I don’t follow the NFL, but have been talked into joining a fantasy league. Yes, I’m “that guy”. The guy who knows nothing and is in it for fun. I can’t name more than 1 or 2 players in the NFL.
Basically, what I would like is this. A list of players, in preference order, to draft. Then, if the guy before me drafts someone, I can scratch him and take the next one. It’s cool if it is itemized by position.
Yes, I’m totally ignorant of football. I know the rules and so forth, but am mainly in this for fun and social pressure.
You have the lists from dalej42. Any one of them will be fine, but the best bet is to get one updated as close to your draft as you can – work off a month-old list and you’ll wind up drafting a guy who broke his leg a week ago.
Two of your first three picks in the draft should to be running backs. Be sure to get a good third RB, too.
Famous Quarterbacks are not as valuable in fantasy football as in real life.
Do not be one of the first five guys in your league to take a defense, unless it is Baltimore’s.
Do not under any circumstances whatsoever take a kicker before the last round.
Good advice so far. I started playing Fantasy for the first time last year after spending 20 years as a football fan and I’ll tell you that not knowing a lot about the game will probably help more than a person like me who is playing for the first time because you don’t have any built in bias from being a fan. Fantasy is all about stats, so you don’t really need to know *much *about the game of football in order to be good at it. You just have to know about the stats and how they work.
ESPN has a podcast draft special that they do every year and should be starting to post by the end of the week. That helped me a whole lot when I was getting ready for my first draft last year and I really recommend it. It will talk you through the players and some basic strategies.
Replying mostly to subscribe so I can keep an eye on this thread.
We are doing an in person draft this year so I won’t have Yahoo’s real time rankings in front of me - so I will have to do more prep beforehand.
In tha past I had bought a mag that also gave access to a web site that was updated before the season and you could also input your league’s scoring to get more accurate player projections (eg certain runningbacks will have more value in a PPR league than others). Are any of the sites above adjustable (I can’t check them myself til I get home) and are there any mags that will be useful with the short window between the end of the lockout and the season starting?
Print out furt’s post and stick it next to the computer you’ll be drafting from.
There are some things about fantasy football which are totally counterintuitive, and can be hard to grasp.
For example, quarterbacks are invariably the highest scoring players in almost any scoring system. In standard NFL.com leagues, the six highest scoring players in 2010 were quarterbacks; Arian Foster was 7th. The next 11 were also quarterbacks.
So, your first pick should be a quarterback, right? Nope. Tom Brady was the highest scoring quarterback, and he outscored Eli Manning, the 10th best quarterback, by 27%. Arian Foster outscored the 10th running back (Ray Rice) by 57%.
More importantly, no team runs a 2-quarterback offense. Tons of teams run a 2-tailback offense, and some run the dreaded running-back-by-committee. That’s why you need to draft running backs early: because there aren’t enough.
Fantasy Football Calculator maintains an Average Draft Position chart which you can modify for number of teams and for PPR. This is by far my favorite fantasy football tool; I tend to compare stats on the fly, but I always refer back to this to see how much I’m reaching, just so I know if the guy I’m thinking about will probably be there next round.
The other important thing is that you get to start only 1 QB, but several RBs. (Generally speaking, though some leagues differ.) This means that if you spend your first pick on your QB, all three of your RBs are going to be worse than average, because you’re forced to pick all three lower than everyone else. That cumulative effect is a killer.
Don’t take a defense before the second to last round period. There are way too many variables to be able to accurately predict who will have a good fantasy defense. Just don’t do it. Let other people jump on Baltimore and Pittsburgh or whoever else while you pick up extra Running Backs or Wide Receivers who can provide you with solid upside. Just stay away.
Actually, I agree. I apologize if it seemed like I advocated actually taking Pittsburgh early, I just meant that I’d take them before the Ravens D, which is no longer a sure thing. They’ve gone 2-3 years skating by on name alone.
But I never am able to get any vaunted defense in my drafts. Sometimes I luck out on a late pick, but even without that, I would just start whichever defense is playing the Panthers every week…
That advice is completely dependent on the rules in your particular league. In the ones I’ve played in, one of the top 2-3 kickers is much, much more valuable than the best defense.
Quarterbacks are worth getting early if you can get a Peyton Manning or Aaron Rodgers, but not if all you can get is a Matt Schaub or Tony Romo.
Quarterbacks (in my leagues) will put up the most per-player points, but not the most per-position points, because you’re only playing one of them at a time. That’s why RB and WRs are so valuable and hotly fought over early on.
Your draft position has a huge effect on who you should pick- even though that cumulative effect of picking a QB first is real, it’s much minimized if you’re the 10th pick out of 11 players- by then, most of the outstanding RBs are gone, and the rest are more or less fungible, where the QB will not be.
Tight ends are fairly useless, even if you have the best in the league.
Yeah, but picking the top kickers from year to year is an educated crapshoot. The top three kickers in fantasy points in 2009 were Nate Kaeding, Akers and Ryan Longwell.
In 2010 it was Sebastian Janikowski, David Akers and Matt Bryant. Kaeding and Longwell didn’t even make the top 10 - and neither Bryant nor Janikowski made the top 10 in 2009.
So even though kickers contribute lots of points, there’s no point in drafting them high, because nobody - including experts like me - has any fucking clue which ones will be good in any given year.
Except David Akers, apparently, but he’s with the 49ers now. Draft him at your peril.
Conversely, defenses are somewhat predictable. Teams which generate lots of sacks and turnovers pretty much always do well, and defensive performance doesn’t change all that much from year to year.
A good rule for kicker is pick one who plays for a dome or good weather team. Also remember waiver weeks for kicker and defense. They’re easy to forget about and you could end up starting one in a bye week.
Defense depends too much on the matchup, for me anyway. I’d rather just pick whatever defense is playing Carolina off the waiver wire, no mater how crappy they are, than stick with Baltimore or Pitt through the whole season. Plus, I don’t want to worry about a defense taking up a precious spot on my bench when my elite defense is on bye.
So I’m all for waiting for the 2nd to last round for defense/special teams.
You should listen to this man. First year in fantasy and should have won the whole thing. Some nobody came up and beat him in the championship by pure luck.
MINOR quibble with this: make sure of your league’s scoring rules. My league’s rules have favored QBs the last few years over RBs, so that while a first-round RB pick is still vital (since you have more than one of 'em), a second-round QB pick is not out of the question.
Also: I’ll try to remember to let you guys know who my two starting RBs are so you can avoid them, then look prescient when one of 'em gets a season-ending injury in the first 3-4 weeks. (FIVE YEARS in a row, this happens to me)
Hey guys, quick question. My wife wants to join a league but doesn’t want to join one I play in, and none of her friends play. Are there any opinions on Yahoo vs ESPN for joining a random league or finding one that is less likely to blow up? I want her to have fun with this, and if the league falls apart due to non participation or whatnot I see that as being counterproductive.
This is probably a terrible thread to ask this question in. I am not sure, in retrospect, why I did that.
Yeah, you should have beat me.