NFL Fantasy Football - Draft Tools

[texasfan4444]

What do you guys use for your draft /research tools? How successful have they been for you?

I usually buy a magazine like a Lindys's or Draft Insiders Digest and use their cheat sheets as guides. I use the draft room tools on the day of the draft to adjust my preference in players with varied success so I'm just taking a poll to see what you guys are using.

This season I got hooked up with Draft Wizard Pro through FanDuel. It lets me set up my 3 leagues and adjust the scoring accordingly. It allows me to do mock drafts with the scoring system to get a feel for where players should go and to examine value picks. I've run through various simulations and it seems to have some decent login behind it. Any one use this in the past?

[shel311]

Played for the 1st time last season. I read up on how points are scored about 10 minuts before the draft, then showed up and just drafted.

Finished with the 2nd best record and lost in the Final 4. Think I'm gonna stick with that system!!!


But just in case...is this Draft Wizard free?

[texasfan4444]

Played for the 1st time last season. I read up on how points are scored about 10 minuts before the draft, then showed up and just drafted.

Finished with the 2nd best record and lost in the Final 4. Think I'm gonna stick with that system!!!


But just in case...is this Draft Wizard free?

It "free" was for depositing $10 into FanDuel and setting up a new account. So the short answer is that it cost me $10....about the same price as the magazine so I saw it as a no brainer. If anything its been a good time killer in between projects at work.

[nick]

truthfully, Football is probably the one sport that taking advantage of the waiver wire is key.

[shel311]

Ohhhh, so it's not an actual part of FanDuel, that is what I thought you meant.

Nevermind, the "wing it" system it is!!!

[shel311]

truthfully, Football is probably the one sport that taking advantage of the waiver wire is key.

I thought I was such a noob genius when I picked up and stashed Josh Gordon last season.

[nick]

look for teams with great offenses and look at schedules. nothing worse than having, ex, Drew Brees, great QB and then his playoff schedule is fucking grueling and you lose cause hes @ Carolina and does bad on the road.

[texasfan4444]

This may be the best idea ever for a league....

20 team league with two separate conferences, two separate drafts, champs of each conference play.

[bigred]

This may be the best idea ever for a league....

20 team league with two separate conferences, two separate drafts, champs of each conference play.

I was in a league like that, 10 on each side, 300 dollar buy in, all transactions cost 10 bucks

[GeorgesGoons]

I have always used Value Based Drafting (VBD) and have done decent enough to be in the top 3-5 of most seasons I have played. But I use some common sense as well, if it is saying I should get my 4th RB but I don't have a QB yet then obviously I snatch up a QB.

Here are a couple of articles:

Talks about why you shouldn't use VBD:
http://www.thehuddle.com/classics/02fs-vbd-madness.php
The premise of his article against VBD is that you cannot predict what someones stats are going to be for the next year. Well, isn't that what we are doing year in and year out when deciding on a player? If you aren't confident that a player is going to score 200+ points and be in the top 5% of scorers why would you pick him with your first pick?

This article talks about why you should use VBD:
http://www.footballguys.com/05vbdrevisited.htm
This website is the one that makes the application. Also a good source of some good fantasy news and other tools.

Shows how long it has been since I have played. Just noticed that this site wasn't updated since 2007...
Damn Army and all those deployments and field exercises

[texasfan4444]

Just did my first draft using this tool last night. I must say this was very helpful. I was able to quickly sort through different lists by position, ADP, projections, etc and use the my leagues scoring values as part of the projections. I only used the NFL.com draft site to make the actual pick. All of the analysis was being done real time on the fantasy pro site. now that I have one draft under my belt with this tool, im looking forward at testing the other features and tools for my other 2 drafts.

http://draftwizard.fantasypros.com/premium/nfl.jsp?

There's the link if anyone is interested in the site.

[The_Niddler]

Pino, so it was $15 or did you do a free option?

[texasfan4444]

Pino, so it was $15 or did you do a free option?

It was a $10 deposit to get all the pre-draft and preseason tools. there is a pay version for in season suggestions and analysis which i did not do. I'm going to use that $10 deposit on week 1 of the nfl to see how many weeks i can keep it going before i run out of cash. I don't plan on adding any more to that account.

Basically it was buy a $6-8 magazine, spend a bunch of time on the interwebz doing research, or deposit $10 use it for the draft(s) and test out FanDuel with said deposit to see if its any fun and/or profitable.

[texasfan4444]

Pino, so it was $15 or did you do a free option?

One more bonus i got from the Draft tool - this came in today via email. its somewhat a form letter, but has some individualized components as well. Of course they are selling a service to keep this going all year, but kind of cool on how they deliver this information.

http://subscribers.footballguys.com/rat ... 4hyP448h65

Its an individual analysis on the contents of the team.

Excerpt - Full link above

Code: Select all

We'll start by complimenting you on your strength at quarterback and receiver. As you know, it's very difficult in a competitive league to assemble a team that is strong at QB, RB, and WR, so just about every team will have a weakness. As you probably suspect, we perceive yours to be at running back.

In 2015, that's not an instant fantasy team killer like it might have been five years ago. And in this particular case, we absolutely think you're strong enough elsewhere to overcome it. You've definitely got a good team here, but we'd feel better if we knew you were committed to keeping an eye out for the 2015 version of last season's C.J. Anderson or Jeremy Hill, or 2013's Knowshon Moreno.

Players we particularly like on this team include Eric Decker and the Rams defense. We have both these guys ranked ahead of where they are typically being drafted.

[shel311]

Lovely. Got the 9th pick out of 10 teams, but I really liked my 1st 2 picks of Demaryius Thomas and Gronk. Then half of the 10 guys are drafting live at a restaurant all of a sudden have wifi issues, and the draft is postponed.

If we're not locked into our picks currently made, I may bail on this league, that's not cool.

[texasfan4444]

Lovely. Got the 9th pick out of 10 teams, but I really liked my 1st 2 picks of Demaryius Thomas and Gronk. Then half of the 10 guys are drafting live at a restaurant all of a sudden have wifi issues, and the draft is postponed.

If we're not locked into our picks currently made, I may bail on this league, that's not cool.

Ouch. Hope you get to keep them. Not a bad start with that pick.

[shel311]

Went from Gronk/Demaryus Thomas to my current team so far of Dez Bryant/Matt Forte/Mike Evans(i was ticked off and decided to take a pick off to put my kids to bed LOL)/CJ Spiller.

I wrote this season off the moment our 1st draf was stopped and cancelled.

[texasfan4444]

Went from Gronk/Demaryus Thomas to my current team so far of Dez Bryant/Matt Forte/Mike Evans(i was ticked off and decided to take a pick off to put my kids to bed LOL)/CJ Spiller.

I wrote this season off the moment our 1st draf was stopped and cancelled.

[shel311]

Pino, I got that Draft Wizard for the heck of it. I don't like my team but the Yahoo projections as well as the fantasy pros projections both have me with the best draft, I guess I'll take it.

[texasfan4444]

Pino, I got that Draft Wizard for the heck of it. I don't like my team but the Yahoo projections as well as the fantasy pros projections both have me with the best draft, I guess I'll take it.

IM starting to think they tell that to everyone who uses the that tool.