The big debate in fantasy football is always zero RB (no more than one RB pick in the first six rounds) vs. heavy RB (three RBs in the first six rounds).
“Pick a side!” we’re told.
But this completely misses the point. It’s totally format dependent. If you are Flex9 (two WRs and a flex, with nine fantasy starters in your lineup), you should strive to have the league’s top RB room. Then, heavy RB makes sense. But if you are in a Flex10 league (three WRs and a Flex, with 10 fantasy starters), you need to strive to have the best WR room through a zero-RB construction.
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I talk about Flex9 and Flex10 more than anyone, probably. I have no idea why. It’s obviously the most important factor in determining how we should draft, structurally. For about a decade, every question in our game had to be prefaced with whether you were half PPR or full PPR. Heck, I named my second kid “Half-Point PPR” (sorry, not sorry). But that is so marginal compared with how many wide receivers your league allows you to start.
Let me again explain the difference.
Flex9
Even if you put a WR in the Flex, which is essential in either format, you are playing in a 36-starting-WR league, max. And half the league is probably going to stupidly flex a RB because they want a more certain 10 points instead of the much greater likelihood of a much bigger game from a WR. So 30-to-36 WRs are started. If you build the best WR room, you can only start a maximum of three, and no one really needs a WR with so few starting, so good luck trading surplus.
Conversely, the league is starting a minimum of 24 RBs, and probably 30, and there are only really 32 viable each week, tops. Having two good ones is very tough given the limited supply of plausible starting backs.
In a lower-scoring format like Flex9, every point is more valuable. If you’re weak at RB, you can’t wash away that weakness with dominant WRs because you have a max of three guys who can explode vs. four in Flex10 — a very big difference.
In a lower-scoring format where less points are required to win your week, consistency actually is king, and more volatile players like WRs are simply less desirable. You’re trying to grind out wins.
Flex10
In a Flex10 format, you have 33% more receivers. Now 48 receivers are going to be played, and maybe only 40 are actually worthy of starting each week. If you don’t prioritize the position, you’re sure to be scrambling. You can play a committee RB in your Flex, but that guy is pretty much locked in for 5-to-11 points. With 10 starters, including one more of the most explosive players, a more projectable player is worth less. That extra wide receiver easily could generate 20-plus points.
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Having the best RB room, where you’re getting 5-to-10 total points more than the team with an average RB room, isn’t that meaningful. If your opponent has better receivers and gets a mild break, he’s going to outscore your WRs by 10-to-20 points.
If you spend your first four picks on WRs and get four top 25 WRs, not a Herculean task by any stretch, you are so dangerous. You can just play committee backs, receiving-RB specialists, and stream the waiver wire when inevitable RB attrition strikes to get at least near average at the position. Then the dominant WR room that you spent all that draft capital to build is the winning edge.
But What About TE?
I want a Top 3 TE no matter my format. I think the TE10 this year (consensus rank) can be the TE3, so that doesn’t mean I have to pay that much for it.
But it’s way more important to beat most teams at TE in Flex9 than in Flex10.
Again, you have less players. In Flex10, you can afford a scrub TE because you can wash that away with your four WRs. You’ll probably have a breakout game once every three weeks if you aggressively draft them (maybe one every five for your fourth guy). So at least two are going to pop most weeks.
But in Flex9, again, you are playing much lower scoring games with one less plausible game-breaking player. So having a waiver-wire-caliber TE, giving up points there every week, just hurts more because it’s so much harder to overcome.
Moving Forward
My objective here is to make “Flex9 or Flex10?” the new contextual necessity for every draft and trade question. It’s to make sure when someone is saying, “I advocate RB-heavy drafting in home leagues,” that they say, “assuming your home league is Flex9.” When people like me say, “ZeroRB is obviously the way to draft because a team that takes no more than one RB in the first six rounds doubles their playoff probability,” I want everyone to be clear that we’re talking formats that allow you to start three WRs and Flex.
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This is the basic language that we all need to use to communicate with one another when asking for and giving the best advice.
You know by now that I favor deeper formats. I want more points. I want more starters. I want to draft wide receivers and have hitting on them become more meaningful. In a RB-heavy league, it’s mostly who doesn’t get hurt. And every week we all have the same exact guys in the top 30. But your home league may have been Flex9 for 20 years and you’re not changing. I get it.
On draft day, if you play Flex9, your first page on your cheat sheet should be your RB ranks. If you play Flex10, it should be your WR page. My priorities drafting are…
- Flex9: RB, WR/TE, QB
- Flex10: WR, RB/TE, QB
So overall rankings are not really useful. They are labored over. If the person doing them says they are for one format or the other, that’s great as long as he or she is lining up with your format. But there’s no splitting the difference here. There’s no Flex9.5 rankings. (Of course, positional ranks are fully relevant in either format.)
Bottom line: these really are different worlds, speaking different languages, when it comes to asking questions and answering them.
(Top photo of Miami Dolphins fan: Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY)
Michael Salfino writes about fantasy sports and collectibles for The Athletic. His numbers-driven fantasy analysis began with a nationally syndicated newspaper column in 2004. He has covered a variety of sports for FiveThirtyEight and The Wall Street Journal, for whom he also wrote about movies. He's been the U.S. elections correspondent for the U.K.'s The Independent. Michael helped Cade Massey of the Wharton School of Business originate an NFL prediction model https://massey-peabody.com that understands context and chance and avoids the trap of overconfidence. He strives to do the same when projecting player performance. Follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelSalfino
