It’s almost time to begin drafting your fantasy football team, but before you dive in it’s good to know resources available for research. Fantasy football, stripped of all its nuances, is basically just statistics and anticipation of probabilities. Unless you are doing some kind of research each week, you will be blind to your strengths and weaknesses on your team.
The most obvious form of research in fantasy football is watching the football games weekly. This is a must do. The benefit of fantasy football is that your team is made up of players from most of the NFL teams, so you can have a vested interest in seeing how each one performs. Luckily the majority of the games happen on Sundays, so you can head over to a football party, a sports bar or take a seat on your couch.
Apart From Watching Games…Alternative Research
If you are watching from home, I would suggest switching to Direct TV and purchasing their “Sunday Ticket” programming package. This set of channels will give you all the Sunday games during the regular season. It even allows for you to have multiple channels up on your screen and toggle between games if you choose to. It also provides the NFL “Redzone” channel that broadcasts during the 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. games, switching between scoring drives of all the teams as they happen.
I will warn you, “Redzone” by itself can be hard to watch even for the most avid fan. Because of all the action that is going on during those two time slots, the channel often feels like you are on a “Merry-Go-Round”.
I often listen to podcasts during the week between games as a source of research. I’ve chosen to be an avid listener of the “Fantasy Footballers.” They are a group of three guys who break down the player stats and offer advice on who to look at to pick up. They produce a 30-45 minute show Monday through Friday, all year long.
There are also paid information sources you can access, like ESPN insider. For $2 a month you receive a subscription to ESPN magazine, as well as access to updated original content and exclusive articles about players and draft advice.
It’s very important to stay “in the know” about fantasy stats, so that you don’t fall behind on picking up the next Devonta Freeman or Tyler Eifert. You don’t want to be the guy who ends up drafting Tony Gonzalez in the second round!
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