What ADP Means in Fantasy Football (And How to Use it To Your Advantage)

"ADP" is a term that gets thrown a lot in fantasy football. What does it mean, and more importantly, how can you use it to dominate your draft?

Christian McCaffrey has the top ADP in fantasy football in 2024. / Stephen R. Sylvanie-USA TODAY Sports

There's no doubt about it: the fantasy football landscape is getting sharper and more competitive by the year. I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember when the term "sleeper" often included players that a bunch of your league mates hadn't even heard of. Now it feels like the majority of the fantasy football community can rattle off at least two running backs and four wide receivers on all 32 NFL rosters. This has also led to an increase in the amount of in-depth (and sometimes even jargon-heavy) info that is being included in fantasy football analysis.

One term that gets thrown around a ton is "ADP", which isn't necessarily obvious to someone newer to fantasy football. At least most of the other jargon we see is typically tied to real NFL stats. If someone mentions "yards per route run", it's pretty self-explanatory. And even if you don't play fantasy football you can figure out what that means.

The short answer is that ADP stands for "average draft position," but even that doesn't give you the full story. So let's take a deeper look at what ADP means, and more importantly how you can use it to dominate your draft.

What is ADP in Fantasy Football?

As mentioned above, ADP stands for "average draft position." Even that simple term, however, has distinctly different uses. You'll see phrases like "his ADP is RB2" and "his ADP is 45.5" as well as things like "his ADP is in the third round." So let's look at the different measures of ADP.

Average Pick in the Entire Draft

This is the most straightforward measure, and it's simply a calculation of the average overall draft spot a player is selected at. To simplify an example, if Christian McCaffrey went No. 1 overall in one draft and No. 2 in another, his ADP between those drafts would be 1.5. If a player went 10th overall in one draft and 20th in another, their ADP between those drafts is 15.

The number wouldn't mean much over a sample of just two drafts, of course, but ADP numbers come from the averages of thousands of drafts. This starts to paint a clear picture of how the fantasy football world values a player. A single instance of a player tumbling down one draft board or getting reached on ridiculously early isn't going to make any impact on the overall average.

Positional Ranking

Another helpful way to use ADP, especially when you're comparing it to player rankings, is how a player ranks within their position. This measure largely ignores what the actual average pick number is for a player, but focuses instead on how their ADP relates to other players at the position.

So if we have Christian McCaffrey with an ADP of 1.0, Breece Hall with an ADP of 5.0 and Bijan Robinson at 5.6, they would stack up as RB1, RB2 and RB3, respectively.

One shortcoming of this method is it doesn't account for the size of the gap between players. Seeing RB1, RB2 and RB3 doesn't capture the fact that McCaffrey goes much earlier than the other two, but that Robinson and Hall's ADP shows that they're often selected interchangeably.

Round-By-Round

This one just takes a pretty simple view of ADP including 12 picks per round. So someone with an ADP in the top 12 has a "Round 1 ADP", 13 through 24 have "Round 2 ADP" etc. This has its own catch though.

You could choose to count rounds either by overall player ranking or by the actual pick average. An example is Drake London, who ranks 23rd among all players in ADP, with an average pick of 25.8. So by player rankings you could say he has a second-round ADP, while his actual average comes in at the start of the third round.

It's not an overly impactful difference, generally, but it's worth keeping in mind that both are possibilities when you see someone reference a round-based ADP.

So now that you know what ADP is, let's look at why it's important and how you can use it to get a leg up on your league.

Using ADP to Dominate Your Draft

One thing that is so helpful about ADP is that, as I highlighted above, the entire fantasy football world is getting a lot smarter these days. The "Wisdom of the Crowd" effect is very strong, and you'll often find that ADP data is one of the most accurate predictions of season-long fantasy production. This gives us a couple of very actionable ways to use the data effectively.

Comparing ADP to Default Rankings

Whatever platform you use for your fantasy football draft likely has players ranked by the site's rankings or projections. This means most of your league mates will have that as their default view in their draft window. Even if they're not strictly following those rankings, they're likely being influenced.

You can usually find some great value by comparing ADP to those rankings. If ESPN, for example, has Josh Jacobs ranked at RB17 but you see his ADP is RB13, that means you might be able to get him a little earlier than your league mates would be willing to draft him.

These gaps become more significant later in drafts when the picks aren't so obvious. It can also help you find players to ignore. It might be appealing to take the top-ranked player on the draft board, but if that player's ADP is much lower than their ranking on your platform it may be better to steer clear.

Find Discrepancies With Your Rankings (or a Trusted Expert's)

Another good approach is to find where you think ADP is "wrong," because that's where the value will be. Let's use the top-200 player rankings from SI Fantasy insider Michael Fabiano as an example.

New York Giants rookie wideout Malik Nabers has an ADP of 51.6 according to FantasyPros, which compiles ADP data across multiple sites. That ranks 50th among all players. Fabs has him ranked 36th. This tells you two important things:

One, Fabiano thinks Nabers is being underrated by the average drafter, so if you trust his rankings (I do), that means targeting Nabers could be a great way to find value.

Two, you also don't need to reach too highly on Nabers to find that value. Seeing him ranked at 36, you might feel the need to pick him in Round 3. But seeing the ADP of 51.6, he's actually not going on average until the start of the fifth round. That means it might be worth taking the risk of waiting until the fourth round, knowing that typically he'll still be available at that point (especially if you're picking early in the round).

Recognize Tier Drops

The other thing ADP can help with is identifying tiers of players, which can help with identifying "runs" of players going at the same position in drafts. Great examples this year come up at both quarterback and tight end.

Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts have ADPs between 22 and 31 overall. After that, there's a 10-pick jump to QB4 Lamar Jackson (41 overall). Then there's a 10-pick jump until C.J. Stroud (51) and Anthony Richardson (52).

It's even more extreme later in the drafts. In an 11-pick stretch, we have Joe Burrow (68), Kyler Murray (69), Jordan Love (74) and Dak Prescott (78). If you don't get one of those quarterbacks, you should not draft your next-ranked player right away, because you can probably wait a couple of rounds and still land them. After Dak, the next-highest QB ADP is Brock Purdy at 100 overall. That's a gap of almost two full rounds.

At tight end we have TE3 Trey McBride (48 overall), TE4 Mark Andrews (49) and TE5 Dalton Kincaid (50) all clustered together. There's a drop of nearly a full round to George Kittle (61). There's also a significant drop from TE8 Evan Engram (71 overall) to TE9 Jake Ferguson (85).

As you can see, ADP is a pretty simple concept at its core. It can be a little complicated to understand at first because people throw the term around to mean a couple different things, but once you know what it means you have an incredibly powerful tool at your disposal heading into draft day.

If you're looking for more tools for your tool belt, the Sports Illustrated 2024 fantasy football draft kit has you covered with everything you might need!