Congratulations. Your Fantasy Football Draft is over! Hopefully you got every single player you wanted, and your competition was woefully short on the football intelligence quotient. That would be nice, but we know that life just isn't that easy. You got some players you wanted, spent too much on some, and absolutely screwed up twice. So, what now? How do you rectify all the errors you made? Settle down, homeboy. This is where you either win or lose your league championship. The Draft takes one day, but there are 12 to 14 weeks of line-up changing, waiver wire moves, trades and bench decisions to make before you earn a spot in your league's playoffs.
The first thing you need to do now is be brutally honest with yourself at each position. Look at your team and see where you excelled, and where you made decisions like Courtney Love signing out of rehab. If you have too many RBs and not enough quality wideouts, check the overall board and see which manager needs ball carriers. Approach him and let him know you are available to help him out, but do not appear anxious. Do this at each position, but do not over-react.
Next, check your bye weeks. Make sure you do not have multiple positions affected in multiple weeks. I prefer to have my Bye Weeks spread across the board among every position. Then again, if you have Roddy White and Larry Fitzgerald, you could care less that they have the same bye week. You will happily take that one week off at WR to reap the huge rewards they will bring the rest of the year.
Finally, look at the schedule for your players during your Fantasy Football Playoffs. For example, the Jacksonville Jaguars have the third hardest schedule for QBs and the seventh hardest for WRs in weeks 14 - 17. The 49ers are blessed with the second overall easiest schedule in the league for RBs, and the third easiest come playoff time, so Frank Gore looks even better here than usual. This is something to bear in mind as the season progresses.
One thing I like to do is not make any moves for 3 weeks, unless obviously, there is a huge injury or nightclub shooting involving your best player. You can also do just the opposite and get caught up in analysis paralysis, and do nothing at all for way too many weeks. I guess the real advice here is to think twice before you make a rash move. L.T. finished with 1600 all purpose yards and 12 tds, and a lot of owners gave up on him during the year.
Just remember that the Championship is won by managing a team, not drafting one. So pour yourself a cold one, congratulate yourself on your draft, and get ready to make all the right moves in Fantasy Football 2009.
Patrick O'Neill, an 18 year Fantasy Football Veteran endorses only one Fantasy Football League
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