Fantasy Football 202: 2026 Draft Strategy, ADP, Tiers & Mock Drafts

Fantasy football draft season is here, but this isn’t Fantasy Football 101. You already know how to draft a team. This is Fantasy Football 202 — how to actually think when you’re on the clock.

Ian breaks down his 2026 fantasy football draft philosophy into three parts: do your homework, read the room, and build your team. That means using mock drafts as preparation instead of prediction, treating ADP as a guide rather than a rule, understanding player tiers, reacting to positional runs, reading the rosters around you, and knowing when it’s worth reaching to get your guy.

Plus: keeper-league preparation, using Vegas futures as another data point, balancing early-round stability with late-round upside, roster depth and why almost every “do not draft” player eventually becomes interesting at the right price.

Fantasy football is forecasting. You’re going to get picks wrong. The goal is to do enough homework that when you’re on the clock, you know why you’re making the pick.

Do your homework. Read the room. Build your team. And don’t be afraid to die on your hill with your guys.

Transcript

Stop Collecting Opinions

SPEAKER_01 0:00

At some point, you have to stop collecting opinions. You did your homework. You mocked. You looked at ADP. You built your tiers of players. And then the draft started. You read the room. You watched the runs. You looked at the rosters around you. And now you started building your team. Now you're on the clock. Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Make the pick. I guess there's only one way to find out. Let's do it to it, right?

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Yeah. Extra, extra. Keep the lights low. New York talking with the late nights go from the garden glow to the stadium street. Devin, every last, every what does it mean? Right on the radio. Coming to your speakers, big days. Art tools are breaking with the medicine. Run it down, lights, right on the radio. Let's do it to it and let it.

Fantasy Football 202 Starts Here

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Hello and welcome back to Rice on the Radio. And today, I am not going to be explaining fantasy football to you. I mean, if you found this episode, I'm assuming you already know what fantasy football is. You may have drafted a team before. You know what the waiver wire is. You probably know what ADP means. Or at the very least, you stared at the little number next to somebody's name and wondered why everybody seems to like him a little bit more than you do. No, no, no, no. Consider this fantasy football 202. You know how to draft a team. Now, let's talk about how to actually think during a draft. Because the more fantasy football I play, the more I think it resembles the stock market. Everybody has rankings. Everybody has projections, a model. Everybody's got an opinion. And somehow, every single August, you can find one article telling you a player is going to win your league, followed immediately by another article explaining why drafting that same guy is going to run your season completely into the ground and you're an idiot for taking him. Look, at the end of the day, these are educated guesses. Hopefully very educated guesses, but nonetheless, guesses. So I'm not here to give you some magical clickbait list of 12 players and tell you that if you draft them, congratulations, enjoy your championship. No. I'm here today to talk about process. And really, I think the whole thing can be broken into three parts. Do your homework, read the room, build your team. That's it. Prepare before your draft, react to what is happening during it, and build a roster that makes sense for you.

