Waiting to Draft a QB

In my last post, I mentioned a few uses that I had in mind for my autodraft program.  One was figuring out if it's better to draft a QB in later rounds.  I finally got around to compiling some results around this question.  Even though we are well into the fantasy football season, I will probably spend some more time discussing draft strategies because it's such a critical (but by no means the most or only critical) part of fantasy football success.

For this experiment, I created a 12-team league and ran through several snake drafts using player rankings from FantasyPros.  I took turns with each team delaying the drafting of a QB by successively higher test rounds (e.g. Team 1 wasn't allowed to draft a QB until round 2, then round 3, then round 4, et al.).  I then compiled the total projected fantasy points for the season and averaged them across each team.  The chart below is the result:

Of the 12 teams, four (teams 4, 6, 8 and 12) end up with lower total projected fantasy points for the season after waiting on drafting a QB.  Team 5 also has a lower projected value, but peaks in round 6 before the decline.  The remaining 8 teams show a marked increase in projected fantasy points by waiting on drafting a QB.  Note the significant rise for Team 7 (red).  As a matter of fact, Team 9 ends up with the highest point total after waiting until round 11.

While this is hardly definitive proof, there is a strong tendency for an increase in points by waiting to draft a QB.  This strategy allows you to front-load other skill positions, particularly RB and WR, the quality of which grows scarcer over time.  QB tends to be a pretty deep position, so picking up those rarer RBs/WRs at the outset proves more valuable.

I plan on looking at yet another draft strategy, Zero RB, next.