I know the signing deadline was yesterday, and I’m glad the Nats signed Strasburg, but for today, I want to talk about the fantasy football draft for the Pirates Fans’ league I’m in.

I’m an fantasy sports nut.  I’ve been playing fantasy football for about 9 years and baseball for about 5.  I make it a point to listen to both fantasy focus podcasts on a daily basis, and perennially participate in multiple leagues in both sports.  For the upcoming season, I’ve found myself in 4 football leagues, one of which is a 14 team standard scoring league on espn comprised of pirates bloggers and fans.  Since its the deepest league I’ve ever played in, and it was my first draft of the year, I thought I’d write up a bit of how the draft went down.  You can find the league here, my team here, and the draft recap here.

As I said, 14 teams is the deepest league I’ve ever played in, so unlike the standard ten team format, your not going end up with an all-star roster.  I really believe that every draft and every league format requires a slight tweaking of draft strategy.  The general wisdom is that given the dearth of elite running backs, you have to go with a back in round one.  But given the depth of the league, and that I was picking late (13th) I decided to wait until the third round, 41st overall, to go running back.  My first 2 picks, 13 and 16, were Andre Johnson and Tom Brady.  Only time will tell if the strategy works, but because I had QB and my #1 WR locked down, I was able to grab several cheap backs in the middle rounds who have upside in Ray Rice, Reggie Bush, Fred Taylor, and Laurence Maroney.  If two of these four work out, I think I’ll be in good shape.

The one possible mistake I made was taking Tony Gonzalez in round four rather than grabbing a second running back there.  In my defense, I wasn’t in love with the RB options available at that point.  The backs who came off the board between then and my next pick, Bush, were Jonathan Stewart, Lendale White, Willie Parker, Larry Johnson, Knowshon Moreno, and Ahmad Bradshaw.  Honestly I’d rather have Bush than just about anyone on that list with the possible exceptions of Parker(If he can hold off Mendenhall) and Larry Johnson(If he can be 4/5 of the old LJ).  So I guess what I’m saying is that given that I was picking 13th, I think I did well, but since I’ve never been in a league this deep, I have no idea how this is going to play out.

Picks I Liked

Due to some teams ahead of him reaching, RTJR was able to grab DeAngelo Williams at 10 and then pick up Brian Westbrook on the wrap around at 19 giving him, in my opinion the best 1-2 RB combo in the league.

Littlefield TriesFootball was able to grab Santonio Holmes in the 6th round as his second wide receiver.  I really think after his performance in last years playoffs this is the year he will finally break out.  Additionally, I think Littlefield has the deepest team top to bottom.

Picks I Didn’t Like

Not only did Peyton Manning go 8th overall, but he was the first QB off the board, ahead of both Brees and Brady.  That’s insanity.

LaDanian Tomlinson was selected 2nd overall, and while I think he still has a lot left in his tank, I don’t think he’s a top three pick.

General Thoughts

About 6 teams missed this draft, and they happened to be clustered at the top of the board.  Due to the snake format, 12 picks would fly off the board in a matter of about 5 seconds.  This happened every other round, and it was really, really annoying.  ESPN should really consider adding a few seconds of delay before autopicks happen.  It would allow people who are in the live draft to see who is coming off the board and what team they are going to.  If your like me, it would give you time to update any spreadsheets or other collateral your using to track the draft.  As I said I play in many leagues every year.  Some of them are on ESPN and some are on Yahoo, and this is probably the only area I’ve found where Yahoo is superior to ESPN.