Step 1: Choose a Fantasy Football Cheatsheet
Step 2: Mark your Targets & Busts
Step 3: Draft Day
Do you want to create a truly customized cheatsheet,
built from your own player rankings?
Do you want to include Average Draft Position (ADP) information to help you uncover bargains during your draft?
Like the professionals they draft to be on their teams, fantasy players need an offseason of preparation to prepare for the upcoming season. While the players are running, lifting weights, going through drills, and learning playbooks, the fantasy nation is studying, making projections, participating in mock drafts, and reading every fantasy magazine known to man -- twice. The two primary types of preparation are extremely different, but the ultimate goal is the same: total domination with a season-ending championship.
Whether one's fantasy draft is online, in a buddy's basement, or in a hotel conference room with hundreds of others die-hards, nothing puts a fantasy team on track for total domination and a championship more than being prepared. Simply put: How one preps for a draft is the key to their fantasy season.
So, what are the most successful ways to prepare for a fantasy draft? Of course, the four items listed above -- studying, projections, mock drafts, and magazines -- are very important; most mortals can't win a fantasy league without them. An overlooked form of draft preparation, however, involves studying Average Draft Position.
The name is pretty self explanatory: ADP is the average drafted position of a player. The information comes from collecting, combining, and averaging out the results of completed drafts done at various websites; such as Mock Draft Central (www.mockdraftcentral.com), which runs hundreds of fantasy mock drafts a week.
Think about it: What better pre-draft information is there than where a player is being drafted? Looking over ADP catches fantasy players up on current-year trends and helps to identify players who are being over-and-undervalued. Knowing these trends and having a sense of value takes most of the bad surprise out of draft day -- there won't be any shockers that will blindside and throw off personal drafting philosophies formed through the many hours of draft preparation.
In a way, ADP preps fantasy players for draft day's worst possible scenarios. And when one prepares for the worst, only the best can happen.