September 9, 2016 Leave a Comment

Fantasy football snake draft review for a 16-team league

I have been part of a college friends league for the past seven or eight years and it’s the one football league in which I have the most invested emotionally. Most of the managers are of the casual type, but the size of the league makes it hard to actually win the whole thing. In addition, it’s a very shallow league with only two bench spots per team. This makes it aggravating and yet strategically exciting at the same time. I have only won the championship once, but last year I tore things up with an all-star team and a 12-2 regular season record before getting dropped in the first round of the playoffs. This year the league added two more teams which means talent is even harder to come by.

The league uses Fleaflicker, and old-school fantasy sports platform that I have come to realize utilizes somewhat absurd rankings and player projections. I realized that I could use that to my advantage by waiting on certain players I wanted on my team because I knew they would likely be available in later rounds. After all, fantasy managers typically follow the default draft rankings in whatever software platform they are using.

I did around half a dozen mock drafts in preparation until I settled on one strategy that seemed the most promising. I figured that I would take A.J. Green (FantasyPros overall rank #6) in the first round, then another wide receiver like Brandon Marshall (#15) or Alshon Jeffrey (#26) in the second round, before targeting a running back like Matt Forte (#46) or possibly Jeremy Langford (#44) in the third round. When doing my mock drafts, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Coby Fleener (#79) was still available on my turn, so my plan was to take him there.

The first few rounds

Of course, mock drafts only mildly predict what will happen in actual drafts, so when it came to real draft time, things went quite differently. First of all, I was thrilled when it came to my turn in the first rounds and lo and behold, who is still waiting to be picked, but Julio Jones (#2)? I’m not exactly sure how he managed to stay there, but he’s an upgrade over A.J. Green and could plausibly be the #1 non-QB player in all of fantasy this year.

With my second pick, I took Dez Bryant. I think the impact of Tony Romo‘s injury might be overestimated, and Bryant’s consistent history suggests that he can still play at a top level this year. Besides, with Romo’s potential return in Week 9, Bryant’s performance should only go up over the course of the season. The fact that Dallas has one of the easiest schedules for wide receivers only sweetens the pot.

Since Matt Forte was off the board when it came to my turn in Round 3, I instead went with Latavius Murray (#31), who had been passed over and was actually fifteen spots higher in the FantasyPros overall draft rankings. In Round 4, I took the one player that had slipped way too low on Fleaflicker’s draft rankings (somewhere around #67) – Jarvis Landry (#34). I was really targeting him with that pick and I would have kicked myself someone else had drafted him, but fortunately for me he was buried quite deep and not one else seemed to notice him there.

The later rounds

So far, my draft was proceeding better than I had hoped, but it was about to change. Going into the fifth round, there was a run on tight ends. Delanie Walker, Travic Kelce, and Gary Barnidge went off the board with three of the first four picks of the round. Then, Coby Fleener was taken. Not only can he potentially produce great numbers on the New Orleans offense, but the drop off in tight end production seems to begin right after him. Once Fleener was off the board I realized it was in a jam and had no clear-cut choice to make at tight end.

I decided I would wait on tight end and pick up someone like Julius Thomas (#15) in a later round, which I ended up doing in Round 11. So I switched gears and instead chose the Arizona defense (#2 in DST rankings). I know that conventional wisdom says to wait on defense, but in my particular league’s scoring settings, defenses are rewarded particularly well. In fact, top defenses in the league are comparable in points scored to the top flex players. In fact, in 2015 the Denver DST outscored the top wide receiver, Antonio Brown, by three points. Because of this, choosing Arizona was a prudent choice.

With the rest of my draft I filled in my remaining positions which included quarterback (Matthew Stafford in Round 6), bench spots (Melvin Gordon and Marvin Jones), and IDP spots. All indications point to Stafford having a tremendous year in his pass-happy offense, and the fact that Detroit faces the second-worst defenses against QBs persuaded me to pick him over a similarly good quarterback, Derek Carr (I would have chosen Carr had Stafford not been available). As for Gordon and Jones, well these two players were simply too good to pass up late in the draft. We’ll see soon enough whether or not they become legitimate weapons.

Assessing my draft

In the beginning of the season, all players seem to have upside, and perhaps even crazy potential. The unknown can be tantalizing at times, but the first few week or two deflate these kinds of ideas and reality asserts itself once again. This attraction to potential leads me to pursue some of my players, particularly Julius Thomas and Matthew Stafford, but I really can’t tell for sure whether they’ll be as successful as I hope. But my other players – including my core of Jones, Bryant, Landry, and to some extent, Murray – give me more confidence that they will produce throughout the season.

In relation to the other teams in my league, I would say my team is highly competitive. I do have a few areas of concern that I may need to address, depending on the performance I see during the first few weeks. Can I upgrade my tight end? Will Murray be the productive workhorse that I hope he will be? Will Marvin Jones flourish or flounder with Detroit? And will this be Gordon’s year to break out?