Mock Drafts As Decision Rehearsal

SPEAKER_01 3:06

So let's start with the part that you have complete control over. And that would be doing the homework. The biggest mistake someone can make before a fantasy draft is honestly very simple. Showing up cold. And listen, I I know I'm probably on the extreme end of this. I mock draft way too much. I badger my league mates for who they might be keeping or who they're thinking about taking at this spot. You do not need to be me. You do not need 50 mocks a day. You don't need six spreadsheets built based upon strength of schedule. You don't need your family staging an intervention because you've been staring at fantasy pros for eight hours straight. But you gotta do a few. Especially, especially once you know your actual draft position. Look, if you're picking seventh in a 12-team league, you gotta mock at seven. If you're on the turn, you gotta see what life is like having back-to-back picks and then not picking for a while. The point of a mock draft is not to predict your exact team. That's impossible. There's always one idiot in your league. What you're trying to learn is the neighborhood. Who is normally around when you pick in round two? Where does the running back market start getting a little too uncomfortable? What wide receiver looks like in round five? When do people start going on a run for quarterbacks or tight ends? Where are the spots where you repeatedly look at the board and think, man, I don't really like any of this right now? That's the useful information that you should be chasing. Because now you know where your problems might be before the real draft puts you on the clock. You know, maybe you thought you could wait another round at running back. Maybe every mock leaves you starting, staring at guys that you don't want. Shit, maybe you thought quarterback could wait until round 10, but the tier you actually like keeps disappearing around round eight. That's the point. A mock isn't a prediction, it's a rehearsal. More specifically, you're rehearsing the decisions. And I'll take that even further. If every mock you do looks exactly the same, I don't think you're learning very much, to be honest with you. If every single time you go running back, wide receiver, running back, wait on quarterback, wait on tight end, congratulations. You've confirmed that you already like a strategy. You got to try something different. You got to go running back, running back once. You got to go wide receiver, wide receiver once. Take an elite quarterback earlier than you normally would just to see how your team turns out. And when it comes draft day, you don't have to use any of those strategies if you don't want to. But you'll be asking and answering one question. What does my team look like if I do this? Shit, maybe you discover something you really do like. Maybe you finish the mock going, nope, we're never doing that. No shot. But great, either way, you learn something. Look, I can't tell you how many times I've done a mock and I'm like, all right, you know what? What's my team look like if I take Josh Allen here? By the way, Josh Allen has a 50% playoff rate, just for the record. But anyway, I can't tell you how many times I've done that, and I still don't like the mock. And I'm glad that I'm not gonna have them. But I've also done mocks where I take two elite receivers right off the rip in a PPR league, thinking, okay, you know, PPR points, they get a lot of targets, we'll see. And then I get to running backs and I go, what the hell is this? How am I stuck with this? Don't force it. If nothing comes naturally, just keep moving. That's the point. Have a plan, but don't become a prisoner of the plan. You should know what hero running back means. You should know what zero running back means. You should understand what an RB heavy start looks like later in rounds for a receiver. The strategy gives you a framework. It should not dictate every decision you make for 15 rounds. If you walk into the draft saying, I'm doing hero running back no matter what, and suddenly a second round running back you love falls way further than you expected. You gotta take the value, man. But now it messes up your whole draft strategy. So now what do you do? Fantasy football drafts don't award style points for sticking perfectly to a strategy article you read three weeks ago. Prepare enough that you understand your options and then you react. And keeper leagues, keeper leagues take this preparation to another level because now a normal public mock can be misleading. You know, if 10 players who normally go inside the first few rounds are already being kept, then your real player pool is completely different. If your league trades draft picks too on top of it, forget it. This is where the better customizable mock draft tools can actually be very useful. You know, put your keepers in the railrounds, remove the players from the pool, you count for picks that have been changed hands, but you know, at least you're rehearsing something that looks like your league instead of some generic 12 team draft. Again, still not precision, still a rehearsal. And that'll bring me to ADP here.

