A review of the MultiLeague Pre-Draft

One of my favorite fantasy leagues I’m in is one I was invited to join with Football Outsiders founder Aaron Schatz called the MultiLeague. The gist is that we are running three seasons: MLB, NFL, and NBA. The winner in a pure Roto sense is whoever scores the most points between the three leagues, though there are also prizes for winning each individual league as well as some minor money back for second place. It takes a lot of discipline to stay up to date every day with this league, and it also was a fun gateway to get me back into fantasy baseball and (especially) fantasy basketball.

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At the end of every season, you get to keep six players. Those six players must have a) not been drafted in the “Pre-Draft” last year and b) must not have been kept last year. So while there is a keeper element, you’re essentially dealing with two-year windows at most. The Pre-Draft is what we call the six-round draft that happens before each individual sport gets a draft, where you can pick any player from any league that hasn’t been kept. It is, I acknowledge, a weird name for a draft. I also can’t think of anything better to call it. (I’ll take good suggestions for it to our commissioner!)

Because of my predilection for finishing exactly fourth place, I wound up with a fairly low pick in the pre-draft. I also swapped my fourth-rounder for a sixth-rounder in a trade earlier this year, so I wound up with a lot of low picks. I did however wind up with a pretty good group of keepers:

Rivers Keepers: C.J. Stroud, Nico Collins, Trey McBride, Ja Morant, Bryce Harper, Luis Robert Jr.

One bit to keep in mind with the draft order is that I think MLB picks are somewhat devalued because their season starts last — tanking teams can always trade things around for MLB assets, whereas if you want to build ahead for the NFL and NBA you are basically playing for next year already. I think the only other bit of Pre-Draft preamble I need to feed you is that most of the scoring and starting positions are pretty standard, but it is a superflex league. Quarterbacks are highly desirable, as you’ll see. And finally, if you’re wondering where someone is, they were probably kept to begin with. This is the full list of players who were kept.

Round 1:

As you’ll see. So the way this tends to go in my three years of experience is that the top-flight NFL quarterbacks go off the board in a hurry, with a few NBA difference-makers thrown in as well. There’s not really a mechanism to keep a top quarterback for the most part, because rookies do not tend to be as good as C.J. Stroud was last year. (See, I told you my keepers were good!)

Anyway, I think we hit Consensus Brain pretty good here. I started creating my list about three picks from mine and came up with: Jokic, Prescott, Burrow, and Love as candidates for my pick in that order. It’s always tempting to grab the best of the best NBA players early, especially centers, because fantasy basketball is kind of the black sheep of fantasy analysis among the three sports. Every year it’s a scramble to find resources and projections. I used Hashtag Basketball the most, and there were some recent ranking on Rotowire, as well as a few guys I follow (Adam Stock, Dan Titus, Adam King) doing a recent industry mock. But like ESPN? The Athletic? Absolutely nothing about fantasy basketball rankings since the draft. The biggest pain point of this every year.

Ultimately Burrow versus Prescott created a Spiderman Meme question for me, and the answer being Prescott came down to recency bias (had a better year last year) and a belief that continuity was better within that coaching staff (Brian Callahan leaving the Bengals). I don’t really know that I feel amazing about the decision, but it was a narrowest of margins selection for me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if either of them got hurt.

Round 2:

On the other hand, this round was mercifully easy. I didn’t think a non-Wemby/Jokic NBA player merited an early pick. It is a PPR league. I had two quarterbacks locked in place. Let’s create double Texas stacks with Prescott/Lamb and Stroud/Nico.

Will I have a running back problem? Probably. But those are a little more solvable to me than a hole at quarterback or wideout. And I do have the second pick in the actual NFL draft, so I could target a back there and essentially use that as another late-round Pre-Draft pick if I needed to.

Oh, it should be said since I see it put down often that Lamb is far and away the best wideout in fantasy football this year: I agree with Todd’s stance that Tyreek Hill is better. I liked that pick. That’s not a shot on CeeDee Lamb or a take about stalled contract talks, I just think Hill and Mike McDaniel generate so much value on every pass attempt that the upside is higher than projections give him credit for. Even despite the small target volume difference in Lamb’s favor.

Round 3:

I did not have a pick in this round. My third-round pick went to Louis in exchange for his sixth — which wound up being the lowest pick in this draft — and the rights to Nico Collins. I do have a smidge of regret about that today because I didn’t think the Texans would add a wideout with the skill set of Stefon Diggs. But I don’t feel outright bad about it.

Had I retained the pick, I probably would have also sprung for Ohtani. (If you’re unfamiliar with how Yahoo! handles Ohtani, you can only draft the hitter or pitcher side of him. They are separate entities.) But as you can see, the quarterback dregs are already being mined deep and we’re out of no-doubter RB1s and WR1s. Haliburton was also on my consider list for the next pick. The best way I can explain this draft to anybody is by saying “Jared Goff went in the third round and it probably makes sense.”

