do I take now?” you think. 

“I can’t draft that guy here…his ADP says 2 rounds later.”

“WHAT DO I DO?!”

You vowed never to let it happen again.

Now it won’t. You’ll be ready for any curveballs (shoutout Pitcher List) your draft can throw at you.

You prepared by reading QB List’s 2025 Ultimate Draft Guide. 

What is the Ultimate Draft Guide, you ask? It’s your handbook to handle any situation, in any draft, in (almost) any format. It has everything you need to know about any player you should concern yourself with. A fantasy football Pokédex, if you will. You’ll be ready to flow like water and bring home a fantasy championship that will definitely impress your significant other.

The Ultimate Draft Guide is broken up into three sections, with a whole lot of meat and potatoes in each: Drafting Fundamentals, Draft Strategies, and Cheat Sheets. For the sake of simplicity, I’ve assumed 12 Team PPR 1QB settings because that’s still the most widely used format.

Now pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er!

Drafting Fundamentals

The Basics

Use strategy as a guide, not the gospel.

One of the worst things you can do is go into a fantasy draft without some sort of strategy. The worst thing you can do is dogmatically adhere to said strategy and refuse to adapt to how the draft unfolds. No matter how many mock drafts you do, no matter how much you prepare, your draft will get thrown off the rails at some point. It’s a scientific fact. You have to be flexible. Let’s say you go into your draft with the trendy “Zero RB” strategy in mind, but midway through the first you realize, so does your entire league. You’re up with the 11th pick, and somehow Jahmyr Gibbs is staring you in the face. You cannot pass up on that kind of value. A strategy is wonderful. But you’ll have much more fantasy success if you make it more of a loose plan that’s adaptable to how the board falls.

Focus on the future, not the past.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at last year’s ADP and the first 12 players off the board:

 

Now, let’s look at the end of the season and how the top 12 shook out.

 

Half of the first top 12 players weren’t drafted in the first round. Some fell out due to injury (CMC), others were pushed out by breakouts (Drake London, Brian Thomas Jr.). It’s unpredictable, unfair, and every now and then, completely insane (Peyton Hillis‘ RB3 finish in 2010, for example). ADP is nothing more than the conventional wisdom on which players to pick, which is heavily influenced by the previous year’s final ranks. Some of the best picks I’ve ever made were considered reaches at the time. Embrace the awkward. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. You’ve done the research, or read the work of those who have done research. I’m not saying overpay and buy all the risk. But if you think it’s time to draft a guy even though the ADP says otherwise, do it. I would much rather be wrong following my own instincts than ignore them because of ADP and watch my favorite breakout candidate lead someone else to victory. Trust me. I’ve experienced it.  

Championships are won on the waiver wire

You hear the old adage “you can’t win your league on draft day, but you can lose it”…yada yada… so on and so forth. The reason I mention this dusty old saying is that the first half is true. “You can’t win your league on draft day”. Why? Because championships are won on the waiver wire. The table below contains 12 players who were being drafted outside the top 120 in 2024 and were widely available on most waiver wires.

A top 30 player.
Five top 50 players.
10 top 100 players.
Three top 20 running backs.
Three top 30 wide receivers.
A top-five tight end.

Don’t be afraid to be aggressive on the waiver wire early in the season. Don’t waste your bench spots on roster cloggers. Look for players who are one spot away on the depth chart from an opportunity or a starting role. Follow the “Greg Jennings Rule”. (You’ll find out what that is later).

It’s not just the big-time breakouts either. Of course, you hope to find the next Bucky Irving or Chuba Hubbard on your wire. But I can’t stress enough the value added to your fantasy team just by adding a Khalil Shakir or Tyrone Tracy Jr. for free.

Attack The Draft in Three Parts

Break up the draft into three segments: Early, Mid, and Late rounds. Deep stuff, eh? But by doing this, you can have a sense of the type of player you should be looking for in that span of the draft. There isn’t a hard cutoff like “Rounds 1-3 are early, 4-8 mid, etc.” Think of them more like ranges that blend together. But it’s important to approach each differently. Proper roster construction is essential for success.

