How do you research for your fantasy sports leagues?

[Mojotronica]

Buy books and magazines? Read articles on Yahoo, CBS or others? Do you make your own projections? Do you make or download spreadsheets? How do you follow the sport as the season unfolds? How many games do you watch? How do you get information on games you can't watch? Do you use SQL to construct and maintain a database?

What do you think of Yahoo's O-Rank or various cheat sheet rankings?

[-Jrabbit]

For football, I have a few go-to websites that, in aggregate, give me a decent feel for things. I do follow the sport on an ongoing basis. I do keep some notes, usually by position, and keep a master Excel workbook for lists, which vary by the settings of the various leagues I play in.

I try to keep it pretty informal; no independent statistical analysis of my own. I find news items on team-level changes (for example, changes of scheme or coaching staff that might hurt/help specific players) to be more relevant. It's just a game.

[Mojotronica]

I used fantasy sports to teach myself to work with more advanced Excel concepts, like Pivot Tables. I'd like to make the jump to SQL programming, but it isn't a natural a fit with my particular type of statistical dementia.

My fantasy sports dream is to develop a database that uses metrics culled from the play-by-plays to create a constantly updating list of target players. For instance, it notes that Toby Gerhardt has been getting RB#1 carries and increases his projected value, but it does it all automatically so that I don't have to manually keep track all those teams I don't care about.

[Al B. Sure!]

I use ESPN for general stuff and CBS Fantasy and Rotoworld for the day-to-day news (like on injuries, practice status, etc.) since it's easier to go to the specific player information on those sites than wading through ESPN's league-wide injury info.

[Tuberski]

I pick people with cool names.

ACK!

[Al B. Sure!]

I have a habit of discounting New York Giants players because I don't want to believe the hype. It screwed me this year when I missed out on Cruz and when I looked hard and long at Jake Ballard in week 5 (when Ed Dickson, my TE in D/ST league was on a bye) but decided to go with Shockey. Ballard had a 72 yard 1 TD game that week to set off a respectable TE season and someone else grabbed him in all my leagues. I saw the potential in both players but thought I was seeing it through a Giants' fans' eyes.

I think Jrabbit does the same discounting when it comes to Bears, as well?


(by the way, it's a long way off but I think Da'Rel Scott, a Giant RB from the Philly-area, will be fantasy relevant next season; he has crazy speed and draws comparisons to Willie Parker)

[-Jrabbit]

I've been all over the map on the Bears. There have been years when I had several -- usually with bad team results. With so many Chicago folks in the leagues I'm in, Bears players are generally overvalued at bit, though not as much as they used to be. I do usually make it a point to have one Bears player on every team, but it's usually a defensive guy or bench player. I did have Forte at RB2 in one league this year -- and he was awesome.

[SlowwHand]

Generally speaking, I don't like to have a lot of Cowboys. If they win, great. If they lose, they would screw my heart twice, so...

[Berzerker]

mostly just yahoo links and articles, I use cbs sportsline (our Lombardi page) for injury updates.

and I try to watch the games but this year we've been playing golf every weekend but 1 and its looking like we got another week of mild weather

[Jaguar]

I specialize in football. Here are the two things I do:

(1) I watch games, particularly for young players drafted in later rounds entering their 2nd 3rd or 4th years. Arian Foster, David Nelson, Miles Austin, and Mike Wallace are examples of players that developed very good reputations and looked great on the field before their breakout seasons.
(2) I observe for systematic biases on the part of the fantasy football community. They definitely exist; I've run regressions and found some very statistically significant stuff. Particularly, it's pretty lazy on strength of schedule, but it also overestimates certain aspects of prior year statistics, especially with running backs.

Through the observations in (2), I take the projections that float around most fantasy sites and modify them to be more respectable. That's how my early drafting goes. Then the late drafting is all about the sleepers.