I’m posting this week’s entry a little late- read my recap tomorrow and you’ll find out why.
So this week I finished re-reading and skimming through David Dorey’s Fantasy Football The Next Level: How to Build a Championship Team Every Season. Dorey is the co-founder of The Huddle- a fantasy football site with some really interesting analysis. This is the book I would recommend to anyone who is a serious Fantasy Football player. The book is divided into three parts, each section taking you through a different part of the Fantasy Football season from drafting to playoffs. Here are some of the most helpful nuggets I got out of the book:
- Understand Your League’s Scoring System – It’s not just about understanding how points are earned in games, but how positions fare with the system- are some positions more valuable than others? Dorey outlines really interesting ways of studying your league and how to make those determinations. If you are ready to get all mathematical about it check out Dorey’s article on the League Analysis and Graphing.
- Stats Are Only Guidelines- Play For This Year, Not Last Year - This one comes from a couple of Dorey’s “rules” that he discusses throughout the book. Stats, especially last year’s stats, are great to look at but it should not be the basis of all your draft picks. I know of this first hand when I drafted Shaun Alexander with my first pick last year. Every year there’s a highly touted player that’s going to end up being a bust. While we can’t predict the future we can certainly make educated guesses. Do I think Tom Brady is going to be a monster this year? Oh ya. Is he going to throw the 50 touchdowns he did last year? No way. Look at what Peyton Manning did after his freak 49 touchdown season- he went back to a respectable but lower 29 touchdown season.
- Take A Closer Look At Players- Now not everyone is going to project players like I am going to try this month (but if you want to try check out this article), but looking back at my previous point- look at three year’s worth of stats and try and get a bigger picture of why a player performed the way he did and in what direction he is heading in. Also look at game logs of the previous season and understand where last year’s stats come from- is he a consistent player or did he just have a monster game or two that inflated his stats?
- Tier Your Players – It’s easy to draft off a cheat sheet, what you want to do is to place players of equal expectations/abilities into tiers. It’s a higher level of drafting and understanding the game. Here’s an article Dorey wrote on how to tier players.
The Huddle is a great site that requires a paid subscription- but there is some free access to some helpful articles. This is just one of the many sites I’ll be checking out this season- stay tuned later for some more website recommendations.
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