Fantasy Football ‘23: Pigskin Papers Draft Day Checklist
Make Your List, and Check it Twice!
(Published August 22, 2023 - Note, an earlier version of this article appeared in August, 2022)
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Where did this summer go? I don’t know, but somehow your 2023 Fantasy Football draft is finally here! You’ve done your prep, your draft board is set, and you’re ready to crush it. Below is the Pigskin Papers Checklist of things to do before you enter the draft room. Some of this was covered in my other draft prep pieces. See: Pigskin-papers-draft-tips. I hope you find this helpful. As a reminder, most of my content is designed for season-long redraft leagues, but a lot of this is applicable to other formats as well.
OTHER DRAFT RESOURCES: Check out my positional breakdowns with rankings and tiers, my overall Top 100, and players to target/avoid:
PIGSKIN PAPERS DRAFT DAY CHECKLIST
RULES: Make sure you review and fully understand all of your league’s roster and starting lineup requirements, rules, and scoring grid. This is especially true if you’re in a new league, or a league that changes things up each season. If your league just changed from Full PPR to Half (which I’m in favor of, by the way), you’ll want to think about how that impacts your draft board, and factor it in.
NEWS: Do a final check of recent player news. You want to make sure you walk in fully caught up. Multiple sites have active news feeds that are constantly updated with all the recent cuts, injuries, and other important items. Also, there are prominent NFL analysts (such as Adam Schefter and Ian Rapoport, among others) whose Twitter/X feeds post breaking news as it happens. NOTE: The lone NFL roster cut this preseason (to 53 players per team) is next Tuesday, August 29. If your draft is that night or later, check those final cuts. I’ve witnessed quite a few fantasy owners drafting players who recently got cut, or injured. The laughs are great - unless you’re the target.
TIERS: I talked a lot about the importance of tiers in the article shared above. Before your draft, take a little time to study your draft board at each position, paying particular attention to your tiers, and where the cutoffs are. You want to have a very good handle on those cutoffs as your draft proceeds. This exercise leads right into the next one…
PLAYER RANGES: If your draft is a snake, be aware of exactly when you pick in each round, and try to figure out the range of players that likely will be available when you make your selections. For example, let’s say you have the 9th pick in a 12 team league. That means your picks through the first 6 rounds are overall pick numbers 9, 16, 33, 40, 57, and 64. Find a good overall Average Draft Position (ADP) or Expert Consensus Rankings (ECR) list, and look at the players ranked within a few spots either way of those selections. As you get into lower rounds, widen the range. Some of these players should be available when it’s your turn to pick. This exercise will also allow you to see which players are not likely to be available to you unless you grab them a little early, when you have the chance. I’d do this at least through the middle rounds. After that, it’s less useful. The purpose of this exercise isn’t to push you into taking certain players - use your draft board and your own intuitions and preferences for that - but it’s useful in terms of setting your expectations for the talent, by position, that might be there for you in each round, and you can incorporate that useful information into your overall draft plan.
BUDGET: If you’re in a salary cap/auction league, congrats - you’re playing the game the right way! Anyway, if this is you, I find that it’s helpful to outline a budget of how you want to spend your money, at different positions and within each position group. That being said, auctions are notoriously difficult to predict, and you never know when a great value will present itself, or how much money you’ll have left when certain players come up. You need to be flexible and not feel compelled to stick to your budget. Nonetheless, creating a loose budget is a useful exercise and it’s best to go in with some semblance of a plan for spending your auction dollars. I also like to go back and look at the prices that certain players commanded in my league in prior years. What I find not to be helpful, or reliable, are the expected auction prices that you see on some websites and drafting software. I generally ignore these and recommend you do the same. One last thing - make a list of the players you’d like to get for $1-2. You want to be able to quickly nominate someone (and hopefully get him) when it’s your turn, and you want to be ready to pounce with $2 bids for the “late round” guys you want the most.
RESOURCES: In addition to your draft board, have your other resources (such as NFL depth charts, team schedules, and anything else you’ve found to be useful) easily accessible so that you can find what you need quickly. Being on the clock should never cause a panic.
TARGETS: Highlight the guys on your draft board that you’re most interested in having on your team this year. I also like highlighting, in a different color, players I’m actively trying to avoid rostering.
BYE BYE, BYES: Don’t worry about bye weeks. I repeat, don’t worry about bye weeks. I don’t even put them on my draft board.
MOCK IT: Doing a few mock drafts can be useful prep. Mocks aren’t necessarily indicative of what’s going to happen at your draft, with your leaguemates, but it’s still good practice. This is especially for snake drafts, where you can mock from your own draft slot and experiment with different builds. I caution against doing too many mocks, since not everyone takes them seriously. Also, doing too many mocks can start to create biases, including preconceived notions of who you’re going to get in each round.
Lamar Has His Info Handy - So Should You!
Good luck - and most importantly, have fun with your draft. You’re going to smash it.
Check back soon for more preseason/draft prep content, and be sure to look for our weekly columns during the season: Weekly Recap, Waiver Wire, and Players to Ride and Fade for the week.
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DH