I like to maximize the potential of each and every roster spot that I have so that I have as many top ten players at each position as I can. This will take some work, but as I already know, successful fantasy teams aren’t built in a (draft) day.

September 3, 2016 Leave a Comment

Last-minute tips for preparing for 2016 fantasy football snake drafts

This weekend and early next week are crunch time for fantasy football drafts for 2016. I find that drafting late in the preseason is better than drafting early since the flow of information is much better than it was three or four weeks earlier. When you are ready to draft, keep these tips in mind to maximize your return when participating in snake drafts.

Try out a mock draft, or two, or three

Doing mock snake drafts help you figure out which players are likely to be on the board when you pick in different rounds. Obviously, the actual draft will turn out differently than your mock drafts, but mock drafts can give you a sense of when you can potentially draft certain players. I think that most fantasy managers will generally follow the default rankings that are generated on your site, so you can pretty much tell who is going to be available at the end of round four, the beginning of round six, the middle of round eight, and so forth. If you play your cards right and practice drafting good teams in mock draft rooms, you’ll be several steps ahead of your competition when the real draft day comes.

Draft in a throwaway league

Fantasy football drafts are fun for everyone during the first two or three rounds. Then things get start to get ugly. As star players and household names fly off the board, it can become a challenge to find players that you want on your team. Maybe you start drafting studs from three years ago or dark-horse rookies because you didn’t do your homework and don’t know what else to do.

If you really want to excel in your drafts for leagues that matter (i.e. leagues with friends, family, or for prizes), you need to have already drafted in a real situation. Mock drafts are helpful with some strategy, but nothing cuts the nerves and forces you to learn player profiles like drafting in a real draft. In order to do this, you have to join a league just for the heck of it. The kind of league I’m talking about is a league with total strangers and one where there’s no money paid into the pot. Knowing that you are committing for a season to a team raises the stakes over that of a mock draft, and so the draft room will ensure that you quickly become familiar with players going in rounds six, seven, eight, nine, and so forth. Your draft in this “throwaway” league might not be the greatest, but at least you’ll be better prepared for later drafts in leagues that matter more.

Understand something about draft rankings

Everyone is going to be looking at rankings of some sort during the draft, whether these are on some third-party site or on the board that your draft room software uses. The curious thing about these rankings is that they can vary widely depending on whom provides them. For example, you can easily find discrepancies in rankings found on Yahoo, ESPN, and CBSSports, and sometimes these discrepancies are pretty big. This should tell you two things: first, that rankings are just opinions, and opinions differ from person to person. Take them with a grain of salt. Second, you can exploit these differences by trying to figure out if one site has draft rankings that are not widely accepted by others. But how do you know if one set of draft rankings is inferior to others?

The best way to figure this out is to take the collective wisdom from a group of opinion-leader experts and use that as your guide. Fortunately for us, that has already been done with the consensus draft rankings over at FantasyPros. The stock rankings are helpful in themselves, but you should go one step further by narrowing these down even more. This is really helpful when sorting based on position.

Let’s say you want to find the best middle-round running back to draft. After filtering the FantasyPros rankings to show RBs only, click on “Pick Experts”, then on the upper left choose “Top 10 RB Experts” that are listed under “2015 Draft Accuracy”. Click “Update”, and this will generate a rankings list which draws from the opinions of ten fantasy analysts who have had success in the past in evaluating running back talent. Now you can compare this list with the default draft rankings in your draft room to find the best player to draft at your needed position.

Your only strategy should be to use an adaptable strategy

Fantasy managers sometimes seem overly concerned with the order in which they draft positions for their team. Some people might think there is an optimal strategy in drafting WR-WR-WR with their first three picks, or maybe WR-RB-WR, or perhaps something else. Forget about all of that.

The way to draft is to start off picking the best player available and letting that player’s position guide you, but not rule you. So if you take a wide receiver for your first pick, you might ideally want to select a running back with your second pick. This will, after all, give you more flexibility in later rounds. However, if another great wide receiver falls to you with your second pick and he looks better than any available running back, take the wide out. If you have done your homework in advance (see the importance of mock drafts), you should have a few names of running backs that you can get in later rounds.

The bottom line is that you need to be able to adapt your strategy rather than letting a strategy stranglehold you.

Turn left when others are turning right

You will probably reach a point in the draft when no players look tempting. This can happen if there’s a run on a certain position which leaves you with “slim pickens” which don’t really excite you, and whom you may end up dropping at some point in the season anyway. Rather than waste a pick by following what other teams are doing, try drafting a quality player of a different position. For example, if you get to the fourth round and you don’t see any great options at receiver or running back, draft a tight end or quarterback. Conventional wisdom may say that this is too early to select these positions, but you can probably snag one of the top players at their respective positions (think Andrew Luck at QB, or Greg Olsen at TE) and thereby solidify that aspect of your team.

