General Tip – Draft your team before you draft your team.
Research is necessary – if it wasn’t, a piece about unorthodox draft tips would be useless. For this reason, mock drafts and cheat sheets are always encouraged. But everything for which you could prepare is still dependent upon the action of others. After all, whether you participate in a snake draft or auction, the players are subject to a market environment.
With nothing guaranteed – that is, even the first overall pick has been debated – every plan needs some sort of safety net. This should be in the form of the team you have already drafted. Mentally.
Print out your roster positions and compare it side-by-side to your favorite draft list. Imagine you have the last pick in the first two rounds – not a snake draft, for this exercise, but either the 10th, 12th, 14th, etc. pick and the 20th, 24th, 28th, etc. pick the next time. Take two players that, mathematically, should be available when you draft.
Skip the next thirty players entirely. At this point, you should be well beyond the reaches of most other owners’ mentalities. Reach – as described earlier – for the remainder of your team. The same could be done for an auction by predetermining a few keystone players for which you would pay nearly anything, then filling in the roster with bargains of $5 or less. Chances are, these rosters contain specific strengths unique to what you value in a draft, and may actually be a better collection of talent than anything a mock draft could produce.
Chaos being ever-present at your draft or auction, some of these players will end up elsewhere, but the vast majority will be available if and when you need them. There is also an added benefit to this conservative approach – when the time comes to make a selection, you can always upgrade if a better option exists.
