This weekend I’m heading to Canton, Ohio for the Fantasy Football Expo to do something I don’t get to do every day: draft against people who evaluate football for a living and try to out-draft them.
I’ve been invited to compete in the King’s Classic, the Expo’s marquee expert draft, held at the Pro Football Hall of Fame and carried live on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio. The Classic runs in several divisions named after gridiron legends, and I’ve drawn a spot in the Len Dawson division — a 14-team, full-PPR snake league. In a format this deep, with rosters this long, the waiver wire is picked clean by September. You win or lose this thing at the draft table. That’s exactly the kind of challenge DFS Dashboard was built for.
The field I’m up against
The reason the King’s Classic carries weight is the room. This isn’t a home league of buddies — it’s a bracket of people whose rankings move markets. A few of the names in my division:
John Hansen — better known to a generation of fantasy players as “The Guru.” Hansen is an FSWA Hall of Famer and one of the true pioneers of the industry, going back to the snail-mail newsletter he started in 1995 that grew into FantasyGuru.com. He was the first person to write fantasy football for ESPN.com, later spent years at Yahoo, and has been a fixture on SiriusXM, NFL Network, and DirecTV’s Fantasy Zone. If you’ve played this game for any length of time, you’ve been influenced by his work whether you knew it or not.
Jeff Mans — the man who took the keys to Fantasy Guru from Hansen. Mans runs the site’s content today and hosts on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio, and he’s one of the more respected redraft voices you’ll find at a table like this.
Jared Smola — Lead Analyst at Draft Sharks, where he’s been building projections since 2007. His rankings consistently grade out near the top of the entire industry for accuracy — he’s ranked ninth out of 173 analysts in draft accuracy and has held the title of the most accurate ranker in the field. When Jared’s projections and mine disagree on a player, I pay attention.
Bob Harris — a longtime Footballguys veteran and one of the steady, no-nonsense evaluators who has been a regular presence at the King’s Classic for years.
That’s four names. The other seats are filled with analysts, site owners, and podcasters who take this every bit as seriously. It’s a genuine honor to be drafting alongside them — and, competitively, a great measuring stick.
Who’s the guy from DFS Dashboard?
I’m Matt Korn, founder of DFS Dashboard. I didn’t come up through a traditional media shop. I came at fantasy from the data side. As a fan, I got tired of how hard it was to find clean, decision-ready information on player performance, so I built a proprietary model that turned sportsbook odds into player projections. The output was good enough that I decided to build a platform around it — and DFS Dashboard was born.
That origin matters, because it’s the whole philosophy behind how I’ll draft on Saturday.
The methodology behind my board
Most draft tools hand you a static list and let you take the best name on it. DFS Dashboard doesn’t work that way.
Our projections start with the market. Rather than leaning on gut feel, we build player expectations off multiple sportsbooks’ odds and then run Monte Carlo simulations — tens of thousands of them per player — to produce a probability distribution for how each guy is likely to score, not just a single number. A projection is an average; a distribution tells you about the floor and the ceiling, which is what actually wins drafts.
On draft day I’ll be running our Draft Engine. Instead of ranking players, it builds and scores complete rosters. At every one of my picks it searches the draft tree — evaluating hundreds of thousands of possible full teams — accounts for my snake slot and who’s already gone, and models who will realistically still be on the board when the pick wheels back to me. It’s ADP-aware, so it knows which value is about to vanish and which player I can comfortably wait on. And it gives me win probabilities between my top option and same-position alternatives, so a coin-flip pick becomes a math-backed one.
In a league where the waiver wire dies early, the late rounds are where titles are decided. The Engine’s Backup Board is built for exactly that — it surfaces the highest-upside player left at each position and rates running backs and receivers by the role they’d inherit if a starter goes down. That’s how you leave a draft with real handcuffs and sleepers instead of dead weight.
My game plan for the Len Dawson division
Every drafter needs a spine to their strategy. Here’s mine going in:
- Hammer running back early. Backfield certainty is the scarcest resource in fantasy football, and it evaporates fastest in a 14-team room. I want to leave the first few rounds with a foundation at the position everyone else is scrambling for.
- Lock in a top-6 quarterback. I’m not chasing the very top of the position and paying a premium, but I’m also not punting it into no-man’s-land. Landing one of the top six QBs gives me a weekly edge without torching my roster’s balance.
- Secure a top-2 tight end. The gap between an elite tight end and the streaming tier is one of the biggest positional advantages in the game. If one of the top two falls into my range, I’m taking the weekly cushion.
- Build wide receiver depth relentlessly. With three flex spots and long rosters, receiver volume is my accumulation position. I’ll be stacking value and upside here from the middle rounds on.
- Stream defense and kicker off waivers. I’m not spending premium draft capital on positions I can solve week to week. Those roster spots go to upside; DST and kicker get handled on the wire.
None of that is rigid. The Engine re-optimizes around every pick I make, so if the board breaks in a way I didn’t expect — a stud tight end sliding, a run on backs opening up receiver value — I’ll adjust. But that’s the framework: certainty early, positional edges where they’re cheap, and depth where the format rewards it.
Follow along
I’ll have a full recap after the dust settles — what I took, what fell to me, what I’d do differently, and how the board compared to what DFS Dashboard’s model expected. Until then, wish me luck. I’m bringing data to a room full of legends, and I can’t wait to see how it holds up.
