FanDuel Daily Fantasy NFL Snake Drafts: Basics and Strategy

Fantasy football and snake drafts go hand-in-hand.

But for years, that just meant drafting your teams before the season began and then waiting a full year to do it all again. With FanDuel's fantasy football snake draft contests, you hardly have to wait at all.

In addition to FanDuel's salary cap format, you can now hop into a draft -- a head-to-head entry all the way up to leagues against 11 competitors -- each and every week to see whose draft is best.

There are some more specifics that we'll get to and some strategy to help optimize your process, but what all do you need to know to get started?

The Basics

Here's all the info, but I'll go over the basics here.

Regardless of how many opponents you have, your team build is the same for an NFL snake draft.

On slates with multiple games, you'll draft a six-player lineup: a quarterback, two running backs, two wide receiver/tight ends, and one flex (running back/wide receiver/tight end). You also have to draft players from at least two teams, so that leaves large stacks in play.

Because of the WR/TE flex, you do not have to draft a tight end.

The scoring is the same as it is in a FanDuel salary cap contest, meaning a reception is worth half of a fantasy point.

That really does cover the need-to-know info. You just join, draft, and watch the points pile up.

FanDuel NFL Snake Draft Tips

Know the Positional Scarcity
Positional scarcity is a driving factor in fantasy football drafts. If you're in a 10-entry league, you could see -- in theory -- 30 running backs drafted in a given week. That's a tough scene if you choose to wait on your running backs until the final two rounds.

Meanwhile, in that same sized league, only 10 quarterbacks can be drafted. So -- at worst -- you're starting the projected QB10 in a 10-entry league. Know how far you may have to dive depending on your league depth.

Anticipate Weekly Floor and Ceiling
"Floor" and "ceiling" are very common terms each and every week, and it's for good reason: they matter in daily fantasy football. They also matter in snake drafts.

If you join a head-to-head contest, you don't need to find the low-salaried wide receiver who blows up for two touchdowns in order to win. It helps, sure, but that's a low probability outcome. What's more bankable is finding a running back with 20-touch potential each week to draft early.

In a small draft, plan for what's most likely. In a larger draft, embrace riskier players who can erupt for big games and help secure a victory.

Draft Running Backs Early
ZeroRB strategy is becoming a mainstream season-long drafting philosophy, but it's not necessarily the right choice in a weekly draft on FanDuel.

First of all, in a FanDuel snake draft, you're not tied to any running backs for the rest of the season if one of them gets banged up. You're drafting them for just a single game.

Second of all, the numbers show why running backs are the best bets.

I pulled weekly data (Weeks 1 through 16) since 2015 to test a few things. Because there's no salary cap to worry about, a player's salary in a given week probably tells us a lot about how he'll be valued in a draft. You don't have to shy away from Patrick Mahomes because his salary is too high, and you don't have to scrape by for a tight end just because you don't want to spend up for George Kittle or Travis Kelce.

So, with that in mind, here is the average weekly finish for players from our sample based on their weekly salary rank.

(Example: the QB1 in salary, on average, has finished as approximately the QB9 in weekly scoring.) (Also, keep in mind that you don't have to roster any tight ends due to the WR/TE flex spot. We'll touch on them a little in passing, but they're not great selections in most circumstances.)

So, yes, the quarterback with the highest salary and the tight end with the highest salary usually rank better at their positions than the highest-salaried running back does, but they have fewer players to contend with for the top spot.

You can see how volatile even high-salaried wide receivers are, by comparison. The receiver with the highest salary finishes, on average, outside the top 20 in weekly scoring.

Here's that same chart but with FanDuel point averages instead of weekly ranks.

(Example, the highest-salaried wide receiver has averaged 15.7 FanDuel points, whereas the fifth-highest-salaried running back has averaged 15.5 FanDuel points.)

It's clear that quarterbacks put up points, but that's kind of the thing about quarterbacks. A lot of them put up solid numbers, and if we just pick them based on their weekly salaries, we can get close to the top-salaried option often (speaking in terms of averages). Remember, if you draft the QB10 in a 10-entry draft, you're only about 4.5 points away from the average that the highest-salaried (and likely earliest-drafted) quarterback puts up.

There's a significant drop off at running back outside the top three, usually, and then another dip after RB8 or so.

This means waiting on running backs and drafting the RB12 and RB20 in a 10-team league can easily put you at a disadvantage if we rely on a large sample of data.

Likewise, if you gloss over running backs, you're obviously drafting the other positions: quarterbacks (pretty replaceable), wide receivers (less productive, on average, than running backs), and tight ends (also less productive but with their own drop off over the large sample).

Let's do this again but rank the players by actual fantasy points instead of salary entering the week.

So, yes, an elite game from a receiver can rival an elite game from a running back, but the problem with this line of thinking is that predicting the top receiver is harder than predicting the top running back in a week.

This final table shows the average weekly salary rank for each of the actual weekly position ranks. I know, this one is harder to grasp, but it's simple once it clicks.

(Example: The WR1 -- the highest-scoring receiver -- for a week ranked, on average, 21.9 in salary entering the slate of games, whereas the RB1 ranked, on average, 9.1 at the position. That means the top-scoring wide receiver has an average salary around $6,700 but the top-scoring running back has an average salary of around $7,300. This doesn't mean to target receivers around $6,700. Rather, it just shows that lower-salaried receivers [and, thus, receivers drafted a little lower] can be and often are big producers.)

Again, this basically works to show us that a much wider range of wide receivers can and do finish at the top of the position in a given week compared to the other positions.

With that in mind, we should really think long and hard about drafting wide receivers in a small-field snake draft when they come at the expense of running backs.

It's not a stretch to prioritize the positions as running back, wide receiver, and quarterback.

As for the tight end position, you can omit it entirely. In some instances, an elite tight end can be a strong pick, but even the TE1 in a given week (if you guess correctly) would rank between the WR4 and WR5 in a week. The TE2 is equivalent to roughly the WR8. You may as well risk it with receivers to get a 30-plus-point performance, something tight ends just don't really offer.