It's that time of year where I have to start planning for my fantasy football drafts. Yes, drafts. This year, for the first time in many years, I am not the commissioner of a league. However, I am participating in 3 fantasy football leagues this year - all using different platforms (ESPN, Yahoo and NFL.com). I guess it'll be a good way for me to judge which fantasy football application is the best.
I've been participating in fantasy football for about 6 years now. I'm no Matthew Berry, but as I sat down and actually starting thinking about my fantasy football drafts, I thought about some basic rules, per say, that are important to executing a good draft. I won't go into too much detail here as I don't want my competition to know who I'm drafting, but these are good general rules nonetheless.
First off, take a look at the fantasy football rankings that are provided by all of the top sports pundit sites: ESPN, NFL.com, Yahoo Sports, etc. Matthew Berry is a good source to start with. He updates his rankings weekly, and not saying he knows everything but he has been a fantasy football expert for ESPN for quite some time now, so it's not a bad place to start.
Other General Rules:
1. Study the settings of your league. It's important to know the details of what generates points for your league. In most generic leagues, QB's get 4 points for a TD pass while RB/WR get 6 points for each rushing TD or passing TD. This is important to know because overall, the most points gets you the win. If your league has the same amount of TD points for your QB and RB/WR? Drafting a good QB is crucial. If not, then you might want to look at top RB's if the top 2-3 QB's are already drafted.
2. Do not draft all of your players from your favorite team. Look, there's a place where you can proclaim your team loyalty in fantasy football. It's called your team name. Beyond that, if you really want to be competitive and win? Don't draft players from all one team. Because you see, there is this thing called a bye week. So if most of your players are from one team? During that bye week it's a guaranteed loss. And no one wants a guaranteed loss.
3. Bye Weeks. They happen, so when you are drafting make sure when you're drafting your back-ups that you pay attention to bye weeks. Nothing worse than drafting 2 decent QB's then realizing that they have their bye on the SAME WEEK. Most drafting platforms give you all of the information about the player: schedule, predicted stats, etc. So check that info out before you draft your back-ups.
4. Check for player cuts/injuries. Sorry to break it to you, but if you haven't heard, Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson is out of a job. The Dolphins released him, so he may still show up in your drafts as available (because the player rankings and availability was set prior to pre-season) but actually, he's not. Also important is injuries, Michael Vick was injured in the pre-season game last week. If you want him as your QB, check his status to see where he is before you draft him. Last thing you want to do is draft someone in the 1st or 2nd rounds who is hit or miss on the health side and may end up not playing for 3+ games.
5. Kickers are a dime a dozen. In fantasy football, you have to draft a kicker. You need to play a kicker. But very rarely (I say rarely because I've seen it happen once) does your kicker win the game for you. Kickers should be drafted in low rounds, towards the end of your draft. Ideally, you want to pick a kicker who's on a team that either a) scores a lot of field goals or b) score's a lot of TD's. But that's often unpredictable so...just draft a kicker. Just make sure he's the starting kicker.
6. Waivers. Watch the waivers and pay attention to players who break out, especially early on in the season. You never know what will happen in the NFL. But do this with caution. You don't want to drop a key player on a fluke one time performance. However, if your star running back is injured and his back up is called up? Might be good to try and claim that back up. And occasionally there are those players that you didn't expect to be Peyton Manning's go-to guy or Tom Brady's go-to guy but it happens. Pay attention to what's going on in the league week-to-week to manage your waiver options.
7. Don't congratulate yourself on your team name. Your team name can be funny, whatever. But unless your league has a prize for best team name? Don't go crazy.
8. Defense. You have to draft a defense, and there are only so many that are considered elite (ex. Steelers, Baltimore, 49'ers) so how do you draft here? Well, if you can afford to (meaning, you feel you have drafted well in all of the key categories so far in QB, RB, WR and TE) try and draft the high ranked defenses if you have the opportunity. Otherwise, draft a decent defense and look at your match-ups each week. If you don't have an acquisition/drop limit, you can choose a defense based on match-up. What does that mean? It means that there may be some defenses that are undrafted that will play games against bad teams. Not a guarantee and not something that should be done every week but worth a look. Just sayin.'
If you follow these basic rules, you just might find yourself in the position to win your league championship and ultimately:
Who doesn't want to win cash, right? It's why my team name in my leagues has become "Cashin Out." Because I will cash out at the end of the season.
But, overall Fantasy Football is fun. I love being able to talk smack to my friends or co-workers (I'm looking at you Jets West) when my team wins. And I also love the fact that it forces me to follow so many different teams and games so I appreciate talent more.
So there's my fantasy football manifesto for 2012. Stay tuned for more amazing sport musings from calisportsdiva.
No comments:
Post a Comment