ADP As A Tool Not A Boss

SPEAKER_01 8:34

I think ADP, which if you don't know what ADP is, is average draft position. It's probably one of the best tools fantasy players have, and I also think people let it control them way too much when drafting. The the easiest way that I can explain how I look at ADP is uh it's like getting advice from a really trustworthy friend. Yeah, most of the time, probably a pretty good decision. You should listen, but they're not your boss. ADP tells you what the market thinks. It gives you an idea of when a player is likely to get drafted. That matters a whole bunch, man. If I'm sitting at pick 50 and I really like somebody whose ADP is around 62, and I don't pick again until 74, well, now I have information. He's probably not gonna make it back to me. So what am I doing? Am I supposed to pass on him because some website or some sheet that I printed out tells me technically I took him 12 spots too early? And then what? Then watch him go six picks later? If I did the work and I believe in the player, get the guy. Obviously, use some common sense here. I mean, if someone's ADP is 145, I'm not telling you to take them 15th overall because you saw one good preseason drive. There's a difference between conviction and insanity here. But you know, within a tier, within a round, maybe even a little more, depending on how long you've been going for the next before the next pick. I'm here to tell you it's okay. I'm fine with it. I do it. ADP should tell you when somebody might get drafted. It should not tell you who you're allowed to draft. You know, I I really like DJ Moore this year. I think he's gonna be a big passing guy in that Bills offense. I think it's the best receiver that Josh Allen has had. He's going in the fifth-ish. But if I'm at the turn in the fourth round and there's, I don't know, five, six receivers in front of him, I'm gonna take him. I don't think he's gonna get back to me, man. Because it's not five, six receivers. It's almost twenty, twenty four picks. You know, that's a lot to ask of a guy not getting taken, and also probably somebody just auto-drafting him by accident. And this is also why I like having more than one source of information. ADP is one, rankings are one, projections are one, sure. The other thing that I like looking at when I'm really splitting hairs between uh players is Vegas. Not because Vegas has like the fantasy football answer key. It doesn't. But Vegas isn't exactly in the business of being wrong on purpose either. So if I'm genuinely stuck between two or three players, I don't mind checking season-long markets. Yeah, look, take these three receivers, for example, right? Jackson Smith and Jigba, Amon Ross St. Brown, CeeDee Land. They're all pretty close to each other, and you know, talent-wise, team-wise. Let's say, you know, I think all three are studs and I'm splitting hairs. Maybe their receiving yards expectations aren't identical. Does the highest Vegas number automatically become my pick? No. But what it does make me ask is why? Why are they listed like that? Maybe one guy has less target competition, right? Maybe another has another star receiver across from him. Maybe one team is expected to throw more. Maybe another has a better defense and spends more fourth quarters protecting leads. You know, maybe one offense is simply projected to score more points. It's that simple. Now we're thinking about the player beyond a ranking number. And that's all that Vegas is to me. Another set of eyes checking the homework. That's the bigger lesson of part one here. Mock drafts, ADP, rankings, tiers, Vegas, articles, podcasts, projections. Use all of it. But none of it gets to make the pick for you. The goal of research isn't to eliminate uncertainty. The goal is to reach the point where if you disagree with everybody else, you at least know why you disagree with everybody else.

Reading The Room During Runs

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Now the draft starts, and this is where all that preparation meets reality. It's time to read the room. You've done the homework, you've mocked, you've looked at ADPs, you've built your tiers. Draft days here. There's pizza on the way, beers are flowing, maybe some friends you haven't seen in a long time are there. Draft gets going, and uh some asshole takes a player 25 picks ahead of where you expected, and the entire thing falls apart. Welcome to fantasy football. This is why I think drafting well is less more about memorizing a ranking sheet and more about understanding what's happening in front of you. Don't draft the board you expected. Draft a board that's actually there. Let's say you're round five. Running backs flying. One goes and then another, and then another. Five picks later, the position has basically been carpet bombed, right? The immediate reaction is, oh shit, I need a running back, man. They're going quick. Well, maybe, but maybe not. This is where your tiers that you've done your homework on become more important than the run itself. Let's say there's one running back left that you really like or that you feel comfortable with, and then there is a huge drop off. Okay, I'm probably taking the running back. But what if I've got the next three running backs basically even? And I would be perfectly happy with any of them. Well, you know what? While everybody else has been panic drafting running backs, a wide receiver that I've had my eyes on that I thought it was going to go 15 picks earlier is still sitting there. Now we got the actual decision to make. Am I willing to pass on this running back to take this receiver and live with one of the next three guys later? Well, if the answer is yes, you take the value. Let everybody panic, man. That's why I don't believe in the blanket rules like never chase a positional run. Sometimes you should. Sometimes you gotta go, oh shit, I gotta get my guy. But I also don't believe in, you know, you have to join the run before you're left holding the bag. That's how people end up drafting the worst player in a tier simply because six other managers made them nervous. The real question you should always be asking yourself is how big is the drop? Who am I comfortable with? What value is falling because everybody else is focused on this problem? It's an executive decision. Now, tight end's a little bit heavier this year, but I can't tell you over the past four or five years how many times I've been in a draft where one tight end goes and then all of a sudden it's like bang, bang, bang, tight end, tight end, tight end. And then you start panicking because you go, oh shit. Uh um uh and you grab somebody that you had no business grabbing when there was a perfectly good running back or a perfectly good wide receiver right there, prime ripe for the taking. It's all about back and forth. You gotta pay attention to your room. The other half of reading the room is figuring out who is actually picking around you. Knowing your league mates help, definitely, if it's not just some random league, it's some guys that you've been playing with for a while. You know the guys who love the rookies, you know the guys who always want the flashy quarterback, you know the guys who somehow ends up with six running backs every August. That's the information that's useful. But, you know, once the draft starts, I actually care more about what their rosters are telling me. Let's say someone already has four running backs through six rounds. Do I think that he's taking a fifth? Probably

