Every summer, I like to look across the Fantasy Football landscape to find the best free Fantasy Football draft tools out there. Essentially, it has just turned into an ever-expanding list.
Even now, with all of the great tools and ideas below, I’ll still find out (through a tweet or through email or even a comment on the page below) about a great draft tool I didn’t even know about.
So share these free Fantasy Football draft tools with your friends — that aren’t in your league, which I’m certain will give you good Fantasy karma to help you on your championship journey.
It’s very possible that I missed some great tools, as there are a billion Fantasy Football websites out there. Drop me a line below, tweet me or send me an email if you know of a tool we should add to this list. Let’s get it up to 50!
Whether you are a site owner, writer or just a fantasy player, this list is certain to grow — so make sure you return just before your draft to see what’s new.
These are really in no specific order, as I do believe these are all excellent free Fantasy Football draft tools.
Imagine you had a personal assistant running around looking for all the best Fantasy Football articles on the web. Then they package them up in a nice list, with the most recent ones on top, and they update the list several times a day.
That’s what Goose does at FantasyRundown!
He tracks down the best articles based around today’s Fantasy news, along with analytical pieces and the most updated rankings.
It’s doubtful you’re going to find a better free Fantasy Football draft tool than this. With a super easy setup, along with the power of FantasyPros.com’s Expert Rankings and ADP, you can run your own one-man mock draft to see what might happen in your drafts.
You can do as many mocks as you want, too, which is nice. You can even load up your league settings and keepers your league might already have. Just start and restart, pick, revert back, and pick again. This might be the best thing to hit Fantasy Football since Kurt Warner.
One thing I’ve learned about this industry, getting three or four dozen Fantasy writers to do anything is a feat in itself. The fact they were able to get all these guys together to submit and update their rankings frequently is a Festivus miracle!
As you know, every time a (draft timer) bell goes off, a Fantasy writer gets his (buffalo) wings.
Sort the rankings by the entire group or just sort by a selection of your favorite writers. The Experts Consensus Rankings (ECR) number shows you the difference between a Fantasy Football writer’s opinion on one player compared to the average rankings from the group.
One of my favorite things I like to do is go back and look at past Fantasy Football ADPs. Don’t underestimate what looking back through draft history can do for your upcoming drafts. You can get a great idea of things like, when Fantasy DSTs should start to go, or when a large group of tight ends usually gets drafted. You can go back all the way to the late ’90s to see those Average Draft Positions.
While I love FootballGuys.com just in general, I find their depth charts are just simple and useful and among the best on the Internet. They are color coded, too, helping you know who is starting only because of injury. My favorite aspect, though, is that all 32 NFL teams are listed on one page – offenses and defenses.
Sometimes I need smart people to come up with innovative ideas and free Fantasy Draft tools because I just don’t have that ability. That’s what these guys did. In a 12-team, standard, non-PPR league, for instance, I can think about my fifth-round pick, 5.10, and see that: Ray Rice has a 28-percent chance of being there for me to draft, but Trent Richardson has a 48-percent chance, and Torrey Smith has a 86-percent chance.
This free draft tool has a 100-percent chance of being pretty awesome.
Smart Fantasy Football owners look at a player’s consistency when considering him for their roster – or starting lineup. With this consistency calculator, an owner can go back to 2000 to see how consistent a player is every week. Did you know that Andy Dalton was the fifth-most consistent Fantasy scoring QB in 2013? Or that DeSean Jackson was the 11th-most consistent wide receiver?
I just don’t understand how none of the major Fantasy sites have stolen this idea yet. After you load up your league’s drafts over the past three years, this awesome draft tool helps you:
This is easily one of my favorite free Fantasy Football draft tools — especially if you’ve played with the same guys for several years in a row.
Just a great way to get an idea of the prices you should expect to pay for players in your Fantasy Football auction. As you know, auctions are usually very different from one to the next, much more so than a regular Fantasy draft. But starting off with a solid basis for auction values should give you a good head start.
Another great tool – although this one actually helps you in-season as well. Obviously, it tells you which teams have the best schedules for which Fantasy positions. In other words, right off the bat, you learn that Tony Romo has the easiest schedule for quarterbacks because he faces the defenses that gave up the most Fantasy points to QBs last year.
You can also use this tool to break down who has the easiest/toughest Fantasy schedules for the first five weeks of the season if you want. (The Bengals’ RBs face the third-toughest schedule to start the season, but then from Weeks 6-10, they face the seventh-easiest schedule for RBs.)
