Fantasy football players are coming out of the woodwork as NFL training camps opened this week (one team – Baltimore Ravens; most start next week). NFL news is at a slow crawl currently but once they get the pads on and start preseason games then we will be full steam ahead towards your fantasy football draft scheduled for August or early September.

Draft Buddy Projections Update

Draft Buddy, our featured custom rankings and draft tracking tool (details · purchase), is up and running and ready to help you prep for your 2018 fantasy football draft. We’ve already updated the projections, depth charts and average draft position (ADP) data five times since the initial release on June 6, the most recent yesterday morning. We will continue regular weekly updates, usually Thursday mornings, plus unscheduled updates as necessary for breaking news.

Review this demo video on how to update Draft Buddy:

Note if you have more than one copy of Draft Buddy, for multiple leagues, then you need to update in each file.

2018 Fantasy Football Rankings

My initial 2018 fantasy football rankings are up on the website and available in Draft Buddy under the alternate rankings feature found on the offense and overall tabs. I should do a video about that feature. The way it works, is you can pull in straight rankings from FF Today, Dynasty League Football* or DraftBuddy.com (yours truly) to the cheatsheets as an alternate to generating custom cheatsheets based on projections in Draft Buddy.

* DLF rankings are an extra bonus for Draft Buddy users, as they are a premium DLF subscriber-only feature. Thank you DLF!

This is beneficial if you want, for example, dynasty-specific rankings, or a quick start with player rankings that align to your beliefs. Rankings are advantageous in some ways to pure projection-based rankings because they can better factor in risk-reward of more volatile players.

Back to the rankings, my overall rankings still need some work. Part of my online admin tool to update the rankings is supposed to identify where the overall rankings are inconsistent with the position rankings, but for some reason that isn’t working currently. Add another item to the to-do list… Plus, the deeper RB and WR tiers are very fluid, which is a nice way to say I could spend an infinite amount of time moving players around in those groupings.

I feel good about the QB and TE rankings, and the Top 50-60 RB and WR rankings, which is a decent start for what is a continuous work-in-progress project. From now through the start of the NFL season I will continue to adjust the rankings and add comments to go with them, based on additional research, news, and my own draft experience. Speaking of which, I joined a new best ball draft that started earlier this week.

Super-Flex Best Ball League

Thank you Draft Buddy! Let me explain…

I was invited to a new best ball draft by Jim Day over at Fighting Chance Fantasy. Best ball? Sure, sounds great. I love to draft but tough to add a new in-season management league. It is a super-flex league, too (meaning we can flex a QB), which I find more interesting to draft lately. I figured the lineup and scoring would otherwise be fairly standard. Not even close. A few examples:

• Long passing plays 50+ yards = 3 points (QB)
• Long rushing plays 40+ yards = 3 points (QB), 2 (RB)
• Long receptions 40+ yards = 3.0 points (RB), 2.0 (WR)
• Long receptions 20+ yards = 1.5 points (TE)
• Receiving yards = 1 point per 7.5 (RB), 1 per 8 (WR) and 1 per 9 (TE)
• Receptions = 0.7 points each (RB), 1.4 (WR) and 2.0 (TE)
• Targets = 0.5 points (TE) and nil, nada, nothing for other positions
• Receiving first downs = 0.5 points (TE) and nil, nada, nothing for other positions

Other yardage and touchdown scoring does change slightly from position to position, too. All said and done, thank you Draft Buddy! Due to our handy spreadsheet, I could input a lot of this unique scoring and get a good sense of the value of different positions. This is not your traditional scoring league!

Oh, and I should also say the starting lineup is big. Start 1 QB, 2 RB, 4 WR, 2 TE, 3 Flex, one of which can be a QB making it a super-flex. Between the scoring and the lineup requirements, can you tell which position is vastly – vastly – higher value than most leagues?

Unique Best Ball Draft Strategy

Lets say two players catch a 20 yard pass. Player A is a WR and Player B is a TE. Player A scores 3.9 points. Player B scores 6.72! And, I have to start two TE, a shallow position. Tight end is crazy high value in this league. On the flip side, RB is relatively low value thanks to start two, which is low relative to required starters at other positions, and the scoring.

Randomly assigned the 8th overall pick, I grabbed Rob Gronkowski, and seriously wondered if anyone else noticed the TE value in this league. Ryan Hallam drafted Travis Kelce before my next pick, but I knew from that point forward I wanted to acquire two of the Top 6 tight ends, and even three or four of the top dozen if possible. Delanie Walker (TE5) is projected higher than Tyreek Hill (WR15)!

It made for a very interesting mental exercise trying to guess the picks by other drafters and what players would be left for me to choose from. I didn’t end up taking my first running back – Lamar Miller – until the 8th round.

This draft is currently in the 12th round. You can download my copy of Draft Buddy to review and check the MyFantasyLeague.com draft report for updates.