Ranking Your Own Players

          There is literally only one key to winning on Draft Day in Fantasy Football:     

          Rank Your Own Players. That’s it.

          The key to a successful Fantasy Football Draft is getting YOUR guys, regardless of whether or not they actually pan out. Sure, it’s possible to have a poorly-executed Draft and still end up with the best players, just based on blind luck, but your best bet at winning is having a plan and executing it properly. When you go in without a solid plan, and rely on someone else’s rankings, you’re inevitably going to end up in what we’ll call:

          A Fantasy Footballer’s Worst Nightmare:

          Almost anyone who’s played the game of Fantasy Football has found themselves in this nightmare, at one point or another: it’s your pick, and the clock timer is ticking down below 5 seconds, TICK, TOCK… You have nobody in the queue, and you’re not sure who to pick. You scramble frantically through the list, and then, desperately, at the last moment, you get a pick in, just narrowly avoiding being auto-picked. Just a few picks later, when someone picks a player you like more than the guy you just took, you realize you picked the “wrong” guy.

          It’s a situation nobody wants to find themselves in. Yet, it happens over and over and over again, all for one simple reason: People aren’t using their own rankings.

          Really? That’s it?

          Yup. That’s it. It’s literally that simple. Using someone else’s rankings is just a recipe for disaster.

          By using someone else’s rankings on Draft Day, you’re asking yourself to simultaneously choose which position to draft and to also choose between players of the same position – in that short 90-second window you’re given each pick. This is inevitably going to lead to some mistakes. The clock is going to wind down and you are going to find yourself in that nightmare scenario. You’re going to end up picking some players on a whim and then realize moments later that there was another guy at the same position who you actually would have ranked higher if you had done the exercise beforehand.

          Too many of us are making decisions on Draft Day. It’s like going into a power-lifting contest without any training and expecting not to pull any muscles or blow out any joints at the competition…

          Good luck with that…

          By not ranking your own players beforehand, and choosing instead to go by the rankings provided by someone else, it forces you to rank players on the fly. You can’t just take the highest rated player at a position, because you can’t rely on the rankings – because they aren’t yours. You have to scroll through the rankings until you find a player ranked lower who you like more… This is a waste of time and energy – the stem which all Draft Day confusion is rooted in.

          The key is relying on the rankings. And you can ONLY rely on the rankings when you do YOUR OWN rankings.

          By ranking players beforehand, you can eliminate the need to rank players on the fly. You can just look at your board and say to yourself – Player X is my highest rated remaining RB, so if I take a RB, I’m taking player X. Player Y is my highest rated remaining WR so if I take a WR, I’m taking Player Y. And Player Z is my highest rated remaining QB, so if I take a QB, I’m taking Player Z, and so on, and so on.

          The only decision that will be left to make is: which position to take?

          Using your own rankings works perfectly if you are participating in an Offline Live Draft, as everything is already done with pen and paper anyways. However, most drafts are done online. Luckily, most websites will allow you to edit your pre-draft rankings. Even if you don’t want to take the time to rank all of the top-250 players, you will help yourself immensely by taking a few minutes to organize the top-100 players, that way you aren’t left scrambling around the rankings on Draft Day. If the website you are using doesn’t allow you to edit the pre-draft rankings, you can do your rankings on a separate sheet of paper, and use them a guideline when adding players into the online draft room queue.

          Once you’ve mastered using your own rankings in such a way, you will be able to slice through Draft Day like an expert, with absolute precision. Most importantly, you’ll always get “your” guys.

          Just don’t wait until the last minute to rank your players! Ranking players is an intricate process and takes time. By simply opening an excel sheet now, early in the preseason, you can treat it as a “living” document which can be tweaked into form as you begin to approach closer and closer towards Draft Day.