If you enter your guillotine league draft with a mindset that's been shaped by years of traditional drafting (or even worse, best ball drafting), you're ripe for a beat down.

Let's talk through the pitfalls that can prevent you from a successful guillotine league draft.

18-Teams—That's a lot of teams

You can play in a guillotine league with fewer than 18 teams—your season will simply end earlier. But 18 is the most common number of teams, and for most of you, that'll be the biggest draft you've ever experienced.

Let’s fast forward to the immediate aftermath of your very first guillotine draft.  You’ve drafted your 14th and final player, and by this late stage, it's some guy you didn't know existed ten minutes ago.  You’re going to look at your roster and think, “My team suuuucks.”  Fortunately, probably, you’re wrong.

18-team drafts are a challenge, obviously. Your league will be spreading out a whopping 252 players, so you're going to see a pretty massive dropoff in talent across everyone's rosters. Everyone will have holes in their roster.

Drafting from the 18-hole feels like an automatic loss…

…but it's not!  Don’t fret if you get randomly assigned a spot at the back of the draft. Drafting from pick 16, 17, or 18 isn't a death knell.  Our data shows no correlation between draft spot and win probability.

People get excited when they land the No. 1 pick.  Sure, you get to select anyone you want from the draft, but there's a heavy penalty to pay in an 18-team league.

Let's compare drafting from the 1 slot vs the 18 slot:

Through two rounds, which would you rather have?

  • Pick 1 & 36   OR   Pick 18 & 19

Through four rounds, which would you rather have?

  • Picks 1, 36, 37, & 72   OR   Pick 18, 19, 54 & 55

Tough call, right?  The point is, don't sweat your draft spot. You've got plenty of other things to worry about (including everything in the next section). Don't sweat your draft slot.

"I can wait a round for that guy."

Part of everyone's mental calculation when deciding who to draft is calculating if other coveted players will be available for your next pick.  "If I skip tight end this round, will Evan Engram be there for me next round?"

With 18 teams, you can usually assume that the answer is "no".  Picking from the first or last slot means you'll be waiting 35 (!) picks before you get to go again. Even if you're drafting from the middle of the order, you'll be waiting 17 picks between turns.

It's a pretty big mental adjustment and you'll want to alter how you plan your future picks.

Self-control

There was a period of five or six years when Krispy Kreme was in the Twin Cities market. It was hugely successful, with lines of cars wrapped around the block…until the newness wore off. Just a few short years later, Minnesotans collectively got bored with Krispy Kreme and moved on to other forms of deep-fried sugar. (If In-N-Out ever comes here, it'll be the same thing: exciting at the start, and then their legendary blandness will set in.)

If you're the kind of person who can't resist a hot-off-the-fryer Krispy Kreme or the unseasoned "flavor" of an In-N-Out burger, you might struggle with your first guillotine draft.

As you'll see in painstaking detail in the next section, you need to eschew sexy, high-upside players. You're targeting mundane, solid, weekly contributors.

Your goal for Week 1 is to not finish 18th. Your goal in Week 2 is to not finish 17th. And so on.  Finishing first in any week gains you nothing.

Take your boring old Dunkin' Donuts or Five Guys to the bank.

Eventually, that'll change, but that's many weeks from now, after Thanksgiving, at which point you'll have a very different roster anyway.

The Guide to Guillotine Leagues Fantasy Football