If your Fantasy Football Draft is coming up, you need this

Winning fantasy sports can be easy, but it takes time and preparation. There are certain steps that need to be taken before your draft even starts.

The very first thing you should do to begin preparing is to come up with a depth chart of every team in the league. This should probably be done right before pre season starts. I would also recommend writing this yourself and not just printing it out so that you become familiar with the teams and their new additions and subtractions.

The next step may be one of the most important because it will affect all of your results. You need to check the settings of your league. You have to see what stat categories are worth points and how much of a value they have. You have to check to see what positions you need to draft and how many. This seems simple but most people never bother to check this and they think that players are good in any league no matter what. Well Reggie Bush is not nearly as valuable if the league does not count receptions. Ryan Howard is not as valuable in leagues that count strikeouts against you.

Now is where the work comes in. You have to go position by position and player by player and project how they will do in the upcoming season. You will be looking at the stat categories provided in the settings and only these categories because anything else is meaningless. If a pitcher gets a lot of losses it wont matter in most leagues because they usually don't count against you.

You can come to a reasonable projection on players by looking at their past 3 years stats as well as taking into account any changes in the offseason that may affect the players stats. Some examples of this are being traded to another team, a big player being traded to his team, an injury, a key player on his team getting injured.
After you have finished projecting each player, you have to rank each player by position. To rank a player you have to come up with a value for each stat category. You would add up all the stat category values and come up with a grand total for each player.
Another very important part of preparing that most people do not do is to put the players into tiers. You look at your rankings and group players into their similar values. This is important because you do not want to draft a player when there are four or five players right behind him who give you around the same value. On the flip side you will also know when this is the last player left at this value. You can say to yourself, if I don't draft this guy the next player is going to be a big downgrade.

You are now set for the draft, but after the draft your research will still be valuable. You will be able to match up trades based on your values of each player. I would also suggest sticking with your values to at least half way through the season maybe more especially with proven players. Most people in fantasy baseball give up on their players way to early. Baseball is a long season and sometimes players don't start out great, but in the long run proven players will come close to their career numbers.

For more on how to win fantasy sports, depth charts, and player rankings. Check out www.winningfantasysports.synthasite.com