In the early rounds, you should be looking for the best player available. It sounds simple, but far too often fantasy managers are worried about filling out their starting roster and pass up on elite talent because they need an RB2. Don’t worry about byes. Don’t worry about filling out your starting lineup. Draft the best talent. You’ll fill in the holes later.

The mid rounds are usually the most fluid, and use that to your advantage. You should still look to find the best values, but start being cognizant of your roster build in the first few rounds and fit in the proper puzzle pieces. If your running backs are risky, boom/bust type players, it makes sense to target a player like David Montgomery to mitigate your weekly risk with a higher floor. If your first few picks were reliable studs with not as high a ceiling, look to take a chance on some players who may be higher variance, but have spike weeks with league-winning upside.

The late rounds are all about upside. I cannot stress this enough. My good friend Jake Ciely (aka @allinkid on Twitter) calls this “The Greg Jennings rule.” Don’t worry about bye-week fill-ins. Don’t draft boring, high-floor players (the Tyler Lockett type). Plenty of equivalent players will be available on waivers in season. Draft the lottery tickets, take the shot on the dart throws, the guys who can be actual difference makers. If they don’t hit (most won’t), you can just drop them. But if you stash a Bucky Irving? Those are the moves that win championships.

You don’t have to “win” trades

This tip is more so for the post-draft fallout and general roster management, but it’s worth mentioning now for those days between your draft and Week 1. You don’t have to “win” a trade for it to help your team. Say it with me.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO WIN EVERY TRADE.

Building a good trade relationship is so much more valuable than fleecing a leaguemate and burning that bridge forever. Always look for a trade that helps both sides. It seems counterproductive, but long-term, you’re much better off. Obviously, you don’t want to help opponents out, but when you take advantage of someone and kill them in a trade, they are much less likely to trade with you in the future. They’ll always be suspicious of what you know that they don’t.

When you make mutually beneficial trades, you build strong trade relationships. You earn a reputation that when league mates have a hole on their team, they’ll likely come to you first. Because you’re reasonable, someone they’re not going to have to play games with. There’s nothing worse than the guy who feels like he has to “win” every trade. Every league has one. If yours doesn’t, it may be you. Don’t be that guy.

Quick Hit Tips

• Do not draft a kicker until the last round.
• Wait until the later rounds to draft your defense (Round 10+ at the EARLIEST).
• Every league is different; no advice is “one size fits all”.
• Make sure you know your league settings before you draft. Roster limits. Scoring. Any other weird quirks.
• DO NOT DRAFT A KICKER UNTIL THE LAST ROUND!
• When all else fails, go with your gut. At the end of the day, we’re all guessing. Some guesses are more educated based on research, experience, skill, and a litany of other factors. Similar to the point I made discussing ADP, I would much rather be wrong going with my gut versus going with someone else’s opinion. There’s no worse feeling than seeing a player blow up on your bench that you sat because someone told you to.

Draft Strategies

Positional breakdown

For the draft strategies and positional breakdowns, I’ll give you some of my favorite targets and the round I’m comfortable drafting them. This isn’t a comprehensive list of how I rank players. You can check that out right here. Names you don’t see aren’t guys I won’t draft or don’t like; I’m just not actively seeking to add them to my teams like the players listed below.

In these next sections, I’ll I’ll briefly go over how I approach each position and list my targets, with my favorites of the bunch highlighted in green in their respective tables. If a player isn’t listed, it doesn’t mean “avoid them at all costs”– it simply means I don’t like their draft price at their current ADP. There’s a point where every player becomes a good value in the draft. Well, almost every player.

Quarterback

The popular “Late Round QB” draft strategy (shoutout JJ Zachariason) still works, and it’s how I approach the position in 1QB more often than not. There are so many high-quality fantasy options at quarterback that you can easily find productive options later in drafts. What I like to do is pair a high upside, high variance quarterback (J.J. McCarthy, Michael Penix Jr.) with a high floor, safe option (Geno Smith) so you have the best of both worlds at a relatively cheap cost. If your high upside quarterback breaks out, you immediately pick up an advantage for your team. If he doesn’t, you’ll be just fine with a McDouble (high floor, low ceiling) at QB. 