Stop thinking that your job is done after draft day

After you draft, you can sit and contemplate your roster with a look of love or of horror in your eyes, depending on how well you think you drafted. Stop doing that! While you may have positioned yourself well or poorly on Day 1, your job in creating your team is far from done. I can tell you from experience that even a major misstep on draft day can be overcome by carefully managing your team, dropping those who under perform, and pick up talent that propels your team to victory. On the flip side, even a well-drafted team can suffer from a few injuries to key players. Plan on keeping up with the waiver wire throughout the season, and realize that this is your true key to success.

There you have it – six tips to help guide you to a better fantasy football snake draft for 2016. No one said that the draft would be easy, but a little homework now goes a long way to help you over the next four months.

September 11, 2015 Leave a Comment

Fantasy Football Snake Draft Review for 14-Team League

I drafted a team a few days ago in a shallow 14-team league where teams only get two bench spots. I ran through several mocks to prepare for the snake draft so I was able to try out several player combinations available at my position. Since I won the league last year, I ended up picking last in the first round, first in the second round, last in the third round, and so forth.

Here are the available roster positions in the league:

QB – 1
WR – 2
RB – 1
TE – 1
Flex – 1
K – 1
D/ST – 1
DB – 1
LB – 1
DB/DL/LB – 1
Bench – 2

Since my picks were always back-to-back, it didn’t really matter the exact order of my picks. I contemplated picking WR1-WR1 or WR1-RB1 pairs, and at the end of the day I just felt more comfortable picking two solid wide receivers. The strongest RB1 that I was looking at picking (both in mock drafts and the actual draft) were not terribly impressive, whereas the WRs I could choose from could all be top scorers by the end of the season.

With my first two picks, I chose Julio Jones and Odell Beckham. I had some reservations about Beckham since he doesn’t have a proven track record and the word on the street is that he’s going to be a target for defensive backs this year, but I think his upside is pretty special given the system that he’s in. I had the opportunity to choose a few other top tier players (Demaryius Thomas, Calvin Johnson, or A.J. Green), but I’m satisfied with the players I got.

My third pick is where things got ugly. The website I was drafting on was running slowly, so I decided to log off and reload the browser in between the mass of picks I had to wait through before it was my turn again at #42 overall. When I tried to re-enter the draft room, though, my browser hung again and I was not able to enter until just after my pick expired and auto-selected Jonathan Stewart. While not a bad pick, I would more likely have chosen T.Y. Hilton, who ended up going to another team a few picks later. When I was finally able to enter the room I managed to select Greg Olsen with the first pick of Round 4 (#43 overall). I knew from my mock drafts that Olsen would not be around by the time I picked in Round 5, so it was in my best interest to take one of the more reliable TEs at this point in the draft.

By the time I picked in Round 5 (#70 overall), quarterbacks had started to fly off the board. I noticed that Russell Wilson started to fall, and I would have picked him had he not been picked five selections ahead of me. Given the absence of other attractive position players, I chose Tom Brady with my pick. In Round 6 (#71 overall), I pickd ed up Julian Edelman. I now had three clear #1 receivers on their respective teams, a solid TE, and a reliable QB as the basis for my team.

By Round 7, many IDP players were being drafted, but I wanted to wait on them given the sporadic nature of those players. Before the draft, I noticed that the way the league’s scoring system was set up, D/STs actually accounted for far more points per game than they might in other leagues. In fact, in the previous year the highest scoring defense – the Philadelphia Eagles – averaged slighly more points per week than either Marshawn Lynch or Antonio Brown. Meanwhile, the highest IDP player averaged about 40% fewer points per week. With no other teams yet chosen in the draft, I was able to select the Seattle Seahawks, the consensus #1 D/ST this year.

In the later rounds, when taking risks can pay off big time, I decided to pick up both Joseph Randle and Darren McFadden. While I really do not like investing in murky running back situations like I just did, the fact that the Dallas offensive line may be the best in the game suggests to me that if one of these does win the battle, it will be a RB who may carry me to fantasy glory. I also picked up Ameer Abdullah with a late pick (#126) since he could be primed for stardom as well once the Detroit backfield gets settled.

Because I picked up three running backs for my bench, it meant that I was unable to fill my active DB/DL/LB roster spot. I would like to drop one of these benched running backs once I figure out who will be the odd man out on their actual teams, but I’m willing to hold on to them until I get a better idea which player will star for his team. Right now, I have only 10 players in active roster spots against my opponent’s 11 active players. I feel that I may be able to win this week even without the contributions of the 11th man, and if that continues into this weekend, I will go ahead and keep three players on my bench. Cutting a player in Week 1 may mean cutting a player who can potentially carry my team in Weeks 3 – 16, so I am willing to take a small risk for the possibility of a larger fantasy payout.

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