Fantasy Football Book Excerpt: “Do’s & Don’ts For Drafting In Your Home Fantasy League”

The following is an excerpt from the Fantasy Football book, “Benny Ricciardi’s Definitive Guide To Fantasy Football,” which happens to be the sister-book to “Benny Ricciardi’s Definitive Guide To Fantasy Baseball.”

Fellow Fantasy Baseball writer Benny Ricciardi got me to write in his Fantasy Baseball book, The Definitive Guide To Fantasy Baseball” earlier this spring, and he came back to me to help write a chapter for the new “Definitive Guide To Fantasy Football.” Of course, I was happy to join in!

In both e-book and paperback form, with an audio book currently in production, Ricciardi has produced a great Fantasy assistant I believe you’ll use for years to come – not just for 2017.

Here are some of the writers in this Fantasy Football book:

• RotoExperts.com’s Scott Engel
• FNTSY.com’s Nando DiFino
• FNTSY.com’s Matthew Modica
• RotoExperts.com’s George Kurtz
• RotoWire.com’s Vlad Sedler
• FNTSY.com’s Chris Meaney
• FootballDiehards.com’s Jen Ryan
• FNTSY.com’s Gregg Sussman

As I mentioned, this is a book I believe you’ll enjoy for 2017, as well as several seasons to come because it is full of advice and strategies that will affect how you play every single season.

“21 Do’s & Don’ts For Drafting In Your Home Fantasy League” — Fantasy Football Book Excerpt

You likely have one league, though, that you consider your “Home Fantasy League,” filled with your oldest football friends, your buddies — your ball-busting brethren. You’ll draft differently in that league than you would a big money online league or a league with online Fantasy Football friends you met in a forum, chat room, on a Facebook group or on Twitter.

DO: Create Owner Draft Profiles

While you are looking through the past three years of drafts or so, go as far back as you can to make “owner draft profiles” that will help you get a clearer picture of your competition. Just like how a coach would study another coach’s play-calling tendencies, you can pretty easily figure out another owner’s draft-picking tendencies. You can discover things about each owner, like:

• This owner drafts a running back in the first round – every single year.
• This owner likes to draft a quarterback and wide receiver from the same team pretty often.
• This owner usually has two wide receivers before Round 4.
• This owner loves to draft rookies.
• This owner likes to draft injury risks and swing for the fences.
• This owner always drafts a kicker before the last round.
• This owner waits to draft a quarterback/tight end until the late-rounds.
• This owner always drafts a backup quarterback/tight end.

After creating these draft profiles (which you’ll likely be able to use in every draft for years to come), look at the draft order and see how things would shake out, if you apply these tendencies to their respective owners.

DON’T: Draft a Great Kicker With an Early Bye Week

No Fantasy Football owner ever wants to carry two kickers on their roster – ever! But sometimes you end up drafting such a good kicker that you just don’t want to let someone else pick him up. Ideally, you’d draft a great kicker with a late bye week, so that when you do have to get a different kicker, you can feel better about cutting him. But if you draft someone like Atlanta’s Matt Bryant (Week 5 bye) or Dallas’ Dan Bailey (Week 6 bye), you’ll only get a few weeks out of him before having to make that fateful decision to cut him or not for a replacement. Why not wait for a late-bye kicker, like Baltimore’s Justin Tucker (Week 10 bye) or Adam Vinatieri (Week 11 bye)?

DO: Look at Your Site’s Rankings Compared to FantasyPros ADP

The website you are using for your home league’s draft has some predraft rankings that populates the available players windows. In most cases, those predraft rankings come from the projections and rankings put out by that site’s content staff. So it stands to reason that ADP on that site comes relatively close to the staff’s rankings on that same site. Since each site has a different content staff, their predraft rankings are different from each other.

If you look at the FantasyPros Consensus ADP, which combines ADP from several sources, including CBS Sports, ESPN, MyFantasyLeague and Yahoo! Sports, you’ll see some players with a much higher or lower average ADP compared to the site you are drafting on. If your site has RUNNING BACK with an ADP of 48, and the ADP consensus, which already includes your site, is much lower, like 72, then you know that running back will likely be drafted well before that 72nd pick comes around. But if it’s the other way around, and your site has WIDE RECEIVER with an ADP of 85, and his FantasyPros ADP is 60, then you can consider waiting another round or so to take him between the 70-75 spots and still get good value.

Our final – DO – is “DO Buy this Fantasy Football book here!”

This should be in your Fantasy Football arsenal, along with all of these free Fantasy Football draft tools!