Fantasy football does big business every year. Some leagues form, and there’s a very casual feeling that goes along with them. It’s more about enjoying game day and having more of a stake in it. Other leagues have huge money prizes, or the person who finishes dead last has to get a humiliating tattoo or do something else equally devastating.
If you want to get into fantasy football in 2022, you’re first going to need a draft kit. When you look at one, though, you might not feel sure about how to use or comprehend some of its particular features.
We’ll talk about fantasy football draft kit features right now. They’re not usually all that difficult to figure out if you take a close look at each one in turn.
A Brief Fantasy Football Draft Kit Guide
Accuracy
First, you’ll want to go to a website that boasts accuracy with its fantasy football draft kits. When we speak about accuracy in this context, we mean player stats and rankings.
Every year, a player gets a chance to perform on the field. Their performance translates to how their team does, and the coaches pay attention to it. Individual performance often dictates how far a team gets.
In fantasy football, each performance can help your team, just as it does the team for which an individual actually plays in the real world. You’ll want to watch what your players do because that dictates whether your team wins or loses, but past performances often indicate future ones.
Because of that, you need accurate stats and player rankings. The best fantasy football draft kits will feature updated ones going back several years.
Based on how much you know about football, you can probably put a valuation on each player and determine how much you need them. That might lead to you picking them in an early round or a later one.
Player Profiles
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You want a draft kit with player profiles that you can easily understand. Every player should come with some detailed analytics, but they won’t do you much good if they’re not easy to comprehend.
No two kits will feature analytics in precisely the same way, so you should pick the kit that showcases each player’s numbers in ways that make sense to you. Speak to the other players in your league about the possible draft kits so you can all select one you like. You’ll probably all want one with predictions, commentary, and the most detailed analysis possible.
Tier-Based Rankings
Tier-based ranking systems are seldom arbitrary. You might disagree with a player’s ranking in a tier-based draft system, but they didn’t get there by accident. They got there because their numbers in previous years indicate they’re a first-tier player, or second-tier, etc.
Even if you know very little about either football or fantasy football, tier-based ranking systems exist, so you won’t draft a team that has no chance to compete. If you take a draft kit’s word that a player deserves top-tier status, you want to draft them in the first round over a kicker who’s a fifth-tier prospect at best.
Cheat Sheets
Cheat sheets come with most draft kits. Although they feature the word “cheat” in the description, there’s nothing illegal about using them according to standard fantasy football rules. These sheets should provide insights that might help you select one player over another, especially if you’re getting into the later rounds and you’re not sure what to do with your remaining picks.
You can often use a cheat sheet to round out your team. The analysis these sheets feature might push you to select a sleeper player that helps you if you’re bunched together with the other league’s participants later in the season.
Full Scoring Projections
Via Joe Calomeni
You need to understand fantasy football scoring if you’re going to compete. That means you’ll want to pay attention to any part of the draft kit that breaks down a touchdown’s worth, or a sack, a field goal, or any other player action resulting in points.
Scoring projection metrics are one way you can potentially predict a player’s performance. At the start of the year, you can use scoring projection charts to predict how a player might do against a particular team during a key matchup.
These scoring projection charts will help you determine who to sit or start. If you know from these charts that a player often struggles against their offensive or defensive counterpart on an opposing team, you’ll know whether to activate them and add them to your starting roster when game time comes.