Patrick Xavier Flaherty (third from right), is an alumni of Holy Cross University* and an expert fantasy football veteran with multiple championships to his credit**.

Hey!  Flats here!  So you’ve gone and signed up for a Fantasy Football team and now you’re looking for some advice on how to run it.  Well brotha, you’ve come to the right place!  No one knows more about how to successfully prepare for a FF, (that’s an akro  acor arcym abbreviation for “fantasy football” that I like to use to speed things along), draft than I do.  So sit back, crack open a Natty Lite, and let Flats set you up on a path to glory.

The first thing you have to know is what kind of league are you playing in.  What scoring do they use?  Is it a regular draft, a snake draft, an auction draft?  Then you need to realize that it doesn’t matter; all the players are pretty much the same and if they score a lot in one league they’ll probably score a lot in another league.  So forget all that stuff; a good player is a good player is a good player.

Thoreau said that.  I messed around with Becky Smithwick out by that pond once.

So now that you looked at what the league rules are and then forgot them it’s time to start researching players.  This is something you should pay attention to, because players are what give you points, and if you don’t have good players then you won’t get good points.

There are a lot of ways to research players.  I find that Sports Illustrated gives you a really nice run down of the top 20-40 players at each position.  They don’t give you a lot of information either, which is cool because I don’t have time to read a lot.  There are a lot of other publications out there that you can read too.  If you’re not a reader then you just watch ESPN and take notes when Matthew Berry is talking, or those two broads he sometimes has on his show.  Skip Bayless has some strong takes too.

I like to do as many mock drafts as I can, especially at work.  You can get a lot done between customers coming to the register.  Mock drafts can give you a good idea of who’s going to go where, and you can write your strategy up accordingly.  Also it’s always fun to take a guy like Tebow in the first round; pisses everyone off!  You should totally try it like 7 times this year.

Now that you’re all read up you need to start ranking players.  I take a QB as soon as I can because Tom Brady is a QB and he always goes first in our group and then there’s a run on them and you don’t want to get stuck with the wrong type of QB; it’s too important a position.  So the first prep work we really need to do is determine what the wrong type of QB is.  First, you want to avoid, how should I put this, “ethnic” types.  A good rule of thumb is “if his name ends in a ‘z’ he ain’t your QB”, you really can’t go wrong with that.  Also if you follow these rules you can avoid the “me-first glory boy” stuff that you get from QBs like Cam Newton or RGMe, as I like to call him.  Yeah they’ll get you points but I don’t like associating with that type of person.

I generally like to rank my QBs as to how I think they’ll do in terms of determination, team-first attitude and grit.  If you do it right your list should look something like Brady, Flacco, Matt Ryan, Carson Palmer and that dude with the red hair from the Bengals.  All solid picks.  I wouldn’t argue if you listed Ryan ahead of Flacco; they’re pretty close.  If you can’t get Brady you can execute a wild card strategy and take Gronk; he’s not a QB but with Brady throwing to him he scores on the field almost as much as he scores off the field, if you know what I mean.  And what I mean is mega-points for you!

After you get your QB all the other players are pretty much the same, but here’s a strategy for you.  The goal in FF is to get the best players at every position right?  The best players score the most points and the team with the  most points is going to win.  So your goal is to set things up so that you have the most best players at the most positions.  In the 2nd and 3rd rounds I liked to take the best defense and the best kicker; no one ever expects this and you can change it up and take a kicker like Gostkowski first if you want; the Pats D should still be there in the 3rd.

Now in the 4th round you need to start looking at the “skill” positions, RB and WR.  A lot of these guys will be gone by now, picked by suckers who missed out while you were getting the best QB or TE, the best D and the best kicker.  I find that in the 4th round I can still get guys who maybe don’t run all that far but get a lot of TDs.  A good pick here is John Kuhn.  Also that guy who used to play for Stanford.  If you decide to go WR instead you can usually find a stud like Edelman, Amendola, or maybe even Welker now that his head doesn’t work right.

Now after the 4th round things can get crazy, because in addition to this smart drafting you should be pounding a Natty Lite for every round.  They don’t call ’em “rounds” for nothing.  Once you’ve got a good buzz on anything goes and you can take chances on risky players who aren’t up to your usual standards.  Good examples here would be a Russell Wilson, maybe a Capn kap Ckap that guy who plays for San Francisco, or Adrian Peterson.  Basically guys who should be good but you never know if they’ll finish the season because they got divorced or hit their kids or have to run around all the time because all the starters retired.

In the 5th round I try to get a good TE if I couldn’t get Gronk in the 1st round.  No way Gronk’s still around here, but you can get a Kyle Rudolph-type without too much trouble.

The 6th round can be tough.  I’m no pussy and I can pound the Natty but 6 beers in 30 minutes can start to get to you.  At this point you should write your address on your forearm so that when you call Uber later they know where to bring you.  Don’t drink and drive man; the third time’s a bitch man.

For a pick in the 6th round I’m usually looking WR.  Edelman’ll probably be gone by that point this year but you can still find an Amendola type, maybe even Welker if enough people believe his head doesn’t work anymore.  Wait, was that the 4th round or the 7th?  Fuck.  Don’t do Jaeger shots during the draft man.  That’s a pro tip for you.

By the 7th round things are starting to get tricky.  All the obvious choices are gone and you need to know your stuff.  What I like to do here is maybe pull out my iPod and listen to a Matthew Berry podcast, or pull out the Sports Illustrated guys and look for Peter King’s advise about sleepers and guys who play the game the right way, or at least talked to him during training camp.  You can’t go wrong with that advice, and it can really help through the 10th round, as things start to get blurry.

After the 10th round I put it on autodraft because I almost always throw up.  But by that time I’ve laid the groundwork for another winning season, or at least a team with the kind of players I can be proud of.  If you follow these simple rules you can too!

*Shortly after the publication of this article the purveyors of this site were contacted by Holy Cross University and advised that Patrick Xavier Flaherty is not an alumni of that school, but rather was asked to leave several dozen credits short of a degree in physical education/sports administration after 14 individual violations of the school code regarding academics, social behavior and hygiene.

**Shortly after Holy Cross called we were contacted by two “associates” of Mr. Flaherty who insisted on being referred to as ‘Fitzy’ and ‘Sully’.  They advised that Mr. Flaherty, in 16 years of playing fantasy football, has won only one title, and that was when Sully was in a hurry to, -ahem-, “bang” Jackie Murriagh, and accidentally dropped Tom Brady instead of Trent Dilfer, and ‘Flats’ picked Brady up and then refused to return him.

DOF regrets the errors, and particularly regrets paying Mr. Flaherty in advance.