YES.
Autopicks are for when your router dies in the middle of a draft or you are giving birth or something. In any event, live drafts are arguably the best part of FF.
There is nothing arguable abut that. Drafting is what makes fantasy sports fun; playing out the season is what makes them really awful.
Fair enough.
I see. So if I got this straight, I should particpate in the live draft? Got it.
NAF1138: How much do you charge for your inside information?
It’s better to be lucky than good. I could regale you with stories of making picks that didn’t work out in a really big way, but those don’t make me sound trustworthy.
NAF1138: Shut up and take my money!
Seriously though, to recap:
[ul]
[li]8 Team league[/li][li]Standard draft rules[/li][li]No PPR, that I can find[/li][li]Starting Roster:[list][/li]
[li]QB: 1[/li][li]RB: 2[/li][li]WR: 2[/li][li]TE: 1[/li][li]WR/RB: 1[/li][li]Kicker: 1[/li][li]Def: 1[/li][li]Bench: 6[/li][/ul][/list]
What would be a decent general strategy for my picks? Just the basic Take What You’re Given?
I’m new, how do I determine “best player available”? Baby steps people. 
Rankings. If you feel more comfortable, take ESPN and Yahoo’s rankings and average them out. Or use mockdraftcentral.com’s rankings (it’s free - you just need to sign up, and make sure you only use recent results).
What Munch said. If you want to really get into it you will read as many lists as possible plus all the explanations for why people rank players in certain positions and then make your own ranks.
So, baby steps. What position are you drafting from? It’s an eight team league, are you drafting first, third, eighth? Find out. Then sign into some mock drafts and practice so you get a feel for who you give up if you decide to pick a QB in the first round etc. You want to be able to sort of guess who is giong to be left for you when your next pick rolls around so you can make choices. You probably don’t need to draft 2QBs in the first three rounds, even if the second QB is the best player available.
Also, I really do seriously recommend the ESPN Geico Draft Specials on the podcenter page linked above. I think they are going to do Running Backs next. They have already done a two part intro and QBs. They talk about a lot of things that will be helpful to you, if only to get a feeling for who the various major players are from a fantasy perspective, and what to look for in a good fantasy player as opposed to real life player.
Here’s a couple other things noobs usually do that you’ll want to avoid.
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RUNS. – At some point in the draft (possibly multiple times, actually), you’ll find that a run is happening at a position. In the third round, for example, you may find that six people in a row have just drafted wide receivers. DO NOT PANIC! Many people will start sweating about their lack of a wide receiver and impulsively draft the 7th WR in a row. But it’s more likely that the real value here is in a running back or a tight end that SHOULD have gone in that run that has now fallen to you.
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FILLING OUT YOUR STARTING LINEUP – Most noobs will reach the 7th or 8th round, look at their roster, and realize that all they need left is a TE and a D (not including the kicker) and they’ll have all their starters wrapped up - so they’ll then take both those positions back to back and feel like they’re finished. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say something like, “the real draft is over, let’s just hurry up and finish off these stupid backups.” DON’T BE THAT GUY! Your starting lineup is likely to change dramatically over the course of the season, which makes your backup RBs, WRs and even QBs more important than you think. Don’t just grab a defense cause you need one to fill out your roster when there are still good WRs out there.
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TIERS – many noobs see this in fantasy football magazines, decide it’s more detailed than they want and skip it - but tiers are important, and you don’t have to be a stat geek to figure them out. When you see the player rankings, they’ll be ranked by projected fantasy points for the season. Obviously that could be wrong, but you have to start somewhere. The importance of tiers is when you see something like this…
…RB…WR…
- Smith - 300 points…1. Marks - 235
- Jones - 296… 2. Mays - 231
- Davis - 293…3. Aaron - **201 **
- Doe - 264…4. Ruth - 199
- Adams - 262…5. Owen - 196
After Davis comes off the board and you’re on the clock, you’ll decide you need a RB, look at your list, and take Doe cause he’s next. But it’s important to note that there’s a big drop off from Davis to Doe. If you then look to the WR column and realize that only Marks has come off the board, you’ll also see that the difference between Mays and Aaron is huge. So even though you may need a RB more than you need another WR, you’ll get a lot more value out of drafting a WR now BEFORE the drop to the next tier than you would out of drafting a RB now AFTER the drop to the next tier.
