Adding Shortcuts to Your Fantasy Football Draft Preparation

One of my favorite channels on TV is the Food Network, I like how easy the chef goes through a complex recipe to make a spectacular dish, although most of the food they make are things that I'd rather pay to have made for me then to fix it myself. One show I especially like is Sandra Lee's Semi Homemade, where Sandra Lee takes store bought items and shows you how to add a few simple ingredients so the dish tastes like you made it from scratch, and not from a box. The short cuts she uses takes a lot of the hard work out of meal preparation. This got me thinking, are there shortcuts that can be made to prepare for a fantasy football draft, that gives you great results without spending all summer long, glued to your computer screen and risk being buried alive under a mountain of fantasy football magazines? I say yes, and with a few tips I can make you look like a draft day genius, and save you time in the process.

The first step is to generate a player rankings sheet based on your leagues scoring system, note I said on your leagues scoring system. If this sounds like mountain of a task, don't worry there are websites that can do it for you, my favorite is www.kffl.com . Not only can you customize it to your leagues scoring, but they also have the standard scoring systems of other fantasy sites like ESPN and Yahoo just to name a few.

For example, if I was to ask you to name the two running backs that are ranked one and two, you would say Chris Johnson and Adrian Peterson. However, in my league due to the scoring system Michael Turner is the second best back behind Peterson. This is information I would not have known if I had just pulled out a pre-made cheat sheet from a magazine or website. Now I don't know if I had the number two pick, that I would take Turner, but it's nice to have solid information to work with when making a decision.

Some of you are saying "Thanks for the info, on to my draft." Not so fast slick there is still some work left to do.

The next step is to figure out which player to target. You do this by looking at the team schedule and find the players that are going up against weak passing/rushing defenses. I'd much rather grab the fifth or sixth best running back that has an easy schedule, then go with a higher ranked back that will be running up against a brick wall week end and week out.

Yes, I know this might mean you have to pass on a sexy pick for a more reliable one, but the whole point is to win the championship, not have the best looking seventh place team.

Before I turn you loose on your draft with this knowledge I have to tell you to do one more thing to pull it all together. Hey I said I'd take some of the work out of your draft preparation, not all of it.

The question I hear the most is, "What round should I take player X?" This is where using Average Draft Position comes into play. ADP can give you an idea of when the players you are targeting have been going in other drafts. As you start putting the players you are targeting with where they are going on average, a virtual road map will open up to you letting you figure out if you can wait on certain players, or grab them early. This will prove invaluable in the later rounds.

Just a word of warning, last year someone in a draft I was in, took Donovan McNabb number one over all. I've also seen the Green Bay Packers defense go in the second round. So while ADP can be a valuable tool, don't treat it as if it were brought down from Mount Sinai from Moses. There will always be one owner that will overvalue a player or two.

See how painless that was. And the nice thing about everything I've suggested, is you can go to a number of websites that will do most of the work for you. So this year don't spend all summer working on you draft, just use a few short cuts and draft like you did