Fantasy Football Librarian

Happy Friday. With all but three preseason games left, things are really picking up in fantasy draft land. I know I'm more than halfway through my drafts but have two more to look forward to this weekend. I will also be spending some time this weekend updating my average draft position spreadsheet that so many of you have asked for. I should have the updated version up on Monday, Sept 1, so please feel free to e-mail me if you'd like the new version when it's available. Now to fantasy links for the day: Brandon Marshall's suspension is down to just one game. Everyone around me in Broncos Country is celebrating and FFFools has some thoughts up on this turn of events. Did you hear that Dungy will be shocked if Peyton doesn't play the regular season opener? Or that Sam Hurd is injured? Or even that Kevin Curtis was injured many days ago now? If you've slacked on fantasy news up until now, don't worry, there's still time to catch up. Just don't forget t...

Greetings fantasy fans. My mind is hanging on by a thin thread this week as can be evidenced by a few mistakes I've made - first, the FFXtreme free subscription contest entries need to be in today by 6:30 eastern, not 4:30 eastern (I automatically converted to my mountain time zone I guess). Remember to e-mail your guess for the WR with the most yards (and his yardage) to me today in order to win a free year-long subscription to FFXtreme . Good stuff, or as last week's winner Ghosty would say, big smiles. I also somehow failed to see that signing up for the FFLibrarian's Challenge league , part of the $100K Fantasy Challenge , required a group number - I've corrected yesterday's post but for those who want to sign up, the group number is 1907 and the password is librarian. A few links for the day: My Bruno Boys' A Librarian's Touch column is up - FFL Draft Day Trends . I'm done with 4 of my drafts so I posted some brief thoughts on trends that I...

So last winter during the playoffs I created a FFLibrarian's Challenge through NFL.com and more than 80 of you joined me in a playoffs fantasy league. I'm taking it a step further and inviting you all to join in me in a regular season FFLibrarian's Challenge league. NBCSports.com has a $100K Fantasy Challenge which involves setting a new lineup of players each week (a player can only be used once during the season) between weeks 1 and 12; those participants that qualify with high scores or perfect picks will make it to the playoffs from weeks 13 to 17 and the grand winner wins, you guessed it, $100,000. All the rules can be found here . Does this sound like something you might be interested in? If so, join me in the FFLibrarian's Challenge group! You can either e-mail me and I'll send you an invitation or you can sign up on the NBCSports.com site , select the Groups option and then "Join New Group" - you'll then search for FFLibrarian's Challeng...

Thanks to those of you who have sent in an entry for the Win an FFXtreme Subscription contest , week 2. FFXtreme is giving away a one-year subscription to an FFLibrarian reader and if you haven't sent in your guess yet, e-mail me the WR that you think will have the most yards in week 4's preseason games (and include the amount of yards in your e-mail, too, please!). All entries must be received by 4:30 eastern on 8/28. If you need a reason to actually make the final preseason games interesting, this could be it. The FF Goat has more sleepers and value picks up - I just grabbed Anthony Fasano in the 16th round of a recent draft, perhaps largely because I had already maxed out my RBs and WRs, but as stated in my Optimizing your tight end column a few weeks ago, I think Fasano has a real chance to put up some solid numbers especially now that Pennington is in Miami. Ross from Fantasy Football Starters has updated tiers for QB , RB , WR , TE , and Kicker and DST up - I'm i...

Last week many of you participated in the first FFLibrarian contest and we have not just one but two winners...oh yeah, you weren't expecting that were you? First, we have the grand overall winner: Christian "Ghosty" Pedersen of Tucson, AZ submitted the best guess for running back with the most yards (and number of yards) for preseason week 3 - Ghosty's guess was DeAngelo Williams with 115 yards; Williams finished the night at the top with 101 rushing yards. Congrats Ghosty, you've got a one-year subscription to FFXtreme to lord over your friends and foes! However, another FFLibrarian reader submitted a guess of Rashard Mendenhall with 78 yards; Mendenhall had 79 rushing yards so I feel like this reader's precision needs to be rewarded as well. Therefore Adam Green has won honorable mention here and also received a free one-year subscription to FFXtreme. Didn't win? No problem. Send me your guess for the WR with the most receiving yards in the preseason...