Predicting Picks By Rosters

SPEAKER_01 17:04

not. I mean, maybe he's if he's an absolute lunatic. I mean, we all play with at least one of those guys, but you know, chances are eventually he needs a wide receiver or a tight end or a quarterback, something, you know? So now I look at who picks between me and my next selection. Do all three teams already have quarterbacks? Maybe I can wait. Do all three need tight ends, and there's only one tight end left that I actually want? Different conversation. You also have to read the room on the macro level because the guy drafting four running backs doesn't only affect his roster, it affects everyone else's brain. People see the position disappearing. They start getting nervous, another running back goes, and then another, and then another. Then suddenly it gets worse. And while everybody's fighting over the same position, something else starts sliding. That's the opportunity that you should be looking for. And I'll I'll be fully admitted here. I I am usually I'm usually the guy stashing running backs. I think last year in my home league, I ended up with A-chan, Cook, Jantey, and Tajay Spears. No, Tony Pollard, excuse me. I don't think Tony Pollard saw a starting spot on my roster once. But forced to run while everybody else was panicking about running backs, I took a bunch of receivers. That's how it goes. Whether you know the people or not, the principle is the same. Look ahead. And your draft position changes how much risk you can actually bring on, too. Look, if I'm in the middle of the round, the turnaround isn't the worst. It's always out of a 10 league, it's 10 picks away. Out of a 12 league, it's, you know, 12 picks away. But if you're towards the beginning or the end, you're looking at 24 picks sometimes before you can make your next pick. That's a different animal. If there's a player that I really want, sometimes sometimes I gotta take him earlier than his ADP and have to deal with everybody yelling, reach or ew, why'd you go that so early? Look, man, a reach is only a reach if it doesn't work out, right? But seriously, if if you if you take a player 10 picks ahead of his ADP and he has a monster season, nobody in week 12 gives a shit where fantasy pros said you were supposed to draft him. The question is whether the player was worth the pick. And whether you realistically would have had another chance at him. Don't completely light value on fire because you fell in love with somebody. But don't spend your whole draft trying to win an imaginary efficiency contest, you know? At some point, take the player. That's part two. You prepared for the draft. Now you gotta react to the draft. Don't draft the board you wanted, draft the board you get. And then we get to our last question of things here What are we actually trying to build?

