Rookie Report: My First Fantasy Football Draft

This is the second in a series of columns where I’m documenting my “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” journey from total sports apathy to—maybe—diehard fan, joining my very first fantasy football league. Read the first column here to see how I got into this mess.

I knew coming into this the draft would be a particularly stressful undertaking, given my complete lack of knowledge of any players abilities, the fantasy scoring system or current NFL news.

I’d been given a few basic tips from fantasy-loving friends before my draft:

• Don’t draft a QB too soon
• No need to draft a backup Defense
• Try not to have too many players from the same team
• Watch out for too many BYE week overlaps
• Look for sharp drop offs in projected points between players, and try to swipe those guys with much higher projections than the next guy

But that was pretty much it…

I’d watched my fiancé do his other draft on Yahoo fantasy the week before in preparation, and I asked him to explain the logic of what he was doing. I don’t think he particularly enjoyed the interrogation, but I’m still engaged (whew). It was definitely helpful for trying to understand how to evaluate a seemingly endless list of options each round. He then filled me in on the whole “collision” thing and explained that he couldn’t offer me any advice during our real draft together the following week. (Ugh.)

But my draft was on ESPN, not Yahoo, so when I logged in before my draft I felt like had no idea where anything was. It was harder to view news about players; this was key for me since I didn’t come in with the knowledge of who was injured, suspended, or otherwise just totally bombing.

I also couldn’t sort by ADP (or, at least, I couldn’t figure out how.) This was a bummer because I planned to rely pretty heavily on the ADP—Average Draft Position, for my fellow newbies—since it seemed to be the best way to tap the collective knowledge of folks more informed than me.

But I did what any clueless and resourceful person does in 2017: opened a tab, went to google and found an answer. Someone else had a list I could sort by ADP and reference between rounds. Score!

I started adding people to my draft queue who looked like good picks based on the stats. Whenever it looked too good to be true (Cam Newton is still available and people are drafting QBs with lower projected points?) I googled to find out why (young, inconsistent and largely untested, despite high fantasy point projections. Or something.).

But something unexpected happened. When someone sniped a pick from my queue, I got mad. I couldn’t tell Gronkowski from Gostkowski, but if one of them was in my queue and someone else took them first, I felt personally wronged. I was starting to get why trash talk is so big in fantasy.

I grabbed a few decent RBs, WRs and a flex up front: Mark Ingram, Randall Cobb, Mike Evans, Davante Adams and Marvin Jones, Jr. I was psyched to pick up Marshawn Lynch because I actually think he’s a pretty good dude who does some great things for his community. (This is not a sound drafting strategy, by the way, but was a lucky overlap in the case of my man, Beast Mode.)

Once that was squared away, I started to think about the other slots to fill.

But right about then, halfway through the draft, I remembered that BYEs were a thing I should have been pay attention to. Oops. (Fellow newbies, the BYE is essentially a week off every player gets throughout the season. If too many of your players in the same position have the same BYE, you may not have enough active players to fill that position that week. No players = no points = losing.) I was lucky that I hadn’t drafted too many players with the same BYE yet, but I suddenly became panicked about every new prospect’s BYE and, as a result, probably made some unwise calls to draft folks with lower projections based on their BYE not overlapping with my current roster.

I was pretty pumped to snag Cousins as QB since I’d heard of him, but kickers and TEs were total projected points picks: Graham Gano, Kyle Rudolph and Eric Ebron.

Overall I felt like I did a pretty solid job; I got a few compliments in the draft chat on my picks, and a few times someone got mad that I stole their pick (HAH! Take that!)

ESPN didn’t grade me like I’d seen on Yahoo, but I’ve decided to give myself a B based on literally nothing.

How’d I do?

P.S. Go easy on me.

P.P.S. It has come to my attention that you apparently need to know the number of teams and the scoring in order to give feedback. After looking it up: 12 team, PPR.

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