I did a draft yesterday afternoon with some friends that just felt bizarre - it's a 6 points per passing TD league so QBs are definitely popular but I didn't expect them to be flying off the board at such a crazy rate. I mean Ben Roethlisberger was gone by the end of the 2nd round. What is that?! So here's the team I ended up with (drafting from 9th of 12) in a league that starts 2 RBs/3WRs (and yes, I do have some draft repeats like Patrick Crayton and Owen Daniels across my various drafts; how else will I remain sane this season? 2.5 drafts down, 4.5 to go...): Marion Barber, 1.09 Reggie Wayne, 2.04 Torry Holt, 3.09 Darren McFadden, 4.04 Jay Cutler, 5.09 Thomas Jones, 6.04 Chris Johnson, 7.09 Patrick Crayton, 8.04 DeSean Jackson, 9.09 David Garrard, 10.04 Owen Daniels, 11.09 Seahawks DST, 12.04 Laurent Robinson, 13.09 Josh Scobee, 14.04 So far I have drafted with CBS twice; tonight I draft via Fleaflicker (for The Hazean's 2nd annual blogger league) and am interested...

So I've had a few of you ask if the average ranking positions spreadsheet I created could be manipulate to reflect your league's scoring system. Sadly, I am but one person and that is beyond the scope of what I can do - however, there are plenty of sites out there that excel at this. I've only looked at Cheat Sheets Creator a little bit but since they're in beta, they're giving their product away for free this year and it could be well worth your time. Or take a look at FFToday whose rankings can all be customized to your own system. There are probably plenty of other options out there and if you know of one, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments section. Wondering which injured players out there are risks versus those that might just come back better than ever? Or at least good enough to be worthy of a roster spot? Take a look at CBS' Draft prep: Injury risks and bounce backs . FFToday's Gut Check column (worth a read every week) assesses the ...

My in-laws came into town last night so I've actually spent most of today NOT thinking about football but just being a Boulder tourist. Can you believe it's possible to not think about football during this time of the year? First, a quick reminder that you have about 30 minutes left (as of this posting) to get your picks in for the contest for the RB with the most rushing yards during this weeks' games. Send me an e-mail with the back and his numbers and if you're the closest one to the correct answer you'll win a free one-year subscription to Fantasy Football Extreme . Smitty from FFXtreme and I are in a draft together which has been drafting for several days now - here's an article from Smitty on our draft . And speaking of our draft, I gave you all a recap of who I had on my team as of round 7 and here is who I have now through round 11: LaDainian Tomlinson, 1.01 Chad Johnson, 2.12 Peyton Manning, 3.01 Calvin Johnson, 4.12 Selvin Young, 5.01 Jonathan Stewar...

As mentioned earlier, my A Librarian's Touch column is up with a cluster analysis run on the average ranking positions spreadsheet that I blogged about earlier this week. So if you want to see how the tiers fell out - keep in mind the only human input was how many tiers to break the positions into - check out my column Creating Fantasy Football Tiers .

Hello fantasy footballers. It's a new day in fantasy land and I somehow lived through a 29-round draft with only a few dreams about drafting players. Seriously, I was dreaming about drafting last night (and this is only the tip of the iceberg for me in drafting...) - I woke up with players names on my mind. This really might be a sickness. I'd love comments on the draft if you have any - and if you have the time to look at all 29 rounds... Yesterday I mentioned that I have teamed up with Fantasy Football Xtreme to give away a free year-long subscription to their site to an FFL reader. All you need to do is send me an e-mail with your best guess at the running back who will have the most rushing yards in this week's preseason games (week 3) - if you'd like to enter, please send me the player's name and number of rushing yards by 7:30 eastern time on 8/21. There are some rules I posted in yesterday's blog but they're pretty basic. And for those of you who ...

Greetings fantasy footballers. Drafting season has arrived (I'm deep in the 20th round of a 29-rounder right now...) and what could be more helpful than a free one-year subscription to Fantasy Football Xtreme ? These guys produce some of my favorite content throughout the season and I've teamed up with FFXtreme to offer a few free subscriptions to you all, my loyal FFLibrarian community. How to win? Well a contest of course! Send me an e-mail with the running back that you think will have the most rushing yards and your projected yardage for that back in this week's preseason games (week 3). I must receive your e-mail before Thursday, August 21, 7:30 pm eastern time. If you are correct (or the closest one to being correct), you will win a one-year subscription to FFXtreme . A few rules to note (doesn't every good contest require rules?): in order to win, you must be new to FFXtreme - you can't already be a subscriber. if there is a tie, the individual who e-mailed...

Follow along with a live expert draft that I'll be doing today with CBS, KFFL, Rotowire, Rotoworld, FootballGuys, Football Outsiders and others. Draft starts at 2:30 eastern time. More links to come soon!

