Draft Day Gamesmanship Part 2
August 4th, 2002
The finest time of the year is once again upon us - draft season! With NFL training camps swinging into action, fantasy leagues everywhere are following suit. Some of us (the really lucky ones!) get to enjoy the challenging experience of doing the annual draft live and in-person. An in-person draft adds a unique twist to the science of drafting. Psychological elements and time-pressures combine to allow a fantasy football shark to disconcert, confuse and generally mess up an opposing owner's draft, using various gambits and ploys.
Last year, I wrote a column on this same topic, (go here to read it) and received a ton of valuable feedback from you, our readers, that caused me to evaluate and re-think some of the key points. Find below my latest ideas and tweaks about employing head games against your rivals on draft day.
A paramount concern on draft day is keeping your own cool and perspective on the process. In advance of the draft, you need to have assembled your war-room kit - a spreadsheet of some kind to track selections, a favorite pen and highlighter, and so forth. This year, the NFL has condensed the bye weeks into a tighter block, with more teams on bye each week (but none at the beginning or end of the season, which is a good thing for fantasy teams during the playoffs.) This tighter distribution of bye-weeks means that you'll want to pay more attention to the bye-week factor than ever before. I suggest adding a column to your position by position player analysis that lists each player's bye week prominently (if you don't already do so), rather than simply having a list of the bye weeks by team somewhere on your sheet. It will save you time, and make managing your roster during the draft easier.
Once you start engaging in teasing/making bad suggestions/encouraging poor selections during the draft, remember that subtlety is the key. If you go overboard or pick on only one owner (the newbie, perhaps?), then you might cause a backlash whereby other owners step in to help out/encourage your target. This is completely undesirable - the whole point is to divide and conquer, not to encourage the other owners to unite against your team. Remember, you're trying to degrade your opponents' teams, not make them so angry they won't speak to you. You may want to trade with one of the others at some point in the season, or at least have a cordial conversation at the office water-cooler.
An important point about trade offers - make sure that any offers you float to other owners during the draft are trades that you'll actually be willing to carry out if they agree. Making offers that suck up their precious time allotment is good strategy, but only if you stand to gain something worthwhile should the other player agree. Making offers and then backing out two minutes later is sure to really enrage the other player, and damage your credibility with the whole league.
Another key consideration - timing is everything with all of the discussed gambits and ploys. Teasing the owner with the first pick of the draft about selecting Marshall Faulk just isn't going to work. However, telling John or Jane Doe that selecting Corey Bradford in the sixth round (when you actually have him rated nowhere near that highly) is a good pick probably will. Such empty praise may lead him or her to actually feel kindly disposed and receptive to you after the draft, when you swoop in with a lopsided trade offer. Sometimes, being perceived as the "nice guy" is as useful as discombobulating the opposition.
Let the games begin! Draft day looms large on many an owner's horizon, and I hope that all of you draft a champion in 2002 (except the other owners playing in my leagues, of course!).
Another Footballguys.com exclusive from Mark Wimer
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