Perfect Draft: 5th in a 12-Team ESPN PPR League

Aug 06, 2021

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With the fifth pick of fantasy drafts this season, I’m aiming to secure an elite running back early, and surround him with additional skill position depth. An advantage of picking here is that I’m put in a beneficial spot during the early rounds–if things go the way I expect them to, there’s a couple of obvious, very strong selections I can make for my team. One con of selecting fifth is that it is in draft order purgatory. There’s not as much control of the draft due to a lack of short turn-arounds between picks, so I could become victim to a long positional run.

In this article, I will walk through a perfect draft with the fifth pick in a 12-team ESPN PPR league. Each pick was optimized using projections and value-based rankings from the 4for4 Draft Hero tool.

Draft Hero Settings

Roster Settings: 1 QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 1 TE, 1 Flex (WR/RB/TE), 1 Kicker, 1 DEF, seven bench spots
No restrictions on when to draft positional players: Even though it’s often recommended to wait on drafting some positions, I’ll remove restrictions in case any values present themselves. With this being said, I’ll almost definitely only take a defense and kicker in the last few rounds.
Limit 1 TE, K, DEF: Limiting these less important positions to just one makes the draft a lot more realistic and challenging.
Targets: Clyde Edwards-Helaire and Antonio Brown. I’ll explain why I like these specific targets in their respective draft rounds, assuming I am able to land them.

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

Round 1, Pick 5 (5) - RB Ezekiel Elliott, Cowboys

The first four picks of the draft went exactly how I expected them to–Christian McCaffrey, Dalvin Cook, Derrick Henry, and Alvin Kamara. This makes Zeke the best option left, as he is the last of the tier of running backs with little-to-no question marks. While he is coming off of a down season by his standards, the return of Dak Prescott to the Cowboys’ offense should elevate Zeke’s play. He’s a very solid RB1 to start your team off with.

The Draft Hero’s top suggestions included wide receivers Davante Adams and Tyreek Hill. However, due to the immense depth present at the receiver position, I’d much rather lock in an RB1 at this point in drafts. Tight end Travis Kelce was also mentioned, but pick five is just a bit too high of a pick for me to take a tight end.

Each round, the Draft Hero also offers the top available suggestion along with four alternatives, as shown at the top of this section. Throughout the rest of the article, I will note those suggestions as well as my top alternative to the player that I actually selected.

Suggested alternatives: Davante Adams, Tyreek Hill, Travis Kelce, Calvin Ridley

My top alternative: Davante Adams