Fantasy Football Strategy For Season Long Leagues
by Badger, Football Handicapper, Predictem.com
As someone who used to be the commissioner of an NFL Fantasy Football League in the early 1990s, back in the day when results were scored by hand or by your own spreadsheet, and way before the Internet and all of the free Web sites... I'm amazed at how big fantasy football has become.
Seriously, the numbers are staggering.
What used to be a few football geeks, a spreadsheet and a few really bad magazines has now grown into a ONE-BILLION dollar business with over 25 million players. These days you can't chuck a stick without hitting a sports-talk radio show, a TV show or one of the billion websites that offer info or services for fantasy football. It's so big that the Chicago-based firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimated in 2012 that fantasy football has grown so big that is accounts for 6.5-billion dollars of lost worker-productivity during the NFL season!
With the increasing popularity of fantasy football, there also comes opportunity, especially since there is a lot of "dead money" as they say in the poker world. Heck, my sister-in-law and my wife play in our "family" fantasy league and if they know more than a dozen guys in the NFL total (usually only the "cute" ones like Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers), then they are guessing. They literally print a draft guide from some Web site the day before and follow it pick by pick, and I know that just about every fantasy football league in America probably has a few players just like them waiting to be fleeced.
Pre-Draft Strategies
Every fantasy league has an owner that racks up enormous fees for waiver-wire pickups throughout the season, but the most consistent and best fantasy football players do most of their work before the draft.
Before I develop any type of fantasy league or draft strategy, I find out how the league is going to be scored. Not many players do this before the draft, and often times it can make the difference as far as "strategy" goes. For instance, I once was in a league that gave quarterbacks the same two-points for every yard passing as running backs/receivers got for their yards. Under this scenario quarterbacks are clearly more valuable, making the quote "second tier" quarterbacks like Andy Dalton, Matt Schaub, Matt Ryan and their like as valuable as a top-flight running back when weekly output is concerned.
Does the league scoring system take points away for interceptions or fumbles? Then guys like Philip Rivers and Jay Cutler are a bigger risk and it should cause a ripple effect down the draft board in leagues where they can lose you points.
Another major pre-draft strategy that most novices fail to account for is to diversify. This means paying attention to bye weeks, as well as avoiding the curse of loading up with too many players on one team or too many players from the same division.
It usually only takes about three or four rounds of the draft before an owner lets out a groan and immediately goes into trade mode because his first-round QB, third-round WR and second running back all have the same bye week (meaning that their fantasy team will be severely short-handed one week). Since teams in the same division tend to have the same bye week, even the best fantasy football draft guru can make this mistake from time to time.
Sometimes it's unavoidable in 12-team/14-team fantasy leagues, and one could argue that the worst-case scenario is one bad week, but you should always check byes before you make your picks, especially in the early rounds when owners tend to overlook the smaller details because there are still so many good players still on the board.
Or you get the token owner who loads up on Tony Romo, DeMarco Murray, Jason Witten and Dan Bailey because they're a huge Dallas Cowboys fan, only to crash and burn when the Cowboys fail to reach their high expectations every year. I understand that many owners are in the game of fantasy football just to watch their favorite teams and players on their own team, but if you want a better shot at success it's just common sense to not have too much of your team's hopes on your favorite team.
A third pre-draft strategy you can employ in most fantasy football leagues is to try and develop huge depth at one position (most of the time at running back). Leagues that force you to draft only a certain number of players at one position can crush this technique, but loading up on one position late in drafts is a good practice to get into because it can cover you for many contingencies.
Starting running backs go fast in most drafts, but the reality in the NFL is that most teams use two or three over the course of the regular season just because one guy just doesn't go every game all season. Taking a few backups or a few third-down backs in the last few rounds to stock up at the position might not look so great following the draft (i.e. a lot of mediocre RBs), but when week three comes along and suddenly four of the five running backs you drafted are starting (or getting major reps) due to injury, you'll be prepared for the long haul or a regular season.
One of the last pre-draft strategies I like to do every year is to try and pick the "breakout" player at a key position. Years ago I watched a rookie named Jimmy Graham just tear up the preseason... so I reached a little and picked him in the middle rounds even though he wasn't on many of the "draft lists" other owners were using. Another year a young 'Skins RB by the name of Alfred Morris was a late-round steal for some owners.
Doing this takes a little more work, like looking through preseason box scores, watching a few games or reading up on each NFL team's training camp notes to see what young players are pushing veterans for playing time. But there is very little that happens in the NFL preseason that isn't reported these days, so picking the breakout player is becoming harder and harder to do each year.
Just a few hours of pre-draft work will help you avoid most of these problems that occur to even veteran fantasy players from time to time. I'm not saying you can't win by making these errors, but if you want to set yourself up for the best success these are guidelines to follow with any fantasy football league you enter.
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