But the pendulum has started to swing the other way. Late Round QB has become so popular that the elite quarterbacks have become a value again. It’s still not worth it to take the Lamar Jacksons and Josh Allens of the world early in drafts. But if they start to slip to the late third or fourth round, the positional advantage is worth the cost at that point. The “Early QB” strategy can pay off as long as you don’t draft the quarterback too early. 

Running Back

The running back position has more strategies dubbed with clever names than any other position. So what does it all mean?

Zero RB: One of the most popular contrarian strategies. You don’t draft a running back in the early rounds. You draft for strength at the other positions, and take multiple shots at running backs in the middle to late rounds in hopes of finding that breakout star. Similar to Late Round QB, it’s become so popular that you can get phenomenal value at running back with their suppressed ADPs. This can work, but you’ll be at a significant disadvantage if you can’t find a productive running back.

Hero RB: A variation of “Zero RB”, this one’s a little harder to pull off because there are so few running backs who qualify for the role of “hero”. You draft one of the elite running backs (Bijan Robinson, Saquon Barkley, Jahmyr Gibbs) and then do not draft another until the late rounds, maybe the end of the middle rounds. This is my favorite approach to drafting, but it’s not always attainable. It’s a more balanced approach than Zero RB, and you can take advantage of the value at wide receiver that’s generally available in the middle rounds.

Robust RB: If you started playing fantasy football before 2005, you remember the days when “Robust RB” was just the first few rounds of every draft. Roughly 90% of the first two rounds were all running backs.

“And we liked it that way!” he shouted.

It’s a simple concept where you take two running backs in the first two to four rounds. Its chances of being successful rely on the tier of running back available when you take your second one. If you stubbornly stick to Robust RB and overdraft a mediocre back, you can kill your playoff chances before the season starts, especially in PPR formats where having high-end receivers is crucial.

Wide Receiver

There aren’t many wide receiver strategies with fancy names using a play on words. The plan you draft for wide receivers is mainly dependent on when you target your running backs. Going Zero RB? Hit WR early and often. Hero RB? Still early and frequently, but you’re less likely to have a stud WR and have to grab a few extra in the middle rounds. Robust RB? You’d better collect wide receivers like Thanos does Infinity Stones.

Since I like to draft based on Hero RB, I often find myself taking a bunch of wide receivers in the middle rounds. Part of the reason I like Hero RB is that I’m confident in my ability to identify values and potential breakouts at WR. But if I can draft a Brian Thomas Jr. or Drake London, chances are I’m doing it.

Late rounds are where you can find a ton of value at wide receiver. Look for players who have an opportunity to step right into a starting role (Jayden Higgins, Joshua Palmer) and stash players who could grow into one (Emeka Egbuka).

Tight End

There are only two ways to approach tight end, and it’s a carbon copy of the quarterback strategy. You can go for elite tight ends, but their acquisition cost is so incredibly high. If you want Brock Bowers or Trey McBride, you’ll be using a second or third-round pick. For me, that’s too high a cost. Some seasons have exceptions to the rule, and George Kittle in the fourth has the goldilocks “just right” risk/reward feeling. If you don’t snag one of the elites, approach it like you would a late-round QB. Pair one of those volatile breakout candidates (Tyler Warren/Kyle Pitts) with a safe option (Pat Freiermuth) if you’re able. The problem at tight end is that there are far fewer safe options. If they’re all gone by the time you’re looking for another, either grab another lottery ticket tight end or don’t draft another one at all.

Cheat Sheet

Here’s a handy chart for you to reference of all of my positional targets by round:

 

Best of luck to everyone in your drafts! Let’s crush this thing together.

 

 

 

Photo by Monica Elvira Boeck | Adapted by Parker McDonald (@TheCarbonFox on Twitter/X)