Friday, September 2, 2011

NFL Fantasy Football 2011 Breakdown


Last night I had my NFL Fantasy Draft with the guys from work.  We don't have a draft party or anything, since you have to do the draft online anyway, it makes sense just to hang at home, grab a few beers and talk smack in the chat room.  The action moved real quick this year, with the whole thing being done in just under an hour.  If you've never played before, it's actually pretty fun.  You have to pick a quarterback, and in most leagues, 2 running backs, 2 wide receivers, another wide receiver/tight end, a kicker and a defense.  Then your last 4-5 picks are backups for those guys.  It helps to know some players, but you can also just click the auto-draft button and let the computer pick automatically for you whatever the highest ranking players are at the time of your picks.  So really, you don't have to know anything.

A lot of the time, auto-draft does just as good a job or better for you, especially if you're not all that knowledgeable.  So if you're asked to join a league and want to be involved to feel part of the group and it's cheap/free, you can always go the easy route and pick auto-draft.  Then as the regular season starts, the website will automatically tell you how many points each player is projected to get each week and you can just base your decisions of who to put in for that week on that and you'll probably do just as good as anyone else.  A lot of it is luck of the draw and how you do against the other team from week to week.  But it's also a bunch of fun when the majority of people at work are in the same league, so you can all talk about how you did over the weekend and can rip on each other. 

It's free to play on nfl.com, but we each contribute $5 into a pool and winner takes all.  Keeps it interesting.  It turns out I clicked on something when a guy at work was asking me to try something out and I apparently created a 2nd NFL Fantasy team not knowing it and it auto-drafted for me, so now I have 2 teams, heh.  That's fine, since I have nothing invested in that one and don't know the people I'm playing.  But it will be interesting to see how I do with that auto-drafted team vs the one I picked all my players.

It's fun and if you've always been put off by it thinking that you have to spend a ton of time researching players/teams, etc. that's not the case.  You can still take part with minimal effort/time and still enjoy the interaction with friends/family.  The only time when you need to be active is later on when the players have their 'bye' weeks, which just means they're not playing that week.  During those weeks, you'll want to sit those players and put in ones that are playing that week. Or if a player gets injured and won't be playing for several weeks or the whole season, you'll want to swap them out. 
 
If you do want to get into it and do research, all you have to do is search for either use the player rankings right on NFL.com, which is probably what most people do, or you can also search Google for NFL fantasy cheat sheets.  Various sites out there which rank the top 200 players overall, by individual position, etc.  Good stuff....I had the 4th pick overall in round 1 and don't think I did too bad.  Time will tell.  Below are screen shots of the two teams in case you're interested.  1 more week until the start of the regular season!  ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL?!!?

Fantasy Cheat Sheets you can printout from ESPN







3 comments :

Jen said...

Is it a race to pick the players, so say you wanted ben roethelisberger as your quarterback but someone else got him first, then you can't do it? or can you both have it?

Jen said...

NM, I see, you have rounds and an order. I get it.

Chris said...

Yeah. If someone else picks Ben, you have to pick someone else. You find out 30 minutes before it starts the order of who picks first, second, etc. Then the default in most leagues is that it continues from there in reverse. If you get first pick in round 1, I think you get last pick in round two. If you get last pick in round 1, you get first pick in round 2. But all that is handled automatically. All you need to do is keep track on the top of the screen where it shows who's pick it is and you'll see your next pick coming up about 10 picks ahead of time. You get 90 seconds when your pick is up to select whoever you think is the best player of the ones still available.

 
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