The 2009 NFL season is officially in the books and we must now turn our attention to the 2010 Fantasy year.  For those who play exclusively in redraft leagues, it will be a long six long months before training camp opens and we will be able to see even a preseason game.  However, in order to help get through this Fantasy dead zone in redraft leagues, I will offer a few suggestions for those wish to remain productive.

Join a Dynasty League

Seriously.

If your argument is that you aren’t skilled enough to compete in a Dynasty league, then you never will join. There is a learning curve in any new league format you enter.  You probably won’t do well until you get the hang of things.  But that is a necessary cost and it goes with the territory. (I tend to look at it as an entry fee, or perhaps akin to an NFL personal seat license).

I joined my first start-up Dynasty league and in 2003 and drafted so poorly that it literally took me years to recover from it. That is the price you sometimes have to pay.

But, hopefully you will learn from your mistakes, as I did. From that point on, you should find that you will always be able to field a competitive team in any future league that you join.

I did a few introductory articles on Dynasty leagues last season and while I am loath to recycle my work, I may do that again in the next month or so.  In the meantime I will just make a short pitch for Dynasty leagues and then move on to other topics.

Why Dynasty Leagues?

Dynasty leagues have year round action (or at least the better ones do). For example, in the last two weeks in one league I either made or rejected a total of 6 trade offers (but no deals yet).  I also acquired two players off the waiver wire (including WR Jarret Dillard of the Jaguars, who I snatched up when the news broke that Torry Holt would not be returning).

In addition, joining a Dynasty league will make you a better player in redraft leagues.  By necessity, to be successful in a Dynasty league you need to be ahead of the curve.  This requires additional study by knowing depth charts, reading message board postings and by doing Google searches.

Dynasty leagues are so competitive that you must be able to identify and roster emerging players before the other owners that you compete with.  If you don’t, by the time it becomes common knowledge that they are a player to acquire, it is generally already too late to roster them in your league.

But, it does all pay off in the end. The additional information you acquire gives you a leg up in redraft leagues over those who don’t start giving any attention to the NFL until August.

Anyway, new start-up Dynasty leagues will start kicking in the next few months, starting usually after the NFL draft and peaking around July.  Please consider joining a league this year - I doubt you will regret it. As usual I will be coming out with my Dynasty rankings after the draft to help those in their leagues.

Look at the Stats

Unlike most Fantasy analysts, I am not that much of a numbers cruncher. That is not to say that stats are not important to me or that I don’t find them an essential and necessary part of the equation in ranking players.  It is just that I don’t point to them as gospel in a player discussion as many others do.

That being said, the very first thing I do before approaching any new season is to sit down and spend a few hours looking at the prior year’s numbers for each position.

The reason that you need to look at the stats is that quite often your recollection of how well a player did may not match reality.  I find that while viewing the stats there will something that jumps out at me, some factoid that gives me a “Wow, I didn’t know that” response about a particular player.  I feel that information gives me an edge in the leagues I compete in.

My favorite site for this is Yahoo Sports, which not only has all the season ending numbers, but also they are sortable stats you can play with. LINK

To give you an idea of what you will be looking at, here is a cut and paste taken from their site for the top 3 players at the WR position:

Name                 Team  G   Rec  Yds  Y/G   Avg  Lgn YAC  IstD  TD

Andre Johnson  HOU  16  101  1569  98.1  15.5.  72   5.3     69       9

Wes Welker       NEW  14  123  1348  96.3  11.0   58   5.9     71       4

Miles Austin      DAL   16    81  1320  82.5  16.3   60   6.9     59     11

The players are ranked by receiving yards, but you can also sort it by the number of receptions (invaluable in PPR leagues), or by TDs or by any of the other columns headings.

By sorting the different options you can come up with some information that might help you spot undervalued players in this year’s drafts.  For instance here are the Top 5 WRs sorted by the category of average yards per catch:

Name                  Team G   Rec   Yds    Y/G   Avg

Mike Wallace      PIT    16   39    756   47.3  19.4

DeSean Jackson  PHI   15   63  1167   77.8  18.5

Mo. Massaquoi   CLE  16   34    624   39.0  18.4

Vincent Jackson  SDG 15   68   1167  77.8  17.2

Malcom Floyd     SDG  16   45    776   48.5  17.2

What do the above numbers tell you?  Seeing DeSean and Vincent Jackson’s names shouldn’t surprise anyone, but you probably didn’t know that Mike Wallace had the best per catch average of any WR in the league. That would certainly add credence to the belief that he will eventually step in for Hines Ward when that player is no longer with the Steelers (although it must be noted that Wallace had only 39 catches)

Also, Mohammad Massaquoi and Malcolm Floyd are two that I wouldn’t have expected to find here. Perhaps it means they are diamonds in the rough who made the most of limited opportunities. It might also mean nothing, as does any statistic taken in isolation.

My point is, by viewing these different categories you might find some break out players for next season that are slightly under the radar of most Fantasy players. And every piece of information that you have that someone else might not, is valuable.

Fantasy Stats

Now that you have looked at real world, you next need to look at how the players did from a Fantasy perspective. The best thing would be to go your own league website and on it you will find summarized the top players according to your league’s own scoring format.

For those who want a general summary, a good free site I would recommend is Fantasy Football Today, which has the entire Fantasy numbers by player position and is broken down into categories (they are also sortable, but I have trouble with sorting function for some reason). Their numbers for RBs and WRs include receiving targets which will tell you how much attention the player got in the receiving game.  Here is the link to those numbers: LINK

Message Boards

People who are into Fantasy Football love to talk about it and share everything they know on message boards. Unfortunately, anyone who has played more than two seasons consider themselves an expert at this hobby, so unless you know who the thread poster is, you must take all opinions with a very large grain on salt.

That being said, I probably get as much information off of message boards as I do looking at numbers or stats. What is particularly good is to getting the take of the local fans, or the homers who follow each team.  Many of these die hard fans are a storehouse of information and will give you insights that you would never find anywhere else.

For example, I have been working on article on Josh McDaniels and several of the Broncos fans sites have in-depth discussions that tops even what some of team’s beat writers have to say.  If you would like a flavor, here is a link from the Football Futures site for Denver fans, although similar discussions can be found on numerous message boards for any individual team: LINK

As far as Fantasy message boards that are not team specific, my favorite for viewing discussions is Footballguys, which is a pay site, but their message boards are free: LINK

I am not that prolific a poster myself. The reason for that is that I feel when you are reporting on what people are saying, if you are involved in the discussion itself, then you have become part of the story rather than just an observer of it.

I consider myself a journalist (pause for laughter) and a part of many of the articles I write (such as my weekly in-season column) does include the thoughts and feelings of those on the message boards in the FF community.  As such, I am somewhat reluctant to fully participate in what I write about.

I am probably being too cautious, but my concern is that if I become too involved in any of these discussions, how I can I report on what is being said without losing my objectivity?  It would be disingenuous for me to write that “people on the message boards are saying such-and-such” when I am repeating my own statements made there.

Perhaps this is on over-reaction on my part, but that is how I view things.

Closing Thoughts

I hope I have given everyone who didn’t already know the drill a good starting point for navigating the coming season. I am not quite sure what I will write about next.  Perhaps I might dust off the Dynasty 101 articles I did last year, or maybe I will actually finish that piece on Josh McDaniels I keep talking about.  I hope to be back with something before the end of the month.

I can be reached at: Jaycharles.Johnson@gmail.com