Every year as you feverishly prepare for your drafts, read every scrap of information on the internet, and buy enough fantasy magazines to paper your living room, you are bombarded with the "experts" ideas about how to pick a winning team. More often than not, these experts will fill your head with certain ideas that they hold to be inviolable truths about fantasy football. If you buy into these truths without thinking long and hard, you're doing yourself a terrible disservice. Your team will be filled with "can't miss" picks and "breakout" sleepers. But more than likely your team will end up being filled with "did miss" picks and "never saw the field enough" sleepers. So, how do you avoid this pitfall? For the novices out there, pick up a magazine, do some research, and go with your gut. But for you fantasy studs (and I'm betting that 95% of you out there think that you are), you need more. Let's bust these myths and get on with winning a championship.

Myth #1 - Experts know better than you do.

Let's just get this out of the way right now - there ARE some people that know more than you, have better insight than you, and are just plain better at fantasy football than you. But don't assume they are experts for the wrong reasons. I'm so glad that they just finished mapping the human genome because we found out something very important - there is no fantasy football gene. Nobody is predisposed to being good at fantasy football. Its about hard work, lots of research, reading, reading, and more reading. The Experts are experts because they've been in the business for awhile, have done the work, and have become good at what they do. You can do this too.

The main problem I have with people picking up a magazine and coming to the draft with their cheat sheets is that they begin to believe that this is how to succeed. The problem starts when they pick Jerry Porter in the last round as a flyer because their magazine told them to do it, and then it works. What they forget is that the only reason they had to put Porter in their lineup is because they took two other "can't miss" receivers from the same cheat sheet, and they both missed. But when the next year rolls around they buy the same magazine, believing in it as a deity, and they get burned. What happened? They forgot to think for themselves, and they forgot the cardinal sin in fantasy football - ignoring all the evidence. These magazine owners are under an incredible pressure to present a different view of things in order to find any measure of success in an increasingly competitive market. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Don't be fooled into taking Marcel Shipp in the fourth round because somebody told you Emmitt wasn't going to cut it. Think for yourself.

To bust this myth is very simple - do the work and form your own opinion. Just like in life, nothing comes easy in fantasy football. You'll make mistakes, and you'll make horrible calls (I took DeShaun Foster in the sixth round last year in a desperate move to shore up an ugly group of Running Backs), but you'll LEARN. And learning is how you become good at picking up on the difference between the real "experts" and those who have enough money to put out a magazine, but couldn't spot a sleeper if he had it tattooed on his forehead. The bottom line is that experts make bad calls just like you will, but eliminating silly mistakes by not following a blind path and instead forming your own opinion is the way to success.

Myth #2 - You must take players with great "upside".

This is perhaps one of the most repeated mantras of fantasy football. The pervasive notion that you are drafting for upside is one that tends to take on an ugly life of its own. I'm not going to sit here and tell you to ignore upside as part of the equation, but take it for what it is. Upside is important, but the very definition of upside means that you are adding a large amount of risk into the equation. How many times have you heard this? "He's injury prone, but he's got great upside". Or how about this, "He's young, but he's so explosive, his upside is hard to ignore". Of course it is. Its hard to ignore because all you've read about is how great his upside is, when they fail to mention the twenty reasons that he may not succeed.

I like the notion of taking players with great upside. Its definitely more exciting having a Quincy Morgan on your team who averages 17 yards per catch and can score from anywhere on the field than it is having a Jimmy Smith who will average 12 yards per catch and be consistent. I understand that. But be prepared for the "upside" to quickly become a "downside" right when you need that player the most. Upside, in my dictionary, is another word for "inconsistent". Again, I'm not advocating that you forget upside, because it is important, but don't get carried away. A couple of years ago drafting Fred Taylor was a huge risk, but his upside was so great that he was still taken early. The owners who took Taylor early as a RB2 the years he got hurt were probably hurt just as badly in their fantasy leagues. So again, think for yourself, and remember how important it is to look at what a guy with upside will do for your team if he doesn't live up to billing. To bust this myth simply think about the downside at the same time, take the emotion out of the pick, take one or two "upside" guys and when other teams are reaching on Donte' Stallworth you take Jerry Rice or Jimmy Smith for an unspectacular but solid backup. Don't leave the draft with your team peppered with "upside" guys or you'll be in for a tough fall. In my fantasy football thesaurus "upside" has the following suggested synonyms - frustration, waiver wire, and breakout. Only one of those is good - draft with caution on upside.

Myth #3 - We can predict when a player will have a "breakout" year.

This is another one of my favorite myths. I can't tell you how many times I've read the line "primed for a breakout year" already, and its only July. There are certain players every year that people pick with the notion that they are ready to finally become a fantasy star. But when the final tally comes in they wonder how the missed so badly. Well, its the elusive breakout year. Despite my rant against upside in Myth #2, I do believe that picking players primed for breakout years is a good idea, but this is a cautionary note to help you understand - it is hard to predict it right. Usually, the guys who are ready to breakout are so hyped up that you have trouble taking them where they should go because of the risk - in the middle to late rounds. For example, if you think that Koren Robinson is ready to breakout, well, you better grab him quick because he is going early.

The highly destructive third year wide receiver myth is deeply imbedded here as well. I won't go into the details here, but this is a perfect example of a myth that can hurt you on draft day. If you think about it, the very notion that you can pick a player's breakout year based on the number of years he's been in the league is somewhat ludicrous. There are dozens of factors that go into a player's development into a fantasy powerhouse. You must learn to isolate those factors, think about them, and then make your educated guess. That's right, I said "guess", because that's exactly what it is. To bust this myth, don't rely on silly third year notions, or ideas about a player's offseason workouts, instead you should rely on factors that really give a player the opportunity to succeed - a new coach (see Norv Turner with Ricky Williams), a receiver stealing touches is gone (see Josh Reed in Buffalo), a goal line back is gone or a shift in coaching philosophy (see Fred Taylor and Michael Bennett). Its not a surefire way to pick winners, but it sure beats thinking we know for sure who is a shoe-in to breakout. Even the best of us struggle in this category.

Myth #4 - Rookies will help your team.

Quick, go and tell three rookies who have been true impact players in their rookie year to step forward. Not so fast Koren Robinson. Get back in line David Carr. Don't even think about stepping forward Travis Taylor. Despite the long list of players who come out of college highly touted and "ready" to make an impact, the number of rookies that actually live up to the billing is incredibly small. People continue to hop on the rookie bandwagon and continually fall off when their rookie lets them down. I know that all of you are thinking about the players that HAVE made an impact. But that's exactly the problem. Look at the big picture. The percentage of players who live up to the hype is small compared to those that actually come through for you. For every Randy Moss there are twenty Koren Robinsons. And if you were relying on William Green as a starter last year, despite his success, you may have found yourself out of a playoff spot by the time he got going.

Now, I will grant the fact that rookie running backs have a chance to succeed. However, even if they do they will not be good for much more than a RB3 or a RB2 if you're lucky. The chance you're taking that they will pan out is greatly outweighed by the number of failures in this regard. And please, please, don't ever draft a rookie WR or QB unless you're in a really deep league. Time and time again I see people doing this and it rarely, if ever, works for them. I recently saw an "expert" draft in a ten team league where an owner selected Andre Johnson in the seventh round. This is astonishing to me. The seventh round!!! Please see Myth #1 for a better explanation of this phenomenon.

Instead of looking to the rookie pool, think about veterans who are proven starters who may be on the downside of a good career, but are sure bets to be a solid backup. Not everybody agrees with this method because the "upside" monster rears its ugly head. See Myth #2. But as everyone knows, drafting for upside also puts a larger risk factor in the equation. So go ahead and draft Charles Rogers this year, or take Andre Johnson. I'll be backing up my starters with guys like Marty Booker, Troy Brown, or Derrick Mason. Few would give these guys any upside at all, but they are consistent, tough, and reliable. I'll take that over a rookie any day.

The bottom line of this whole article is this - If you learn to think for yourself you will never allow yourself to fall into the traps and myths that pervade this sometimes frustrating game of fantasy football. I love playing it every year, and as I get each year under my belt I find that these myths take a hold of people more and more every year and provide large helpings of frustration every Sunday. You will never be able to predict exactly what is going to happen, that is the fun of this game, but you can go a long way towards eliminating that frustration by busting these common myths.