How have fantasy football's No. 1 draft picks panned out in past 10 seasons?
The top-five players in fantasy football through 12 weeks of the 2021 fantasy football season, using Joe Bryant's Value Based Drafting (VBD) metric as our way of evaluating fantasy production, are Jonathan Taylor, Cooper Kupp, Austin Ekeler, Joe Mixon and Deebo Samuel. Do you know how many of those names were consensus top-10 picks entering the season? Just one — Taylor, who checked in at No. 9 on Fantasy Pros' consensus ranking of Average Draft Position (ADP) entering the year. Ekeler was No. 13, with Mixon following closely behind at No. 19. Kupp was taken fairly early among receivers, as the WR17 and 44th receiver off the board. Expectations for Samuel were significantly lower, as he had an ADP of 82, taken after names like Robby Anderson, Noah Fant and teammate Brandon Aiyuk.
But that's your top five. Go figure.
Looking at the draft in hindsight to uncover discrepancies in ADP and actual production, much like the ones you see above, is one way to see just how little we really know about how the football season will unfold. We don't know which players will turn into stars and vice versa. We don't know who will catch the injury bug. We don't know which teams will surprise us as the Cinderella stories of the NFL season, and the same goes for the players within the fantasy football season. And nothing quite shows us that this is the case like the No. 1 overall draft pick.
The very first pick of the draft is seemingly easy to make, but it's never a guarantee. Nothing's a guarantee in sports, which is why the JaMarcus Russells and the Greg Odens of our world exist, and the same can be said for fantasy football. All we can do is give it our best educated approach and/or cave into the pressures of the hundreds of rankings and expert analyses, and pick away.
On Monday, the very large majority of No. 1 overall pickers received a gut punch, one that followed several others over the course of the season, as it was revealed that Panthers running back Christian McCaffrey is done for the year with an ankle injury. He had already been in and out of games, with questionable tags galore throughout the 2021 campaign. He was great when he played in full games — he basically had all 785 of his yards from scrimmage in just five contests — but the best ability is availability, and this was the final blow for owners who held on to him, begging for a stretch of good health.
As the consensus No. 1 overall pick, McCaffrey likely led to a lot of early exits for those who drafted him. Take yours truly, for instance, who selected McCaffrey, J.K. Dobbins and Raheem Mostert as my first three running backs of the draft this year within the first six rounds. Yeah... think I'm having fun in that league?
And here is where we ask the question that was proposed in the headline of this article: with McCaffrey's season over and a bunch of fantasy teams down and out, how have the other consensus No. 1 overall draft picks fared in recent fantasy football seasons? How many times does the pick that is supposed to be as close to a guarantee as possible, the draft slot that's deemed the crown jewel of the fantasy football draft, actually come to fruition?
Using ADP data from Fantasy Football Calculator and checking out the end-of-year results on Pro Football Reference using standard scoring and the aforementioned VBD metric, we've taken a look through the past ten seasons to see how each year's No. 1 pick has done.
