The very first thing I tell people to do when preparing for the fantasy football season is to ask themselves whether they want to win or just play along and have fun. It makes a difference on everything you decide to do from that point forward-at least four months out. Chances are if you are reading this blog you are probably the type who wants to win and enjoys looking for other opinions and insight as you form your own analysis of players and projections this NFL season. Consequently, if you want to win you have to make fantasy football a true hobby, anything short of that and your chances coincide exclusively with fate, luck or whatever deity you may choose to worship. Read Hobo Soup!So you take fantasy football seriously and joined a league or three. What to do now? Do you head straight for the mock drafts? Check out the early rankings from numerous sources, maybe even compile them from all the fantasy football gurus on the web to create a handy excel spreadsheet. Do you search out articles and news stories on your favorite players and or teams? Or are you a veteran fantasy owner who already has his favorite fantasy football sites and blogs book marked and RSS Feeds added?
No matter your experience level, here are three things people underemphasize when preparing for a fantasy season.
1. Get to know your competition and start planting seeds. Whether you know the people in your league well or a total stranger, introduce yourself and start a dialogue. In leagues I have been playing in for several years and everyone knows everyone I still like to extend a personalized greeting to owners referencing last season. You just want to open the lines of communication and bury any residual hatchets while also stoking the fire. I don’t care if you are a beginner or used to compile your fantasy results using box scores from Monday’s newspaper, knowing the other owners are going to be active is essential to creating a fun and competitive fantasy football league. When you begin to put in countless hours of time to win every week the last thing you want is seeing the guy you are tied with for the last playoff spot playing a team that stopped looking at their team two weeks ago. Do your part at the start and you will have a better chance of enjoying the entire season.
2. Rankings and Cheat sheets. It would not be fantasy football without position rankings and cheat sheets, but how do you make them useful? Everyone has his or her own opinion and everyone values another’s opinion differently. I could write a 1000 pages on rankings but really only one thing needs to be said. All the rankings you see are simply data. If you are researching for fantasy football, you probably have developed your own perception of players’ value.
Unless you are going to compile rankings and run qualitative analysis on the numbers my suggestion is don’t go crazy with rankings. Take one or two sources you find respectable and form your own rankings. Then you can spend more of your time tweaking those rankings. And by tweaking, you don’t have to simply move players around each time. If you read something or an injury occurs and a player’s value rises, simply put an up arrow and short note next to their name. After a few weeks, make some revisions and move players around. You really should not have to update your rankings more than twice before an auction or draft.
3. Make preparations in your real life. Once something becomes a hobby, it has the chance to take up a great deal of your time. It may sound like overkill here but I have seen long-time relationships dwindle during a fantasy football season the same way I have seen fantasy teams abandoned by week six. It’s completely ridiculous to put yourself into a position where you cannot balance your hobby amidst your career, family and other priorities (scroll down to the second heading). Every time I say this to people, they look at me like I have three heads yet every year it happens.
Seriously folks, the first question you need to ask yourself to prepare for the 2009 NFL season is:
Do you want to play fantasy football for fun and amusement or do you want to win your league championship?