My Bruno Boys online draft with a few of the big dogs in the FF world continues. I drafted #1 overall and so far my team includes: LaDainian Tomlinson, 1.01 Chad Johnson, 2.12 Peyton Manning, 3.01 Calvin Johnson, 4.12 Selvin Young, 5.01 Jonathan Stewart, 6.12 Chris Johnson, 7.01 Thoughts? How am I doing? Yup, I'm taking a risk with Young and the rookie platter of Stewart and Johnson, but I feel like right when Young might be at risk of having Hall swoop in on his carries, Stewart and Johnson will be at the point of dominating their backfields. We'll see how that plays out but I start 2 RBs and 3 WRs in this league so I need to flesh out my WRs a bit more. Depending on Tropical Storm/Hurricane Fay and her fury on Internet access, I may have a draft tomorrow, too, where I will be drafting from the 6th spot. So I've got lots of tiering and rankings and projections on the brain...as I know so many of you do, too. Advanced NFL Stats deviates from their norm to provide some fant...

A few days ago I posted an average rankings position spreadsheet and as promised I've updated it (added the Bruno Boys' top 100) and added two new analyses to it. First, in addition to averaging all of the rankings, I ran the standard deviation for each player's rankings to determine how much of a consensus there is across all the experts; the lower the standard deviation, the more consensus on the ranking for that player. I then added the standard deviation to the average ranking position to get a better picture of these rankings - this tells me both a player's ranking and the level of agreement on that ranking, which changes the list I posted earlier ever so slightly. For example, Adrian Peterson is now #3 since there's more agreement on the ranking of Brian Westbrook, who is now #2 - so it's interesting stuff and I think the average+consensus gives a more holistic view of the overall rankings. Second, I did some average rankings within positions; I'm run...

So for those who haven't noticed this in the past, I tend to talk about weather a lot - I kind of dig weather forecasts, patterns, etc. Nerdly of me I know, but if you could do fantasy weather I probably would. So I just have to comment on the fact that it's only in the mid-50s today and rainy in Boulder - a solid 30 degree drop from yesterday. Gotta love the crazy Colorado weather. But don't worry, I've been focusing on fantasy football more than the weather. I'm doing an online draft organized by the Bruno Boys with some other fantasy football advice-givers like Rotoworld , Athlon/Grogan FF , Fantasy Sharks , Rotowire and many others. We're doing it so each of us has a 6 hour window to make our picks though it's certainly go by at a much faster rate than that. I had the first pick of the draft and snagged LaDainian Tomlinson - my 2nd and 3rd round picks are coming up quickly... NoLimitSportsline has an excellent overview on auction draft strategies for ...

I've pulled together an average ranking position spreadsheet from 11 different freely available Top 100 overall rankings from expert fantasy football sites. There are a few important details to note - first, as I mentioned earlier this week, I tried to ensure that sites all used the same scoring system to create their rankings, but the majority didn't list their scoring system. Second, I gathered all of these lists within about 36 hours of each other so they should be as close to comparable as possible in terms of player news. Third, as with last year, players that didn't receiving a ranking within the top 100 from an expert were given a ranking of 125 for purposes of averaging. Keep in mind that there are lots of useful tools out there including ADP (average draft position; based on where players are drafted in thousands of mock drafts), a tiering system (for an example, see the tiers in the Bruno Boys draft webazine ), and of course your own gut instinct. This can mer...

Check out my latest column for the Bruno Boys, Pick your kicker with some statistical perspective . I know, researching kickers isn't on the top of everyone's drafting strategy but you don't want to forget about them completely. So I took a look at offensive stats from 2003-2007 and compared them to final season fantasy rankings for kickers to see if there are any patterns in determining which kickers end up on top. Read on for the results. More links to come later today!

I'm currently crafting an average ranking from about 10-12 top 100 overall rankings lists that are freely available - I should have the list up by Friday 8/15 at the latest. This year I'm enlisting the help of my husband's Stata program so that the process won't be quite so painstaking. Now one of the major questions from all of you last year was: are you comparing rankings with similar scoring systems? And much like last year, many of these sites do not list the scoring system that they used to devise their rankings. So while I agree that we want to be comparing apples to apples here, I simply don't know what kind of scoring system was used for a lot of the sites' rankings. I hope you all can get down with that slight ambiguity. And just to whet your palate, some of the sites I'm looking at include FFToolbox , CBS Sports, NFL.com, SI, ESPN, Ask The Commish , KFFL , etc. I'll be using this same set of sites and several more like Rotoworld and Football ...

Monday Night Football kicks off tonight with a preseason battle between Cincinnati and Green Bay. Who else is psyched to see Aaron Rodgers for at least a few snaps? The news on important players keeps coming... Willis McGahee is undergoing knee surgery that should take him out for 2-4 weeks , returning hopefully just in time for the first game. This makes me quite cautious about drafting McGahee as an RB2 even - perhaps that's overly reactionary of me...but Ray Rice's value continues to tick upwards. There's so much else to share but I'm going to rely upon the good people at Rotoworld , namely Gregg Rosenthal , to keep you posted via his Moving Day article which notes players that are moving up and down in value thanks to their injury or preseason play. Keep in mind that Gregg also has a blog, Pancake Blocks , that has multiple updates a day for those of you that need constant FF news. NFL. com's Michael Fabiano also has a daily blog, though it doesn't seem ...

