Dealing With Drafting Strategies

The best advice I can give you is to have some idea, but don’t go into your draft with a strategy set in stone. No draft is static. They are all fluid and all it takes is one crazy owner who is a huge Tim Tebow fan that drafts him in the 1st round (I’m looking at you Josh McDaniels) to throw the whole draft off. You need to be able to adjust on the fly. There will be quality players that may fall to you that even though you have that position covered, he may be to valuable to pass up.

Be careful about targeting specific players. I’ve made this mistake myself. What usually happens is you miss out on a couple by one or two picks and you wind up hating your team before the season starts. That puts you behind the 8-ball and it makes it easier to give up after a couple of weeks. You don’t want to be the guy who stops trying after week 5 because a) it gives some owners a bye week and b) you might not be invited back next year.

Over the course of the next few weeks myself, Patrick and Matt will be dispensing a lot of advice and opinions and I’m sure a lot of it will be different. That doesn’t mean any of us are right or wrong, it just means there are a lot of ways to go about setting a strategy.

Remember, Mel Kiper Jr. can’t accurately predict the NFL draft. He does that for a living – studying not only the college players, but also the professional GMs of the NFL teams. You’re most likely going to be drafting with 9-11 other guys, some of them you may barely know. I’ve been in leagues where Bernie Parmalee went in the first round or Mark Chumura went in the second when it wasn’t required to start a TE.

ANYWAY, have your rankings set but be prepared to go off course. Don’t be afraid to stock up on a position you’ve got depth at if you think you can use that player as trade bait.

I hope this helps and I look forward to helping you more throughout the season.