One of the best ways to prepare for a fantasy football draft is a fantasy football mock draft via custom fantasy football rankings. This can help you more effectively execute your preferred draft strategy by evaluating fantasy football ADP trends and get you fully up to speed with how those rankings compare to the ones other managers are using.
In the following overview, we'll walk you through the best way to use the RotoWire fantasy football mock draft to optimize your roster builds. We will tell you why testing custom rankings matters before draft day, then guide you through comparing your rankings to ADP trends. After that, we'll discuss evaluating roster builds based on your rankings, followed by identifying tier breaks and draft timing issues. We'll then illustrate how to refine your rankings based on mock draft results.
"One of the things I love about our mock draft tool is that it helps me plan for every draft and league I'm in," RotoWire fantasy football expert Ryan Pohle said. "I can input all of my league's settings and feel confident that the simulator is going to give me a realistic outcome of what players will be on the board when it's my turn to pick.
"I can play around with several different strategies, whether it be grabbing a TE early and waiting on a QB or vice versa, or going RB or WR heavy early. I can then analyze those roster builds and see what I like the best, and then implement that plan on draft day."
Why Testing Custom Rankings Matters Before Draft Day
Mock draft simulators are invaluable in helping validate whether your custom fantasy football rankings align with real drafts. What sounds like a good fantasy football draft strategy in theory might not match what is happening in live drafts, and these tests are the best way to determine if that is the case.
A secondary benefit of this process is that it reveals which player values on your fantasy football cheat sheet need adjustment. In some cases, this could be a minor adjustment, but even those can have cascading positive effects. It can be the difference between having the late rounds of the draft run smoothly or having to chase higher risk prospects to make up for an early round deficiency.
Comparing Your Rankings to ADP Trends
The most effective method of testing your custom rankings is to see where your ranked players are being selected vs their fantasy football ADP. In most cases these will correspond as expected, but when they don't go as planned, it is an immediate alert that you need to adjust your custom rankings (something you can easily do in the RotoWire fantasy football draft kit).
For example, if you are counting on a running back to make it to back half of the RB2 tier because he shows up too frequently on the NFL injury report and that running back is commonly being picked earlier than anticipated, you should take that as a sign that you need to reevaluate this back's value.
"ADP tends to fluctuate, especially during the summer when injuries may affect the depth chart and training camp hype can send players up draft boards," Pohle said. "While it's difficult to keep on top of everything, keeping an eye on ADP trends to see what players are rising or falling is important to adjust your own rankings properly.
"Try not to overreact too much to coaches hyping up young players, but it's still important to keep in mind that injuries can have a large impact on player roles and usage."
Evaluating Roster Builds Based on Your Rankings
Individual mock drafts can have outlier valuations, so you are best advised to run multiple mocks when gauging how your custom rankings compare. You will also want to do full mock drafts because this is the best way to assess whether your team builds are balanced, too risky or lacking depth at key positions.
It's also a good idea to use this process to compare how your custom rankings line up with the overall RotoWire fantasy football projections. Many fantasy managers go with a standard set of rankings and finding out the differences between them can highlight value opportunities.
"Have you ever wanted to do hero-RB or start your draft with four consecutive WRs, but you couldn't quite pull the trigger because it seemed too risky? said Pohle. "The mock draft simulator is a great way to try a variety of strategies and see if that unorthodox build is something that you think can lead to a championship-caliber squad.
"The great thing is that there's no one size fits all. And when it comes to drafting, you have to be able to adjust to what others are doing and not get caught in following a run at a position, but being the one to start it."
Identifying Tier Breaks and Draft Timing Issues
Another benefit of mock drafts is that they underline where your tiers may be too aggressive or too conservative. Since fantasy managers often plan their drafts around these tier breaks, getting this right or wrong can make or break your draft.
For instance, if your initial analysis of NFL depth charts suggests that players in the WR1 tier will still be on the board at the end of Round 3, but mock drafts show that those candidates will be gone by early in that round, it can help you adjust your draft priorities and thus avoid missing key tier breaks.
Refining Rankings Based on Mock Draft Results
Don't forget that your goal in using the mock draft simulator, available through your subscription to RotoWire, is to adjust your rankings, tiers and draft strategy after reviewing mock outcomes. The result should be a flexible, data-backed draft plan that performs well across multiple scenarios.
You should strongly consider incorporating the RotoWire fantasy football draft assistant into this plan. This tool is a powerful draft day guide that centralizes all of your custom information in an easy-to-use format so that you can focus on picks.
