2014 Fantasy Football Draft Preview

Jacob Solis, Sr. Tech Manager
September 9, 2014

There’s a chill in the air and September is here. That could only mean one thing: Fantasy Football. Welcome back boys.

This series of articles will be a week to week analysis of a standard 10 Team no PPR league. We’ll talk about fantasy monsters and dark horses you need to be snatching up on the waiver wire. We’ll talk about week to week schedules and what teams are having easy weekends, and we’ll give constant injury updates.

To kick this series of articles off, this first article will be about your draft. We’ll give a few rankings based on our 10-man league but there is a fantastic resource on /r/fantasyfootball called “beersheets.” This guy has created cheat sheets for nearly any league possible and they’re free.

We would like to start off by giving some general tips for this year’s draft.

Pay attention to staff changes

We can’t articulate enough how important this is to your draft. You need to keep in mind what changes have been taking place and what kinds of changes there coaches are installing into their teams. Take last year for example when Adam Gase was appointed Offensive Coordinator at the Broncos. He revitalized their offensive system to have a fast uptempo passing that transformed Manning into the fantasy beast he was last year. Yet not all staff changes are golden. If a new coordinator comes in with a new offensive system that emphasizes passing your RBs could be taking a hit.

Tight ends are scarce this year

In all of the mock drafts we have done it’s been tough to land a solid TE. After the top 4 (Graham, Gronkowski, Thomas, Cameron) the points drop dramatically. Now we’re not saying give up first pick to Graham, just keep in mind that if people start drafting TEs you might want to jump on that bandwagon before all the good ones are gone.

You do not need to stick to the standard Double RB picks

Now don’t get us wrong, two RBs for your first two picks is almost NEVER bad. It sets up a solid base on which your team can build. We feel that the league is moving more in a pass minded direction which puts more value in WRs and QBs. In a 10 team league you should not really have to worry about QBs since there’s still value near the bottom with Kaepernick, Newton, Stafford, and Brady. Yet WRs is a different story.

Draft a solid RB round one and see what’s open in terms of QBs and WRs. See if you can snag any fantasy monsters like Johnson, Manning or even Graham. If you don’t really like anything that’s open you should just draft another RB for comfort.

Up next is a power rankings cheat sheet, but we think you should make your own sheets depending on your specific league rules and the people you are drafting against. You should also do a few mock drafts and take notes on what players were open during the middle rounds. Create a shortlist to look at on draft day.

Pre-Draft Rankings (Based on a standard 10-Team no PPR)