So the idea of tiers is simpler than it seems - just draw a line between the two players at every big drop off in projected points, then try to always be drafting a guy BEFORE the big drop instead of after it. In the scenario above, even if you really need to draft another RB, the guy at 5 is really no different from the guy at 4, but the WR at 2 is WAY better than the guy at 3. So take the much better WR now and the slightly worse RB later.
Hope that wasn’t too much to hit you with, but I think they’re all important points. Good luck!
My draft position will be determined apparently when the draft starts. The settings page says “The draft order will be randomized before the draft.” and that’s all I got.
TheBoltEater: Tiers had been touched on earlier in the thread but I thank you for the visual aid, it’s very helpful.
Are there any sites that separate players into tiers like you did with the colors or is that something I’m going to have to just keep my eye on during the draft?
NFL.com will show you NFL.com’s draft rankings, which are broadly similar to everyone else’s. Keep FFtoolbox.com’s average draft position chart handy, too. Also, see all those articles to the left of the screen? Read them. Reading lots and lots of expert advice will give you a much better feel for who’s being drafted too early and who is being drafted too late.
Bear this in mind: rankings don’t tell you who to pick. They tell you who won’t be available when your next pick comes up. Are you picking at the end of the first round with Calvin Johnson available? Well, if you want the #1 WR, you’d better take him now.
Now, some general advice: you will rarely win a fantasy league on the strength of your first two or three picks. However, you can lose a whole bunch by fucking up your first few picks. Leagues are won with the guys you draft in rounds 5-9ish. That’s when you draft journeymen who are on the verge of breaking out (Brandon Lloyd three years ago), or journeymen who are on the verge of losing their starting jobs.
Don’t pick rookies. Figuring out which rookies will thrive instantly, which will take a few years to get good, and which will never be any good is a skill that NFL GMs don’t have. Don’t think that you’ll be the guy who does have it. If you draft a star rookie, it’s because you got lucky or because everyone knew he was going to be an instant star.
Quick question, have any of you guys ever or currently played/playing in a league that costs money to enter, with the winner getting a cool prize? If so, what cool stuff have you won?
One of the baseball leagues I’m in with some friends decided to upgrade to the “Yahoo Plus” package a few years ago (Yahoo used to reserve content like same-day stats and some other features for paying members, but since the market is so saturated and competitive, all that’s free nowadays). I won that year, and Yahoo sent me a championship plaque.
Other than that, reserve your fantasy budget for leagues with friends that give out cash prizes.
I won my work’s money league last season. Of course, I was obligated to spend some of the winnings on a round of drinks and some food during a happy hour. I also play in a very competitive hockey money league. I’ve never won anything, but a few of the members are hockey bloggers and I like interacting with them.
I play in a 12 team $100 entry league with friends. Live in-person draft, with lots of beverages, and shit talking. It’s a blast and one of the events I look forward to every year.
The winner gets $900 which is awesome to win right after Xmas. In eleven years I’ve won twice
Not that I know of offhand, but maybe someone else here knows a good site for that. But if you print out a list yourself (which I know is terribly low-tech) you can always just draw a line between tiers, or futz around with the document and colorize it yourself.
And I also play in a pretty darn competitive $100 buy-in league. 1 championship to my name in 12 years, plus 2 championship game losses… one of them by 7/10ths of a point. I will never get over that.
Okay guys, here’s my band of skooma addicted misfits:
Starters:
Ben Roethlisberger
Maurice Jones-Drew
Ryan Mathews
Steve Smith
Marques Colston
Fred Davis
Trent Richardson
Matt Prater
San Francisco 49ers
Bench:
Robert Griffin III
Willis McGahee
James Starks
Beanie Wells
Malcom Floyd
Reggie Wayne
My draft position ended up being seventh out of eight teams (and we were lucky to get that many), serpentine format.