Build For Depth Value And Upside

SPEAKER_01 20:24

So roster construction is where I think fantasy football becomes much more personal, right? There isn't one perfect answer. Again, like I said before, personally, I tend to draft pretty running back heavy. That's how I like building teams. I like the flexibility. Running back gets ugly quickly during an NFL season, guys get hurt, committees change, somebody loses a job, you know? And I'd rather have one too many legitimate running backs than get to week five, lose a starter, and discover that my best replacement is somebody getting seven touches in a three-man committee. Like I just said about Tony Pollard. You know, you could look at that and say, what the hell was the point of even having him? Well, couple things. The point was that one, I had him if one of my starters got hurt. I had the replacement. And if somebody becomes desperate for a running back, guess what? I got trade ammunition. And honestly, the other thing too is it's good to just keep them off somebody else's roster, to be honest with you. There's a couple teams that I played throughout the year that uh needed a running back, and I had two of them sitting on my bench that they couldn't use against me. Bench value isn't only the fantasy points somebody scores while they're sitting there. Sometimes the bench value is the insurance, the flexibility, and the leverage. Options, right? I like having options in fantasy season. Now, that doesn't mean everybody should build a roster that the way uh the way that I do. Some people want to just build their entire starting lineup filled as quickly as possible with the best guys they can. Running back, running back, receiver, receiver, quarterback, tight end, and then call it a day. Not for me, but some managers will stockpile running backs or receivers, and if the league lets them, not even draft a kicker or a defense. Shout out to my buddy Justin, who likes to cause a problem every year in every league with that. But they figure, all right, whatever, I'd rather get the depth and I'll figure it out later. Both things can work. There's no trophy for having the prettiest roster on draft night. Even if Yahoo says, Oh, you got an A plus. Those guys usually never win. Actually, that's something I think is pretty important. Stop trying to build the perfect draft night roster. It doesn't exist. Your team that you thought you were gonna have is going to change. Someone is going to get hurt. You're going to make waiver claims. You're going to drop guys. Maybe you'll make some trades. Someone you love right now is going to disappoint you. Someone you barely care about that you picked up in the 10th on draft night might be one of the most important players on your team. So the goal isn't how do I make this lineup look perfect tonight? No, no, no. The goal is how do I give myself the best combination of starters, depth, value, and upside for November, for December. And personally, that's why my risk tolerance changes as the rounds go on. You know, the first four or five rounds, give me the foundation. Give me volume, give me clear roles, give me players I expect to start every week, plug and play, forget and set. I'm usually not interested in having my second round pick require five different things to break perfectly for him to return the value. But later, different story. After round five, round six, let's get weird with it, man. Let's have some fun. Give me the young receiver who could explode. Give me the running back in the ambiguous backfield who might be able to beat some people out. Give me the guy who is one injury away from a massive workload. Because if my ninth round pick misses, fine. Who cares? My roster should be able to survive that. If my first four picks are all giant swings and three of them miss, well, guess what, buddy? Hope you like wearing your clown suit at the end of the year or whatever your league punishment is. The simplest way I can put it and explain my approach is this early rounds, don't lose your draft. Later rounds, that's when you try and win it. That also affects how I look at these do not draft list things. You know, you see a million of them. I don't really believe most players are literally undraftable. Almost everybody eventually becomes a value.

Early Safe Picks Late Big Swings

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Yeah, maybe I hate the offense, maybe I don't trust the role, maybe the injury that he had in preseason scares me. Maybe I just don't think the player is good as everybody else does. Fine. But if he falls far enough, eventually the price compensates for the risk. So when I say I'm not drafting that guy, what I usually mean is I'm not drafting him at what it realistically costs to get him. And that's an important distinction. Because fantasy football is always about price. The same player can be a terrible pick in round three and a steal in round six. Ultimately, that's roster construction. There is no universal correct team. You build based on your league, your board, the value available, your risk tolerance, and your evaluation. That's where I want to bring all three parts back together here. Fantasy football is forecasting. We're all just a bunch of glorified weathermen. It's the stock market. There's an insane amount of information available to us now. Probably too much. You can research one player for three hours, and I promise you, if you look hard enough, you're gonna find somebody telling you he's overrated. Somebody's gonna tell you he's underrated, somebody's calling him a breakout star, someone's calling him a bust. At some point, you have to stop collecting opinions. You did your homework, you mocked, you looked at ADP, you built your tiers of players, and then the draft started. You read the room, you watched the runs, you looked at the rosters around you, and now you started building your team. Now you're on the clock. Ten seconds, nine, eight. Make the pick. You're gonna get picks wrong. I'm gonna get picks wrong. Everybody gets picks wrong. Perfection isn't the goal. The goal is making informed decisions more often than the person you're playing against. Do your homework, read the room, build your team. And when it's time to make your pick, trust your work. It's really that simple, guys. That's Fantasy Football 202. You already know how to draft a team. Now go into your draft knowing why you're making the picks you make. I am Ian Rice. This has been episode 80 of Rice on the Radio. This is part one of the fantasy series that I'm gonna be putting out. Next up, we're gonna do tiers of players. As always, spread good energy. Tell someone you love them. And I'll catch you guys next time.