D-Day: Get ready to Draft!

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Hey fellas (and ladies) -

For the past few years, I've scoured the internets for tips on how to sucessfully draft your fantasy football team. Well, it turns out that the best FREE service I've found is right at home with ESPN's Draft Kit. Let me break it down for you...

1) Projections and Rankings - ESPN has always had the most in depth projections and rankings for a free site. There are other pay sites such as Rotowire, KFFL, and such who keep their readers a little more informed on a daily basis, but ESPN is definately adequate. The Draft Kit has projections on how each player is expected to do next year and rankings on when each player should be drafted based on those projections. This leads us into the next great feature of the Draft Kit:

2) Average Draft Positions: The old saying goes that "one person is wise, while many people are foolish." Well, maybe when it comes to Maryland basketball riots, but not to drafting your team. ESPN has thousands of mock drafts that go on everyday. By averaging all the draft ranks, one can figure out where - on average - a player will be drafted. If you're really high on Kellen Winslow and want to draft him in round 3, take a look at the ADP and see he's usually not going until the 5th round. Note: these numbers are for a standard ESPN 10-team league. Our league is deeper and so an ADP of 50 will correlate to round 4 instead of round 5.

3) Mock Drafts: Even if you like the wisdom of one person, the Draft Kit has expert mock drafts for every league type - even point per reception leagues like ours. This will help you figure out who and what position you want to draft within each round. Unless your strategy is so far off from the experts' strategy - but in that case, we won't worry about you anyway.

4) Bye Weeks: One of the most overlooked aspects to drafting is selecting players based on their off weeks. Teams have been decimated because you drafted your #1 QB, RB, and WR with the same bye week. Bye weeks shouldn't effect your draft that much, but when you are choosing between two close to identical players, bye week could be the deciding factor.

5) Strategery: No one should go into the draft without a plan. Good thing, because ESPN has pre planned plans for you! Just look into the Draft Kit Strategy section for information on the 2 RB plan, point per reception plans, and just general draft strategy talk. It's a really good section if you are just getting your fantasy feet wet or want to kick your draft game up a notch.


Okay, I hope this helps. For league specific talk, I've created an additional page:

Teaser's Revenge Talk

I'll let everyone post to this page, so let the smack begin. By the way, for those of you reading, this page might be NSFW. Reader beware.