Fantasy Mashup: Draft review: Dan's way

I'm back from yet another Manly Football League draft, and I have to say that this was the least-stressful draft I can remember.

Reason? I ditched everything that was non-essential, reduced my "info-clutter" and focused my preparations on selected targets. Here's what I came up with:

1. Simple cheat sheet. In the past I've shown up with multiple cheat sheets, or with elaborately customized sheets that reflected all sorts of personal preferences. Forget it. On draft day I printed out the most recent cheat sheet from my preferred fantasy service, put it through a three-hole punch and popped it in a three-ring binder.

2. Average draft position. After the cheat sheet, I called up the ADP site I use and printed off the most recent results, three-hole punched the pages and put them in the back of the binder.

3. Clean updating. The MFL is a keeper league, which means 36 players are off the board before the first pick gets made. In the past I've scratched through those names with regular pens and pencils, and the result is often confusion. On my way out of town, I asked Janet to stop by a drug store, where I bought a two-pack of highlighters. Step One: I used the green highlighter to mark off the league's protected players.

4. Pick your targets. Let's face it: If you're into fantasy, you know all the players, and there are certain guys you'll take for need and others you'll take because they're too good to pass up. But serious fantasy guys have a list of players they really like, and they're likely mixed in throughout the rankings. Once I had the protecteds marked off in green, I used my yellow highlighter to indicate the guys I considered special prospects or values. The key? Don't focus only on the obvious players, and don't highlight everyone you would take.

5. Add the ADP to your draft sheet. While Janet drove, I checked the ADPs from the sheets in my binder for each of the players I'd highlighted in yellow, then wrote those numbers beside the name of each target.

6. Round-by-round possibilities. As a final step, I scanned through all my targeted players wrote down their names on a sheet of notebook paper by their ADP selection round. This meant there were usually multiple options for me in each round -- not guys I HAD to have, but guys I was HAPPY to have at those spots. I like this better than my old way of projecting guys to rounds. Locking in players has a habit of making my draft strategy too rigid.

Another use for this sheet? It showed me where "clusters" of my kinds of players were falling. In my case, a bunch of guys I wanted were falling in the 9th and 10th rounds (overall; that's the 6th and 7th round in our keeper league), and so I kept that in mind and worked a deal to get an extra pick in the 10th round this year for a 9th rounder next year.

7. Track the picks on one sheet. Our commissioner hands out a nice sheet that shows the pick and the team that owns it, and that's all I really need. In the old days, I used to keep track of the draft order AND update my opponents' roster sheets, looking for patterns that would help me anticipate their actions. What a waste of energy. Our league has a color-coded draft board, and one of the owners' sons updates it for us. If I'm worried that somebody else is chasing the same tight end, I can check his status that by scanning the board. Keeping your own roster is simply stupid, because it distracts you from what you should be doing: keeping an eye on what's going on in the room and on your sheet.

So that's it: One binder, one cheatsheet, one grouping of targeted players by ADP for reference, and a sheet to track the picks. No magazines. No messy stacks of paper. I looked around at the other guys who came with a bunch of materials Saturday and I felt confident. That's a good feeling.