Team Needs
The Fanspeak consensus NFL team needs for all 32 teams — positional needs from draft analysts, consensus rankings pulled from trusted sites, and crowd aggregates built from real mock-draft simulations. Run different roster-need scenarios or build and share your own.
How Team Needs Work
A team-needs set ranks the positional needs for all 32 NFL teams on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is a tiny need and 10 is a critical need. Each team gets an ordered list of position needs. These needs dictate how the CPU general managers in the On The Clock draft simulator decide when they're willing to reach for a player, or whether it's worth stealing one who has slipped. Positions rated 7 through 10 add an additional bonus to that position, which in turn increases the CPU's probability of reaching for a player when they're an urgent need.
Tutorial
Every team is a stack of need chips. Here is one chip, exactly as it appears in the editor, and what each part of it does:
Grab the dots or the position name and drag a need up or down to re-rank it.
Tap minus or plus to lower or raise the need from 1 to 10. You can also type a number straight into the box.
Tap the x to drop that position from the team entirely.
Use an empty + Add need slot below a team's chips to add another position to its board.
Nuances
If you ask multiple fans of the same team what their biggest need is, you'll hear different answers. Some fans will insist a QB is their top priority and put that position at a 10. Others might point to a weak offensive line and put OT at 10. No team-needs balance is perfect, and history has shown that general managers are largely unpredictable. Some draft expensive positions (QB, WR, OT, CB) higher than expected to save money with rookie deals; impatient GMs might draft a quarterback before they have good protection in place. Team needs are a best-guess starting point, not a law.
Build Your Own
Start from one of Fanspeak's official lists and tune the team needs as you see fit. Note that values of 7 or above are treated as urgent needs, with 9 and 10 treated as critical needs. Users must sign up before they can save and use their own team needs.
Fanspeak Consensus, Balanced, and Win Now
Our three primary boards aim to capture different scenarios for each team. Recent draft picks are assumed to not be busts, and all free-agency signings are taken into account. As the season plays out and players reveal their skill level, the team needs will shift.
Fanspeak Balanced assigns one or two critical (value 9 or 10) needs to teams that are on the verge of winning a Super Bowl or recently made a deep run. We assume these teams are one or two critical picks from being contenders, and the other picks are for depth. Teams that have no chance of winning the Super Bowl are more spread out. These losing teams have many more needs in the 5-6-7 range, with some needs at 8 if that unit underperformed by a huge margin. Average teams sit in the middle of those two examples.
Fanspeak Win Now amplifies the top needs of each team from Fanspeak Balanced even further, and dampens the middle-range needs. This set assumes a much more top-heavy draft than Balanced. The following positions are given a boost: QB, WR, RB, EDGE, CB. These picks are often the most discussed come draft day, and seem to be disproportionately favored because of their ability to make huge, game-altering plays.
Fanspeak Consensus is a mix of Fanspeak Balanced and the general consensus lists from around the NFL landscape: beat writers, analyst big boards, and the needs our own community of drafters lean on most. It folds the experts and the crowd together into one ranking, smoothing out any single source's biases, and it's the set enabled by default on the setup page. If you're not sure which to start from, start here.