Ahead of completing your 22/23 Fantasy EPL Draft, you need to think about your Draft Rankings. Totti breaks down his thoughts on Making Your Own Draft Ranks ahead of the new Premier League season. It’s not as hard as it may sound! Check out below for all the top tips.
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Making Draft Ranks
The team at The Draft Society will be churning out content to get you prepared for Draft Day. Looking at players, teams, strategies and everything you need to have an awesome start to the new season. This article, however, will provide you with a blueprint if you want to go the extra mile and actually create your own Draft Ranks. There are many ways to go about creating ranks, I attempt to introduce some of them to help you navigate the minefield that is making your own ranks.
What Are Ranks?
Ranks are a list of EPL players sorted by who you would rather take in a draft. Ranks are a baseline to use on Draft Day to see where valuable players fall. Who you might want to pick up. It is not to be confused with a Cheat Sheets that are ranks specifically streamlined to a certain draft (10 or 12 team, knowing other managers, factoring in roster construction).
Necessary or Luxury
If you read The Draft Society content, listen to the Key Pass Collective Pod or follow me on Twitter you are probably already sick of me saying, suggesting, insisting on doing your own personal ranks. Why, you may ask, is this so important? On Draft Day, you face decisions every 5 minutes or so and your judgment can be clouded by the added adrenaline the Draft Day brings (not to mention the beer). Having your own ranks, means there is a safety net, constructed by yourself, that stops you from doing something you might regret later.
Actually taking the time and looking through the individual players also means that there will not be any surprises for you come draft day.
Is it necessary? Not in the slightest. Is it fun to do? Very much so.
Working From Resources
Both Fantrax HQ and The Draft Society have extensive Draft Kits leading up to the 2022-23 EPL season, including all important Draft Rankings. Draft Purists might tell you that you have to start your ranks from scratch, but I firmly believe that using the resources available will result in a more extensive, more thought through and altogether better final ranking.
Tiers
When setting up Final Ranks one way to go about it is to set up Tiers first and then move over to Ranks from Tiers. Tiers are groups of players from the same position that you expect to score similarly over the course of the season. In theory, a drafter will be willing to pick any player from within a certain tier during the draft. You need to be willing to draft all players from within a given tier at the same point of the draft. If Maddison, Saka and Bowen are in the same Midfielder tier, it means you don’t mind which of these players you end up drafting. In addition, a tier 1 DEF is not necessarily as valuable as a tier 1 MID or FWD. It’s important to understand that a tier is simply a measurement of the perceived value of each player as compared to the rest of the players at their position.
From Tiers to Ranks
To explain the process, I have come up with a metaphor that best describes converting Tiers into Ranks:
It is like sewing. So you have the threads from all your tiers, the “best” players, those you like the best, and you keep them in mind, you start putting down names, KDB, then when you realize you’d draft a different position player ahead of the guy in your tier (Bruno), you put in the “forward thread” with Salah, then u have 2 threads going tier 1 midfielder and tier 1 forward, you keep putting them one after another, all the while keeping in mind the “thread leader” from your other positional tiers and keep adding them in. At once you only have a maximum of 3 (+1GK) thread going, so you can always keep in mind who will start the next thread.
It is much easier than it sounds, you will get the hang of it very quickly once you start the process
Would You Rather?
You can, of course, start your ranking from scratch and not use Tiers as a preliminary setup. I try to do my Tiers early on in the pre-season and then do my Ranks separately from scratch at a later date, then compare the two and examine the differences and combine the two documents into a “Master Ranks”
When going about constructing your Ranks from scratch, the go-to question you are going to use is “Would you rather this player or that player?” Examining each player against a group of players.
The best way to go about this is to get yourself a base list, you can use Fantrax ADP, last year’s scores (do not forget to add promoted players and new transfers) or projections for next season. Whatever you use, you will have a list to start working from. Then you can start moving players around. Once you have done 5-10 players, look back and make sure you are happy with the order and look ahead to see if there are any players in the next lot that would fit in there. Once you have done this, you can move onto the next batch of 5 or 10 players moving all the way to around 150.
For personal ranks, I would suggest that you do not need to rank more than 150 players. Around the last spots, roster construction, GW1-5 schedules, etc will come into play much more. Upon completion, don’t forget to update your ranks to include transfers coming in and the adjustments these transfers might cause. I usually use an online document editor to finalize my ranks, but it is possible to enter your Ranks into the Fantrax system making them available and automatically accessible in the Draft Room.
Ranks to Cheat Sheet
Once you have finished your “Master Ranks” you can start working on your very own personal Draft Cheat Sheet. A Draft Cheat Sheet is essentially Ranks, customized to the draft you are about to do.
What can you do to personalize and league-specialize your ranks?
- Highlight the areas where your picks are likely to fall
- Add which position you might be looking for at a certain point in the draft
- Add a few interesting players you can look at in later rounds, who you have not ranked
- Comment on potential fallers (players who, are likely to be missed by your league mates)
- Highlight players who are likely to be picked earlier than where you have them ranked
- And last, but probably most importantly, highlight players you would like to draft
This last bullet point is very important. If you are like me, serious about your draft prep, you can lose sight of this all being a fun game you love to play. At the end of the day, you want to have players in your team, who you actually like and can cheer for, so don’t think twice about reaching for a player you like.
Good Luck!!
Find our 22/23 Fantasy EPL Preseason Content here! And make sure you also check out the 22/23 Draft Kit from our official EPL content partners The Draft Society for Draft Rankings, Team Previews, Draft Strategy, Transfer Analysis, 22/23 Season Projections, and so much more!
Follow Totti on Twitter @Tottiandor for all the latest!
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