Fantasy Football Guide: Preparing for the Draft

The mission of the All Habs Network is to build a global community of sports fans.  It’s one of the common threads that drives the philosophy of our websites and guides our presence on social media.  Last year we successfully launched All Habs Fantasy Sports as one more tool to engage our readers and help them connect with other passionate fans.

Recently Steve Farnham authored a piece inviting readers to participate in one of our fantasy sports leagues — have you joined yet?  Today you will hear from Brian Clarke, the Commissioner of All Habs Fantasy Sports, who has designed the leagues, will arbitrate disputes, and will provide information.  Brian presents the first part of his series on fantasy football basics for our rookie players.

Fantasy players of any level are welcome to leave questions in the comments section below for Brian.

 

All Habs Fantasy Sports Football Guide
Preparing for the Draft

written by Brian Clarke, AllHabs.net

BURLINGTON, ON. — So this is your first time playing fantasy football and you’re questioning yourselves as to how you’ll draft your team. Well I’m here to tell you that there are tools – and terms to understand – out there along with resources.  Without giving you specifics on who to draft, I hope to provide you some helpful information.

The first thing I can suggest is to start doing mock-drafts. Yahoo hosts mocks and you can go in and draft to your heart’s content. You can experiment drafting from different positions in the draft. This is a good idea since we don’t have any idea what position we’ll be drafting from until we go into the actual draft. When we draft, we’ll be doing so in a format called a snake draft. Meaning in the first round we’ll go 1-12 or 16 and the reverse order in round 2. Order alternates round by round from there.

Things to consider when drafting; when I first started playing fantasy football I relied nearly entirely on ADP (short for “average draft position”.) Yahoo posts this.  This will give you a pretty good idea where players are being drafted. You may want to make up a list and exclude certain players. What the ADP rankings will not tell you about is injury or contract holdout situations. So you can make your own lists and exclude certain players. Trust me on this these situations currently exist out there.

The other significant things to consider when drafting are bye weeks. Each team has a week off between weeks 5-11. So you need to keep this in mind when you draft. For example you don’t want to have your top receiver or running backs to all have the same bye week. That will leave you in a quandary for those weeks and be missing spots in your line-up.

Handcuffing. You’ll hear this term often.  Usually this applies to running backs. Running backs are susceptible to injury. Some more than others as in all sports. Let’s say you draft a highly ranked running back that may mean so much to the success of your fantasy team that if he gets injured you may want to take a look in advance who his back-up is.

Twitter wasn’t as big when I started playing and there are loads of resources out there. I have created two relevant lists you may want follow.

https://twitter.com/#!/beezee05/fantasy-football

https://twitter.com/#!/beezee05/nfl-football-media

Within those lists there are a few people I would follow.  Some names that come to mind are Dave Richard, Jamey Eisenberg, Sigmund Bloom, Bryan Fontaine, Andrew Garda, Matt Waldman, Chet Gresham, Andrew Miley and Jim Day. Most interact and respond to questions to my experience and all pretty personable. Most of these people host or contribute to some highly informative podcasts.

I’ve also created an account called “The List Man”. Within I’ve got a list of our All Habs fantasy sports participants which requires some updates.

https://twitter.com/#!/TheListMan/all-habs-fantasy-sports

So if you haven’t considered following lists it might be time.

Look out for my retweets as well. I try to RT those tweets that I find particularly helpful to our group.

What format is our league?  We play a head to head format. Each person’s team starts a line-up each week consisting of 1 quarterback, 2 running backs, 2 wide receivers, 1 flex (your choice, a running back or a receiver), 1 tight end, a place kicker and a team defense (no individual players). The total points of that head-to-head match-up wins.

If you reach out for advice you may want to know that our league is a flex running back/wide receiver half point PPR (.5 for each pass reception that any of your players makes).  This also is also something to consider when drafting. Some running backs are more involved in the passing game than others. Those points per reception can add up and be the difference between winning and losing. This is factored in in experts’ rankings.

I’m happy to respond to questions at brian@allhabs.net or you can always catch me on Twitter @beezee05

Next article in series: In-season management of your team