Perfect Fantasy Football Draft: 12th in a 12-Team Yahoo Half-PPR League

Aug 22, 2022

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Drafting from the twelve-spot in 2022 Yahoo fantasy football leagues allows the opportunity to control the flow of the draft from the turn but typically negates the opportunity to begin your team with a truly elite option. Depending on how RB-heavy your particular draft is, there is always the chance to come out of the initial turn with two bonafide WR1s on your team and deal with the running backs as the draft goes along, building a high floor of wide receiver targets as the base of your team.

With the back-to-back picks you have throughout the draft, you’ll likely be the beneficiary of starting a positional run as opposed to continually missing tiers of players, as is often the case when you’re drafting out of the middle part of the round.

In this article, I will walk through a perfect draft with the 12th pick in a 12-team Yahoo half-PPR league. Each pick was optimized using projections and value-based rankings from the 4for4 Draft Hero tool. For those new to Draft Hero, be sure to explore this walkthrough of the app.

More Perfect Drafts: 3rd in a 12-Team ESPN PPR League | 10th in a 10-Team ESPN PPR League | 5th in a 12-Team ESPN PPR League | 4th in a 12-Team Yahoo Half-PPR League | 7th in a 10-Team ESPN PPR League

Draft Hero Settings

Roster Settings: 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, 1 Flex (WR/RB/TE), 1 Kicker, 1 DEF, 6 bench spots
No restrictions on when to draft position players: Even though it’s often recommended to wait on drafting some positions, I’ll remove restrictions in case any surprise values present themselves. In the Draft Plan tab, K and DEF are not selected until the last two rounds.
No limit on positions: Although limiting less important positions to just one makes the draft a lot more challenging, allowing other teams to draft backup “onesies” more closely mirrors a typically home league draft.
Targets: Mike Williams, Rhamondre Stevenson, Chase Edmonds, Cole Kmet. Across 40+ drafts so far this year, these are my most rostered players. If I am able to land them, I will elaborate on each player.

Jump to Pick: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | Draft Recap

Round 1, Pick 12 (12) - WR Stefon Diggs, Bills

The draft, as it often does, started out very running back heavy, so instead of forcing my hand by chasing the position, I’ll simply take the pass catchers laid out in front of me and deal with the position as we continue on through the rest of the draft. It will be risky to try and replicate the production of the RBs on the board with an option at the turn of the 3rd/4th round, but beginning our team with a ceiling of 300+ targets by going WR/WR here should make up for that gap in production.

Kicking things off, we’re taking Stefon Diggs, who had a “down year” by earning 24 fewer receptions than he did in 2020 but still finished as the overall WR7. Though the bull cases on teammates Gabriel Davis and Isaiah McKenzie are on differing levels of palpable, there is a very real chance that Diggs has a heightened target share in 2022 after the departures of Cole Beasley and Emmanuel Sanders.

Suggested alternatives: Davante Adams, CeeDee Lamb, Deebo Samuel

My top alternative: Davante Adams