Does your league allow trading of draft picks? This handy dandy free tool allows you to figure out the correct value you should receive in a draft pick trade. You can even do 2-for-1 deals if you want. Trading draft picks is always a little tricky, but this should give you a good basis.
One of the toughest things regular Fantasy Football commissioners have to do is fill up a league after an owner or two bails, and no one has a buddy that: a) wants to play or b) knows anything about Fantasy Football. All the buddies they do know that are like that are already in their league. This forum is full of people looking for leagues – and leagues looking for people.
The FantasyPros have done a really nice job of connecting into all of the different player news sites, and displaying current news in a way that’s not overwhelming. They display Fantasy player news updates from sites like KFFL, CBSSports.com, ProFootballTalk and Rotoworld.
I already mentioned that Fantasy Rundown brings you the best articles EVERY day, but what I might not have mentioned is that they also tell you whenever a site updates their rankings. As a matter of fact, they stay on the industry’s pulse, mentioning when any of 38 different sites (at the time of this writing) update their Fantasy Football position rankings.
You play Fantasy Football on CBS, but you like to read the writers on KFFL, RotoWorld and RotoExperts? Your browser will now instantly scan the page, and put little icons next to the name of each player discussed in that article to tell you if they are owned, if you own them or if they are available for pickup!
While there are several sites you can go to for your daily Fantasy news updates, there’s something convenient about having them pushed to you from these guys. Instant news isn’t always analyzed the best, whereas these guys have a full day to take in the news and react to it. Also, they’ll still shoot you some breaking news once in a while when a major Fantasy event happens, like an injury or arrest.
Very cool app that predicts what’s going to happen in the coming rounds, based on what happened earlier. It forecasts who will probably get picked over the next two rounds, so you’ll always have an idea of which players might make it to your next pick.
While this tool is actually a pay app, the demo is free for the first four rounds.
Predraft analysis can get pretty tedious, but going the extra mile pays off big time. Using target reports can help you notice trendy QB favorites and or highlighted players in an offense. Target reports are especially helpful during the season when scouting rising players, especially during Weeks 1-4.
This tool is awesome because it has some depth to it. It’s not just a “Is this guy worth trading for this guy” kinda tool. First, you set how many players you start at each position, with default settings already plugged in, and then you insert up to five players for Team 1 and then up to five players for Team 2 – then analyze!
Pretend you have a pocket-sized Mel Kiper look over your Fantasy Football team. (I’m not sure why he has to be pocket-sized, but it sounds more fun that way.) You show him your team – and he breaks down how you did, explaining your strengths and weaknesses, points out some players you’re counting on that really shouldn’t even be owned, and he mocks you for passing up on Trent Dilfer. The “Rate My Team” tool really is super easy to use, and you gain a TON of information out of it. It helps you set up your team to dominate any possible trades, also.
It even tells you the percentage of likelihood that you’ll end up making it into the playoffs. That’s 100-percent awesome.
Full disclosure: The guys on this podcast are my friends. I play softball and drink beers with Jamey Eisenberg, I used to eat wings with Dave Richard and I’ve dunked on Adam Aizer in basketball. (One of these things is a lie.) So I thoroughly enjoy listening to these guys joke around and talk Fantasy Football every day.
But I also believe they are very entertaining, even if you don’t make fun of them regularly in person. You’ll be imagining Aizer doing the podcast with a preppie sweater loosely tied around his neck in no time.
There’s no greater source for news and rumors these days than PFT, and that has been the case for just under a decade now. You might not get Fantasy analysis, but wouldn’t you rather know the news sooner, giving yourself a chance to make the Fantasy call rather than waiting on Fantasy sites?
Able to go back to 1985 if you type in the year in the URL, not sure why they removed it from the listing. FYI, Roger Craig was a BEAST that year, with 15 touchdowns, over 1,000 rushing yards and 1,000 receiving yards – and 92 receptions!
It says it’s experimental (said that last year, too, I’m pretty sure!), but they updated the tool in May, and you can now auction along with 11 of your closest fake computer team friends!
This is a cool tool that looks over the Fantasy Football landscape to show you which players are on the rise and which players are falling in the rankings at each position. They monitor the rankings on several sites to determine the risers and fallers, and this tool, along with the PickEmFirst app seems like it would be a great in-season tool, as well. You can select a time frame you want to use, too, including seven days, 14 days, 21 days and 28 days.