So I must confess, I think I'm in over my head this fantasy season. I've now agreed to be in 7 fantasy football leagues - my previous high was 4 leagues so this is bound to be a big change for me and I'm wondering how things will go. One of the changes this year includes playing in a league that is solely IDPs and special teamers. While two of my leagues in the past have included IDPs, I certainly haven't played in an IDP-only league before and the prep for this 29-round draft feels very different. In preparing for this draft I came across a pretty interesting article from FF Maniaxs - How to win a fantasy IDP league . We have similar approaches to IDP drafting - find the "tackle machines" so I particularly enjoyed reading this piece. Some other fantasy football articles for you: Running with the Ones from Rotoworld reports on some of the latest training camp battles I love the weekly Gut Check column from FFToday and a recent column on draft strategies is li...

Ahh, the Olympics. A time for me to reflect on how many other sports exist outside of football. I'm a bit of a one-trick pony; sure, college basketball can be really fun and track events are another one of my favorites but sometimes I forget that the world of sports doesn't revolve around football alone... I'm in a wedding this weekend and off to the rehearsal dinner in just a few minutes, so excuse the brevity of these links (that seems to be my refrain this week...): With Steve Smith out for the first 2 weeks of the season, I've seen a lot more attention paid to the other WRs in Carolina. Check out fantasyfootball.com's thoughts in Position Analysis: Carolina WRs . Speaking of suspended WRs, Bruno Boys posted some Brandon Marshall analysis in their Bruno Boys Crystal Ball: Brandon Marshall article. Looks like I'll be far more likely to have B-Marsh on my team than the BB guys... The FF Geek Blog has some musings up on last night's preseason games , includ...

Today is the beginning of the football season now that the Hall of Fame Game has come and gone and preseason football starts in just a few hours. I couldn't be more excited. I've been quiet this week since I've been traveling to/from Seattle and helping a friend with last minute wedding prep. But I'm back and hopefully better than ever. So let's jump right in and read up on the latest: NFL.com's Fabiano takes a look at how Favre's trade to the Jets will impact Favre's fantasy value in Favre's move to New York could be detrimental to his fantasy value . I'm also wondering how this might impact Thomas Jones; before Favre arrived, Jones was probably the most obvious offensive weapon that the Jets had...will this spotlight on Favre help Jones gain a few more yards here and there? How does losing Ryan Torain to an elbow injury affect Selvin Young's status? I have more faith in the Denver back system than the rest of the planet, so I must admit th...

My next column on the Bruno Boys' A Librarian's Touch is up - Optimizing your tight end ( 8/7 note: um, I forgot to actually link to my article for a full 24 hours - feel free to contact me the next time I'm clearly not paying attention ). Check it out for some thoughts on late round TEs you might want to grab. I'm back from several days of conferencing in Seattle and promise to get lots of links up over the next few days. Until then, enjoy the TE thoughts!

This is a beautiful day, football fans: Sports Data Hub has gone live with their beta release (oh and I'm in gorgeous Seattle where I think I could spend the rest of my life). But the release of SDH is big news for those of you that like data - no more searching around for stats on different sites and trying to manipulate it on your own. Data warehousing gurus who happen to love football have brought the fantasy football world something awesome - to see how you can use some of their free analysis tools on SDH , check out this video . Since I'm short on time tonight, here are just a few quick links: Fantasy Football Xtreme's Sleepers in August CBS Sportsline's Draft prep: Don't discount these RBs in 2008 - love the Thomas Jones mention here. Ask The Commish's Dynasty Keeper League Player Rankings Advanced NFL Stats has some cool stuff up again - check out First Down Probability for some insight on converting for a first down.

Hi fantasy footballers. Before I jump into training camp news (and how it will definitely affect your drafting and rankings), I just wanted to note that I will be traveling to a library conference in Seattle today; I'll try to keep the postings coming this week but if I'm a little quiet through 8/6, don't be too surprised. So last night was the Hall of Fame induction for Fred Dean, Darrell Green, Art Monk, Emmitt Thomas, Andre Tippett and Gary Zimmerman - and tonight is the HOF Game - the Colts vs Redskins (the Redskins have a 4-0 record at Canton, fyi ). I realize this is a relatively meaningless game for the season but how can you not be excited about the chance to see football on tv again? In prime time no less! As noted above, I'll be traveling and not sure how much of the game I'll catch but I certainly am looking forward to it. Javon Walker tried to retire . Favre isn't the only one on the brink between retirement and playing, but I'm far more co...