Criticize away!
And apparently Maurice isn’t even with a team and I missed that during the draft because I’m a big dumb noob. :smack:
Huh? Maurice Jones Drew? He’s on the Jaguars. He’s currently holding out for some cash, but that’ll get resolved - it always does.
My only criticisms are: 1) Ryan Mathews is always an injury risk - for instance, his collarbone is currently broken. 2) For an 8 team league, you’re going to need to keep on top of emerging WRs and breakout candidates. Smith and Colston are good, but there are a lot of names above them.
You have some people I like and some I don’t. I love Jones-Drew even with his holdout, and I *love *McGahee. I think people have seriously under rated his potential. I have serious concerns about Mathews and his health, but he could be a second half warrior. Coming back from a broken collarbone can be tough though, and I feel the same way about Richardson. Still all nice picks. Starks and Wells are players I wouldn’t draft, really ever, in this format. They are both talented, but for a variety of reasons I don’t think they are relevant anymore. So I call your RBs iffy but with lots of upside.
Your QB position is iffy but with less upside, Big Ben is not someone I am a fan of as a QB1. RGIII looks like he might have a nice season, but I would want someone stronger at QB than Ben to start you off. I am in an 8 team keeper league with a (very) slow draft and am currently playing QB roulette because the top six QBs were already off the board by the time I got to my first pick what with keepers and everything so I get being behind in that area. But I think you might have made stronger choices there.
I don’t like your wide outs, but that isn’t the end of the world if your RBs hit. I think Smith is old and will be a fine WR2 in this format, but not a great WR1. Collston is a flex player for me in an 8 team league, and you have him as your WR2. I love Wayne as a sleeper, but he is also a flex play in an 8 team format, and I don’t think Floyd should have been drafted in an 8 team league. So you have some work to do at WR, but on the upside I think WR is super deep and it’s likely that you will find someone who has not been drafted who will be huge so keep your eyes open.
Who didn’t get drafted at QB? Just so you know what your options are in case RGIII flames out and Ben is…Ben. See if Ryan Williams is available to pair with Beanie. He seems to have been forgotten, and I think he is going to have the bigger role in AZ this year. I would gladly drop say Malcom Floyd to pick him up, because he has some upside and Floyd really doesn’t. Heck, I would drop Beanie for him, but I hate Beanie (I am a former Beanie owner). Maybe you can package a couple of players and make a trade to open up the roster spot for a pickup of a guy with some upside and a WR2 to go with Steve Smith. Maybe send and offer of Wells and Starks to someone with RB trouble for a wideout coming back, assuming someone like Williams is available for pickup.
So here is my advice on what to do now(should you want advice), which I will warn you in advance is not super duper typical. I frequently get raised eyebrows for the way I chose to play fantasy. It works for me, it isn’t for everyone. But I have never been a strong drafter and I do usually do pretty well.
Your team is a weird combination of risky high ceiling guys and guys with low ceilings but who are sort of risky also. So I love the high ceiling picks, but wish you would have backed them up with one or two legit studs. Since you didn’t, I think the better way to go would be all risky high ceiling picks, rather than conservative picks who are sort of meh. I am a go big or go home kind of guy. I would rather take a shot at finishing first and finish last because it all blew up than finish 4th because I didn’t swing for the fences. Typically this strategy puts you out in front of the players who are more conservative. Fortunately it’s not too late for that if that’s how you want to go. Package up some trades of your bench guys. Look over your opponents teams and figure out where they are weak, and get them to pay your to help marginally improve that weakness. Active on the waiver wire and try to find some lotto tickets. Go get that guy who is showing some promise before he has proven it. Take the risk on being wrong because right now your team isn’t really that safe anyway, so what do you have to lose?