Matthew Berry is the face of the industry – and for good reason. He has a Hollywood background, has played Fantasy Sports for close to three decades, and he has great timing. Nate Ravitz plays the straight man perfectly, and Pod Vader keeps the show rolling.
This podcast is one of the best produced ones, as you’d imagine from ESPN, and they have fun segments, like “The Name Game,” where Ravitz names a player, then he lists off half a dozen or so other players, and Berry decides if he’d rank any of them above the initial player.
Consider this thing – the average of average draft positions! In other words, they pull in their own expert rankings, as well as the ADPs from drafts on CBSSports.com, ESPN, FantasyFootballCaclulator.com, MyFantasyLeague.com and RTSports. Then it all gets averaged out into one table that you can sort by position. You can’t get any more average-r than that!
Look, I know we have a lot of tools by these guys – but they’re good – and they’re free! What are you complaining about!?! This page is good to have on hand during your draft so you don’t accidentally draft Steven Jackson, Lamar Miller and Jacquizz Rodgers together, since they all have a Week 6 bye. (I’m not a huge fan of avoiding players with the same bye weeks, but many are – so use this.)
[Became a dead link for some reason — I’m investigating! If you know what happened to the site, please let us know!]
If you’re reading five articles about free Fantasy draft tools, then it’s pretty safe to say, you’re a diehard Fantasy Football player. That also means you’ve likely filled out your own spreadsheets at different points, and created your own cheatsheets. Well, this tool saves you a ton of work. You can move guys up and down as you like, add notes, mark them as injured or players you want to target – whatever you want. You can export your rankings or even share them if you want.
That’s right – these guys break down each preseason game — many of which the day after the games ended. They also share some game notes, and choose a player to give the PFF Game Ball to. Come back to this one once the NFL preseason rolls around
I love this chart – it measures a wideout’s productivity adjusted for the quality of his quarterback. They broke down 116 wide receivers with at least 30 targets last season. Essentially, this tool will help you find out which wide receivers might receive a boost in Fantasy production if they have a better QB in 2013. (Spoiler alert: Dwayne Bowe and Michael Floyd rank highly!) You can also take a look at Fantasy Points Per Target for wide receivers that didn’t see a change in QB here.
Jonathan Bales, @BalesFootball, one of the rising stars in the Fantasy industry right now, started this series back on May 28, which is where the link sends you. They are some nice pieces with some meat on their bones. This guy impresses me. I kinda want to punch him for that.
I got a chance to be a guest on Behar/Stafford’s podcast a couple summers ago – and loved it.
These guys are great, and a must-listen for anyone that likes to look ahead – even those in non-keeper leagues.
Attention All Mobile Peeps!
Ever go to a draft with a two-month-old magazine in one hand and a warm beer in the other? The guys at Sportable.is have you covered. They recently released their interactive redraft rankings targeted for “drafters on the go.” Each player has their own Fantasy profile card, which comes with 2014 projections, outlooks, and opinion polls.
Every season, these guys put together a great draft guide, with a ton of articles and rankings and insights. They even link you out to a bunch of great Fantasy articles that aren’t even on their site! Great free spot to load up on Fantasy info.
Tweet me @DavidGonos or drop a comment below to let me know about any free Fantasy Football draft tools I’m missing!
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PickMeFirst is no longer free, its been a pay service for about 6 months....$12.99 per sport.
That stinks. I'm looking at the site now and it has a big button that says, "Sign Up Now, Its (sic) Free!" It does, however, say that to Upgrade to Pickemfirst Pro -- THAT costs $12.99.
App is a free download, but to actually use it you need to pay.
Was a great fantasy tool until last season., is not worth buying unless your in dozens of pools.
I disagree with you, Tony. I'm in a 12 team league with a 30 player roster (yes 30!) and this app was a real timesaver when reading news on sites outside of my league site. As a single mom working full time and also going to school full time, I couldn't have managed my team competitively without being able to quickly tell which players are available to pick up. Great tool for very busy people, in my humble opinion.
This is one of the best/useful fantasy article i've ever read. Real good job! You've made a new follower out of me.
Thanks! Glad you found it useful!
#33 is a dead link for me, and would actually be the best tool for me outta all the, any suggestions?
This article is fantastic though, great work!!!
Uh-oh, looks like the site is down/dead/gone! I posted a disclaimer on that tip, so hopefully, we find out what happened. Sorry about that -- and thanks!