Fantasy Football Draft Geek

Well, my first draft is in the books!

If you read my last post you know that this was an online draft in which many people allow yahoo to pick for them based on a ranking list. As I mentioned in that post, yahoo picks starting lineups first and then fills in the bench. This means that kickers and defenses go WAY early.

I knew this would happen and came up with the strategy to pretty much take whoever was left at the end. I wanted to take my defense on my second to last pick, but I ended up taking it a couple rounds sooner because surprisingly Yahoo's logic started picking backup defenses before I had one!

This league has 14 teams (bigger than I prefer). I was picking in the 11th spot... a spot which I really dreaded until my first pick came up. The biggest shock of the night was that Tom Brady was still available at the 11th pick! A complete no-brainer. The reason this happened is because Brady was listed at #9 in yahoo's default rankings and the 10th and 11th picks in front of me were actually logged in, and intentionally passed on Brady. I personally do not believe Brady will repeat last year, but there is no denying he is an excellent QB and represents great value as the 11th pick.

In this league QBs are also more important than any other position (yes including RBs). In my analysis of the scoring system of this league, I realized that QBs score way more points than RBs and after the top 4 QBs there is a major dropoff in points. My strategy going in was to obtain one of my top 4 QBs. I thought at 11th pick I could grab Peyton Manning at that position... To my amazement Manning was taken before Brady. If both had been taken (as I was fully expecting) I probably would have taken the best RB and on my board and grabbed a QB with my second pick.

As with any draft, there are things you wish you could change. The pick I "might" want back was my TE. From my analysis, TEs actually score the least amount of points in this league. As expected (because of yahoo's draft logic) TEs started going way to early. In a panic, I chose to take the top TE on my list (Jason Witten). I don't necessarily regret this pick as I think he will have a good year. I think however I could have nabbed a perfectly decent TE a round later and had a little better depth... only time will tell.

For those that are curious here is my team in the order they were picked:

1-11 - Tom Brady
2-4 - Maurice Jones Drew
3-11 - Plaxico Burress
4-4 - Lee Evans
5-11 - Matt Forte
6 - 4 - Jason Witten
7 -11 - Julius Jones
8 - 4 - Nate Burleson
9 - 11 - Philip Rivers
10 - 4 - Chris Johnson
11 - 11 - Colts
12 - 4 - Sidney Rice
13 - 11 - Ben Utecht
14 - 4 - Shaun Suisham

Overall I think I did pretty well.... Keep in mind this is a 14 team league, so the team may not look as good as your 8 - 10 team league.

Time will tell... time will tell