Round 4:

With Trevor Lawrence off the board, the last guy I think we’d actually consider a fantasy QB1, the NBA run started in earnest. I started planning for this pick around the time of Louis’ pick and my board was basically: Ohtani if he made it, Jayson Tatum, Anthony Davis, Tyrese Halliburton, and Domantas Sabonis.

So I was sniped, but I’m not upset about Davis. I do think there’s a center premium, and while I don’t love that it took a league-wide push to force players to play games, he did play a reassuring amount of games last year. It’s the little things with fantasy basketball that are silent killers, and where I wound up was that Davis doesn’t really have a true weak point I can’t patch up. He doesn’t shoot many three-pointers, but I can always find volume three-point shooters. What I can’t do is patch up, say, a terrible free throw percentage. The guys that are going to weight your free-throw percentage up are not as likely to take many free throws. So I guess I’d say my NBA strategy is to lean in to guys who won’t kill you in a category, and I valued Davis’ defensive stats and free throw percentage over Sabonis’ better assist rates.

This was most of the NBA top 20 gone with a few NFL picks sprinkled in as well as Juan Soto. I think the Chet Holmgren pick was inspired and really wanted to bump him into this tier but couldn’t find a way to justify it with his point totals so far. But I was really hoping he would make it back, as well as another player sniped ahead of me in Round 5.

Round 5

One thing I noticed a lot about fantasy baseball this past year, and I’m seeing more and more in other leagues now that the thought is in my head, is that analysts who help create ADP for the big sites are skating to where the puck is going rather than where it has been. Elly De La Cruz was a second-round ADP in most fantasy drafts this past year despite what I’d call a lackluster 2023 debut where he hit .235 with 13 homers in 427 PAs. And so the backlash to that seems to be a lot of people looking at spreadsheets and hard-hit rates and saying “well I can’t justify picking this guy in the second round because there’s nothing sustainable here!” But sometimes the sustainability hasn’t arrived because this guy is 21. And now he’s hitting .258 and leading the league in steals and hitting 21 homers. And boy do I wish he had made it five more picks down.

(And this isn’t to just crap on sustainability analysis either, because those guys were right on say, Nolan Jones this year. But sometimes the premium you have to pay to pick a player is actually a bargain because that player is going to bust out and the ADP is pricing in that chance. Do I know who that is before every year? Hell no. But my eyes are a little more open on this having gone through this season with attention.)

Anyway, having missed on my power-speed dream, and then seeing all Trae Young’s three pointers go right ahead of me, I was happy to grab the last guy on the NBA tier I had in front of me in Scottie Barnes. I had him last year and his assist rate blossomed after the Raptors traded away Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby. Then he got hurt. I think if he hadn’t gotten hurt, we would have seen him push into the third round of this draft, because he doesn’t really have a weakness as a fantasy player.

Round 6

So this was my classic sport dilemma. I had one guy left in my top tier of NBA, and one guy left in the top tier of my MLB, and … wait, did that guy just draft Bo Nix?

Yes, the Bo Nix pick — seemed like a homer pick, but best of luck Todd — meant that every team in MultiLeague will start with two quarterbacks before the actual NFL draft. You also kind of have to look at it as a defensive pick, because Nix might have been more appealing in the NFL Draft as someone who was eligible to be picked and kept for next year.

Anyway, Booker or Jose Ramirez. I love Ramirez, has carried me a long way this season in fantasy, but between having the No. 1 pick in MLB and the ability to trade for more MLB help if I need it, I went with Booker hoping someone from MLB would slide to me with the last pick. Instead I lost both Betts and Ramirez to Jason T.

So I deep-dived what I could of fantasy baseball analysis looking ahead to 2025 — another thing there is not a lot of out there — and the consensus seemed to still have Tucker as the best available player despite the fact that his knee mysteriously broke in June and the best the Astros can do about it is post videos of him hopping in the outfield. He was crushing it before he was hurt — .266/.395/.584 with 19 homers and 10 steals.

This was kind of a weird pick knowing it was going to be MLB for me because it’s your choice of any disappointing or hurt player. Could have picked Tucker, could have picked Ronald Acuna, could have picked Julio Rodriguez, could have picked Fernando Tatis Jr. Like these are all guys that could have gone in the third round of this draft off the right season, but none of them had it and most of them spent significant time on the IL. Ultimately me settling on Tucker was about the fact that there’s no reason whatever this is shouldn’t clear up by 2025, and he had the best season on the field of the four of them. But I could understand picking any of them.

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