by Scott Sokol   

It’s that time of year, the most exciting for any fantasy football player.  We’re just six weeks away from NFL action and drafts are right around the corner.  A fantasy football draft can be one of the most exciting and enjoyable times of your year but it can also be one of the most stressful, especially if you’re the commissioner of your league.

Here are some helpful hints for getting your league and your team off on the right track:

10.  Don’t get too caught up in trash-talking your friends in the draft room.  There’s no worse feeling than sending some great smack to your biggest rival only to look up and see that you’re on the clock and only have ten seconds left to pick.  Let somebody else be the guy that takes Brett Favre because he’s at the top of the default rank from last season, meanwhile you can take your time and draft a player with a guaranteed starting spot.

9.  If you’re doing an online draft, make sure you’re able to test the draft software well ahead of time.  Most of the big fantasy sports sites should offer this feature to at least the commissioner(s) of the league, if not everyone, and it’s a good idea to get yourself acquainted beforehand just in case you run into any problems during the draft – somebody complaining of a computer malfunction, stuck in traffic, or whatever excuses fantasy owners always seem to be making.  A few years ago, I decided to sign up with a new fantasy sports site because it offered fully customizable scoring, live scoring, and all the bells and whistles of any of the pay sites for free.  I thought it was a no-brainer.  Started up a new league, meshing owners from a few I knew of, and when it came to draft day the draft room software was so bad that we ended up disbanding the league by the fourth round.  Don’t let that happen to you this year.

8.  This tip is on draft strategy.  We all have our Sleepers – and if you read my sleeper list you’ll find guys like Kevin Smith, Chad Pennington, and Chris Chambers – but I won’t be right about every sleeper I like and neither will you.  Make sure you don’t take too many risks, thereby passing on solid contributors that could help your squad on a weekly basis.  It’s great to nail down a few guys that you really have a good feeling about and try to get them on your team, but if you miss out on them, don’t do something crazy.  Just keep a level head and your team will turn out fine.  If you miss out on one sleeper, there will always be another you can take the next round.  Keep in mind, they’re called “sleepers” for a reason and as often as not, they don’t wake up.

7.  Sabotage always comes back to haunt you in fantasy sports.  On more than one occasion, I’ve teamed up with one or two other owners to try to screw over another owner in the draft.  Usually it’s at a point where we notice something like there are only four starting quarterbacks left and an owner who needs one is five picks down.  Four of us will team up and take QBs just to make sure this team without enough will only get a backup.  I’ve never seen that strategy pay off yet.  What usually ends up happening is each of you that took the extra QB have too many and have a worse starting lineup because you didn’t draft that WR or TE you actually needed.  And to make matters worse, the guy you tried to screw over will probably end up doing something like drafting Kurt Warner (3.417 yards, 27 TD last year).  The best bet is to worry about your own team in the draft, not somebody else’s.

6.  Figure out the drop-off points.  Sometimes this is even more important in leagues that keep a few players.  Basically this means there’s several points in every draft where the talent level markedly drops to another “tier” of lesser talent.  All the top RBs and QBs are taken along with top 5-6 WR and you’re left with a mess of RBs and QBs that are all about the same and WRs that begin morphing into crapshoots.  There’s not too much to do about this, but there is one tip.  If you notice that the drop-off is coming soon and it’s your pick, this is not the time to pick a sleeper.  If you miss out on that sleeper, so be it, you don’t want to miss out on a player you already know is one of the best left on the board.  A sleeper pick works out as well as Adrian Peterson only once every few years – but chances are you can wait until the drop-off point to make that bold selection.

5.  While we, the Fantasy Football Trader team have put in hours and hours of work putting together our Monster Draft Kit, nobody’s advice is 100% perfect, and usually the best way to do research is to get it from a variety of sources.  For instance Sleepers & Busts – I think all my picks in the Draft Kit were good ones, but there’s no way I’ll be right on every one (In fact, to be rather honest – if you find a source that’s ever even 60-65% spot-on with prognostication, you’ve found yourself an incredible resource). You can say the same for any Fantasy Football Expert out there, so if you read up on lots of different articles, you’ll have a better knowledge base to formulate your own opinions that you can draw from during the draft.

4.  Last year is last year – and has no effect on this year.  Just because Leonard Pope caught five touchdown passes in 2007, or DeShaun Foster ran for 876 yards doesn’t mean that either will be relevant in fantasy this year.  It’s much more important to study why these guys would be good this year or why they might not.  In this case – DeShaun Foster is just a backup to Frank Gore in San Francisco and is unlikely to get more than a handful of carries a game, while the broken ankle Pope suffered late last year looks like it could hinder him to begin the season, and he could easily be passed by another decent Cardinal Tight End.  The point, of course, is that numbers last year show you something, but they don’t show you everything, so don’t fall into the trap of sorting by 2007 fantasy rank in your draft room and just going down the list.  Another good idea is to develop a list of projections which take your points system into account.  If the site you play fantasy football on won’t do it for you – find another site that will let you plug in your scoring system.

3.  Make sure your league rules are clear to everyone and that the whole league has come to some sort of a compromise/agreement on everything.  If you’re commissioner, a terrible blunder can be deciding all the rules of your league without any input from your owners.  If you do that, you’re just setting yourself up for complaints all season long.  It will give you a lot of grief, and everybody else in the league will get tired of hearing the same guy complain every week that if the league had one starting QB instead of two he would be winning the league.  Maybe the most important rules to establish before the draft are keeper rules.  If you’re starting a keeper league you need to decide how many players to keep and for how long because that can drastically change draft strategy. 

2.  Get all of your draft research done as soon as possible.  If you love fantasy sports as much as I do this one shouldn’t be any problem.  No matter how you’ve decided you’re going to do for research for your league – do it early for two reasons.  First, just in case you talk to your league and the only day you can draft is tomorrow you’ll be all ready and might even have an advantage over other owners.  Also, if you do your initial research early on, you’ll be able to easily follow all the training camp battles, injuries, holdouts, etc. that other owners will be busy looking up during the draft.  Any edge you can get you should take, and this is an easy one.

1.  The most important part of your draft is that everybody in your league is present at the draft.  Whether you’re doing a live, in-person draft, an online draft, or an extended draft over several days and weeks, nothing is worse than a draft with half of the teams on auto-pick.  The best thing to do is get every owner in the league on board early.  The presence of one owner is no more or less important than any other owner, so it’s better to find a time that everybody can agree to.  Don’t just propose one week in August for the draft, instead just start throwing out dates that work for you – but open up the whole month and into the first week of September if necessary.  The longer you wait to get your league in order, the less possible draft dates you’ll have.  If you haven’t already sent out an email to your league to discuss a draft date, do it today!

Hope these tips help – but more than anything, just have fun.

Happy Fantasy.