Football and Fantasy

August! Ah, yes.

Football season, pro, college, high school, and fantasy is close at hand.

ESPN980's promo picture for the fantasy football convention caught my, uh, attention. Staring at fantasy players is about all I do these days.

I'm a retired fantasy baller, preferring instead to suffer for my art as a writer.

There were two sites I followed religiously as an active fantasy GM/owner (1990-2004) in Grom's Fantasy League formed by co-workers in the Minneapolis branch of the world's largest computer technology company.

Joe Bryant's www.footballguys.com taught me 80 percent of everything I know about fantasy football, especially the concept of players tiered by position. His cheat sheets ranked the skill players within tiers.

Tiered ranking helped to avoid the second biggest error when drafting a fantasy team: over-reaching for stars. Do that and you'll build an unbalanced roster.

For example, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Drew Brees might be listed in the top tier of 2009 fantasy quarterbacks. (I haven't seen Bryant's list for this season, so this is hypothetical.) These three could be expected to deliver near the same fantasy points over the season, so they have equal value on fantasy draft day.

Here's the kicker. Pass up the chance to draft a higher tiered player at another position in a reach for your favorite quarterback will come back to haunt you.

Wide receivers get six points for catching a touchdown pass. Quarterbacks get three points for throwing one. Quarterbacks score more often. Receivers will get you more points per score.

But there's only one quarterback on a starting line-up while there are two or three wide receivers. Your objective is to build a balanced team that consistently scores from every position. Think of players by position and ranked by tiers on draft day on draft day and you will likely arrive at the right assortment of players for balanced scoring without getting carried away by any one star.

Balanced fantasy teams and tiered players inform my own thinking about real football teams. Imbalanceed teams are flawed teams. It's a pointer to which NFL clubs will not be post-season contenders.

We need not mention names of any local teams here. I've pointed fingers at them enough. Instead, look at the 2008 Denver Broncos: strong passing game, injured running backs, poor defense. They finished out of the playoffs in spite of a great start.

Joe Bryant is the founder of Bryant Boats. I've never met the man, but I've enjoyed his emails since 1992.

The guys at Fantasy Football Champs also have very good fantasy draft kits with spreadsheets that you can customize to your league's scoring system. They shine during the season, though.

Their projections on which players to start each week helped me get the most from my roster with success as measured by playoff appearances. No, I did not make the Fantasy Bowl every year, but I was a contender.

I wrote a sports column under the pen name Master4caster for my league in which I predicted the winner of upcoming games using a math formula derived from FFC's weekly projections. I correctly pick the winner of fantasy contests 67 percent of the time.

That happy experience led to the start of this blog in 2005 and later to work on Hog Heaven and Bleacher Report where I now deliver football content.

Site Meter says I still get hits on this site. Thank you for that. Check out my archive for old stories about the Washington Redskins football team. Hop over to http://redskinshogheaven.com for my latest on the team.

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Not compensated by www.Footballguys.com or by www.fantasyfootballchamps.com for this review.

Early fantasy look at the NFC East

Skin Patrol over at Hogs Haven lamented that he was reduced to looking at silly 2008 NFL Mock Drafts. We've both commiserated that we've not had much to footblog about. Luckily for us, it's not too early to look at fantasy football.

Michael Fabiano at nfl.com posted an early look at the fantasy value of NFC East players. That's early, too, but at least is more grounded in reality than a 2008 mock draft. I saw no surprises in Fabiano's comments. However, he had this to say about Clinton Portis.

"Portis should now be seen as more of a borderline No. 1 or 2 fantasy runner rather than the elite featured back he has been throughout his career."

The number of carries Portis has had, and the emergence of Ladell Betts leads to that assessment of Portis as a fantasy player.

Fabiano sees the Redskin offense schedule as the 5th easiest for passing and 4th hardest for rushing. The article didn't say how he arrived at that conclusion.

That mock draft thing? Not only do we not know 2007 NFL game results, thus the 2008 draft order, we don't know how the school boys will rank. They, too, have to play to hold or lose their draft rank. Somebody is going to get injured and lose their ranking. Some junior is going to come out early and insert themselves in the ranking. Silly.

Photo: www.msnbc.msn.com