Alright, so I decided to get serious about my fantasy football league this year. I mean, really serious. No more last-minute draft picks based on gut feelings. I wanted to dominate, so I figured I needed a solid top 200 players list. And, let me tell you, it was a journey.
First, I scoured the internet. I mean, I went deep. Every fantasy football site you can think of, I was there. I compared their rankings, looked at player stats from last season, and even dug into some injury reports. It felt like information overload, but I kept pushing.
Building the Foundation
- Started with a spreadsheet, just a simple one.
- Copied and pasted names and rankings from different sources.
- Fought with the formatting. So much formatting.
Then came the hard part – making sense of it all. I started noticing patterns. Some players were consistently ranked high across different sites, while others were all over the place. That’s when I decided to create my own “average ranking” system.
I basically took all the rankings for each player, added them up, and divided by the number of sources. It was tedious, I won’t lie. Lots of manual entry, lots of double-checking. My eyes started to cross after a while, staring at all those numbers.
The Refining Process
- Used color-coding to highlight players I liked or had concerns about.
- Added columns for notes – injury history, potential breakout seasons, whatever.
- Realized I needed to account for different positions, so I added QB, RB, WR, TE, etc.
After hours and hours, I finally had a rough top 200 list. But it wasn’t pretty. It was a mess of colors and notes, and I knew I needed to refine it. I spent another couple of days tweaking it, moving players up and down based on my own research and, yeah, a little bit of gut feeling too. Don’t be a robot, hunches can be correct.
Finally, I had something I was proud of. A personalized, data-driven top 200 list. It wasn’t perfect, and I’m sure I’ll be adjusting it throughout the season, but it felt like a solid foundation for my draft. All that hard work paid off.
I print it and it become a bible during my draft.