Fantasy Football 2021: 12-team mock draft
Fantasy football mock drafts are perfect mid-day stress relievers as you get closer and closer to the real thing. The real thing, on the other hand, can be quite stress-inducing. After all, you're signing your life away, at least for the next few months, to the players you ultimately decide to select throughout the draft. They can single-handedly dictate your mood for an entire week, become the root of loads of trash talk from friends and family, and keep you up until the wee hours of the night as you make impossible decisions.
But, for now, we should remember that these are mock drafts. No commitment here. It's a trial run with a select group of players that you can either aspire to replicate or, alternatively, look at and decide that it's just not the team for you. There are endless possibilities, multiple strategies and, depending on the format of your league, a handful of draft slots from which you can begin your adventure.
Today, we'll go over each and every one of those draft slots, giving you an idea of what teams can look like no matter where you're lined up in the draft order. We'll also go over two strategies that you may want to test out — a zero-RB draft and an RB-heavy draft — depending on where you're picking from. And we'll go over good picks, bad picks, ugly picks and late-round gems that can win you your draft. Well, that I think can win you your draft. As we've come to learn, fantasy football is an unpredictable, volatile game — and that's what makes it all the more fun.
For the RB-heavy strategy, we'll use a pick at the top of the draft board and draft four consecutive running backs. After all, if you have the opportunity to pick No. 1 overall, you're not going to want to miss out on the players seen as the surest things to lead your team to glory, and those players are all running backs. I made these selections, and the picks from that team will be bolded. For the zero-RB strategy, we'll select toward the back end of the first round, where that elite tier has already been scooped up. Instead, we'll take six consecutive non-RB players. The thought is that it might be smart to stock up at other positions first before rapidly picking up running backs later on in the hopes that one or two can turn into good or great options. My colleague Tim Kelly made those picks, and his selections for that team will be italicized.
Also of note is that we are mocking as if this were a half-PPR league, which may result in certain players going earlier or later than they'd go in a standard or full-PPR format.
Draft performed using Sleeper. All picks, except for Team 1 and Team 10, were made by CPU.
