2024 CFF Draft Guide
What makes the 2024 College Fantasy Football Draft Guide presented exclusively by Purple Reign a unique must-have fantasy tool? Let’s start with the author. Joe Arpasi is the man behind Purple Reign. He is a former CFF analyst and co-owner of CollegeFootballGeek.com, and a former Division-I college football coach. His unique insights bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the College Fantasy Football industry. He’s been featured in many media outlets such as SiriusXM radio, Athlon Sports college football season preview magazine, “Chasing The Natty” podcast, and Bleacher Report for his College Fantasy Football insights.
The 2024 CFF Draft Guide includes:
450 players featured with fantasy point and statistical projections
Player risk analysis
Player draft strategy
Average Draft Position (ADP) data
Position battle status
Draft Day Cheat Sheet
Under/Over valued players
Weekly run/pass defensive match-up analysis for every FBS team
This draft guide brings a unique take on how players should be viewed in CFF. There are no “traditional player rankings” in this draft guide. Players are not ranked by “star power” or generalized thoughts for the upcoming season. Instead I focus on hard numbers and provide robust fantasy point and statistical projections for every player featured. Projections are just that – projections of what is possible for a player to achieve.
Players vary greatly on how dependable they can be. While I create projections for all players, not every player will live up to those projections. Risk must be taken into account when looking at a player’s ability to live up to their projections. To help highlight this fact within the draft guide players have been assigned into one of three “player groups.” Each player group has a profile of the players within them, and these profiles help you understand the risk involved and when you should consider drafting these players.
Player Group A: Proven Commodities
These are players with an established history of fantasy worthy play. There is a low risk level that players will not live up to fantasy projections, and a high fantasy point floor. It is best to draft these players for any starting spots and some bench spots.
Player Group B: Next Man Up
These are players that have shown flashes of fantasy worthy play. There is a slight/moderate risk level that players will not live up to fantasy projections, and a moderate fantasy point floor. It is best to draft these players for some starting spots and any bench spots.
Player Group C: High Risk/Reward Sleepers
These are players that have potential to break out into fantasy worthy play. There is a high risk level that players will not live up to fantasy projections, and the lowest fantasy point floor. It is best to draft these players for BENCH SPOTS ONLY and in the second half of the draft.
Full player projections are listed on pages specifically dedicated to each player group listed above. A Draft Day Cheat sheet is also provided where all players are compiled in an easy to use draft day tool.
Tiers are assigned to players based on their fantasy point projections. I do not adhere to the idea of purely ranking players based on projected fantasy point totals. I consider all players in the same tier to be viewed as “equal” which allows a drafter to select the player that they like best from that tier. Tiers go from 1 being the best, then count their way downward. Here is a summary of how you can view different tiers:
Tier 1 – First round draft pick STUDS
Tier 2 – The very best of the non-STUDS
Tier 3 – Really good players to round out your starting line-up
Tier 4 – Pretty good players that can round out your starting line-up or be top-notch bench players
Tier 5 – Above average bench players
Tier 6 & Below – Average bench players that are either low ceiling established players or sleepers
These descriptions are not finite, and this year’s RB group has players that are better than their tier description. But this gives us a starting point of how to view tiers in comparison to one another.
The methodology behind generating the projections in this draft guide is the use of an extensive historical database of team and player statistics going back to 2018 (the 2020 season has been omitted). All stats are tracked by head coaches (HC) and coordinators (OC) instead of by teams. As coaches move from team to team, their specific statistical history follows them into the projection review process. All stats are tracked on a "per game" basis due to teams playing different amounts of games per season. You can review historical career average statistics for the best CFF coaching systems below:
Below is an example of per game career team stats tracked in this historical database:
A coach’s career and season-by-season histories are reviewed. The career stats can be seen in the top row of the examples below, with the individual seasons listed underneath.
Team Stats:
Player Stats:
If there are multiple coaches on a staff with different coaching histories, their stats can be viewed individually as show in the examples above or a comparison of their career stats together (see below).
Sometimes there are outlier seasons that differ too much from a coach's history and have an effect on a coach’s career totals. Those seasons can be identified and removed from review, which adjusts the average stats for the coach’s career totals. This gives a more accurate viewpoint of the coach’s career stat averages. Below is an example of the 2019 Mississippi State season as an outlier season.
When the season is removed from review the career average stats change at the top of the box.
Coaches have tendencies to favor specific WR roles as the primary or secondary fantasy WRs. These roles are also tracked and reviewed to help evaluate that the correct players are being assigned to the correct WR spot on the depth chart (ex: WR1, WR2, WR3). There are times where a “big name” WR is being listed as a WR2 in the draft guide. The reason for that classification is that the player's role in the offense matches what role the coaches place in their WR2 of the offense.
For example, other draft guides could list a slot WR as the WR1 for Tennessee. In the example below you can see that a slot WR has only been the WR1 once in the database, and instead the historical data shows that an outside WR should be WR1.
While reviewing players the primary focus for these projections is the player's workload. Pass attempts, rushing attempts, and receiving targets. All other stats in the projections are bases on a per/workload basis. The projection model allows for manual adjustments of the workload stats and manual adjustments provide flexibility in determining the best suited stats for a specific player.
These projections are based more on coach's historical stats than name recognition of players. The wealth of data shown in this methodology is analyzed and I make my manual adjustments to finalize these projections. I believe in being as accurate and responsible as possible with the data available so I can provide you the best sourced projections to help you win your College Fantasy Football leagues.
Click below for your copy of the 2024 CFF Draft Guide!
