I had the first of my two fantasy drafts on Saturday night, and everything went basically as planned. It’s an 8-team league mostly made up of friends from church, and this is the league’s second year. This year, we decided to make it a keeper league, with a maximum six players (out of 20) retained from year to year.
Here’s a quick rundown of our other rules:
- 20-man roster (starting 1 QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 1 Flex RB/WR, 1 TE, 1 K, 1 DST, no position requirements on the bench)
- Fairly traditional scoring: 1pt per 10 rush/rec yds or 25 pass yds, 6 pts per TD, -2 for turnovers, bonuses for single-game yardage milestones
- In order to keep a player for a second season, you surrender the pick you used on that player in the previous year’s draft.
- To keep a player for a third season, you must surrender a first-round pick (or best available, if you keep multiple players).
Based on our keeper style, you wouldn’t draft a player for his long-term future value (beyond year 2) unless: a) you see him as a top-of-the-first-round talent for years to come, b) you plan on keeping enough players for multiple years to make it a net value gain overall. My own strategy tended to favor players whom I predicted to make big strides between now and 2008, without much regard to subsequent years.
Now, my starting roster:
QB – Donovan McNabb
RB – Frank Gore
RB – Brian Westbrook
WR – Donald Driver
WR – Lee Evans
Flex – Maurice Jones-Drew
TE – Antonio Gates
K – Stephen Gostkowski
DST – Panthers
Including bench players and an estimate for playing time, I project my team to score 121.2 points per week, 16.5 more than the next best team. I also feel like I have a fairly solid set of keepers, with Jones-Drew and Gore leading the way. If I finish toward the top of the league every year, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Gore will be a yearly keeper, even if I have to give up a first-rounder next year.
This result shouldn’t be surprising, nor should it alarm the rest of my league (if anyone in the league is reading this). After all, I should have the best team according to my own projections, or else I would have failed miserably at the draft. Hopefully everyone else in the league feels the same way about their own teams.
The rest of the teams, in terms of points per game, are fairly close together: 104.7, 103.8, 102.5, 101.6, 99.1, 99.0, and 86.4. There are probably varying levels of skill and upkeep that each owner will put into his team, but that’s still a fairly even spread, especially for the six teams in the middle. It’ll be a tough year, for sure.
I’ll probably check in with occasional updates, even though no one really cares about anyone else’s fantasy team. My other draft (a 12-team redraft league on SportsLine) will probably occur shortly before the start of the regular season.
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