The 2021 NFL season is fast approaching and, with it, all the excitement and drama we’ve come to expect. Will Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers go on to defend their Super Bowl title? Can the San Francisco 49ers make a solid playoff run?
The questions and possibilities are endless, with fans chomping at the bit to see how this new season will unfold. Tens of millions of fans will also already be thinking about their new fantasy football team and which players they’ll want to draft.
In 2019, there were roughly 34 million fantasy football players in the US alone, highlighting how popular the game is, and that number only continues to grow.
Typically, a fantasy football league will last for the entire season, which can be a bit too much of a commitment for some. As such, DraftKings Fantasy Football has risen to prominence in recent years.
Instead of basing your results off an entire season, daily fantasy football limits ‘contests’ to a short period of time, usually a single day but sometimes up to a whole week. Players can challenge friends and others to these one-off ‘contests’ and rematch them as many times as they like.
As fantasy football has progressed, so too has the technology linked with it and there have been numerous useful tools to help both daily and standard fantasy football players.
One of the most handy is a cheat sheet. It’s pretty easy to find one of these online as there will be countless outlets offering them, so it sometimes helps to have a look at several and compare.
A cheat sheet is one of the most important tools to prepare you for the fantasy football season by listing all of the available players in the fantasy draft and outlining important stats and information on each one.
This can help you make a plan for which players you want to target for what positions in your roster, and how you’ll spend the money within your salary cap. No one wants to map out their ideal roster only to realise they can’t afford it.
There are also tools that help you make your own cheat sheet, or keep the one you’re working with up to date. Things can change pretty quickly in the NFL and it’s hard to keep on top of everything, so a tool that makes these adjustments for you can pay serious dividends.
Fantasy draft day is arguably the single most important day in your fantasy season, so you need to be prepared. Thankfully, there are a variety of tools to help you do just that.
For example, you could download a draft wizard that provides comprehensive assistance for your picks. It will create rankings of players for you and even provide live advice during your draft to make sure you’re making the best picks possible.
You can even get tools that focus specifically on single positions within your roster, for example wide receiver, and provide in-depth analysis on the players you should be looking at.
One of the more impressive tools for draft day preparation is a mock draft simulator, which can run through countless different draft scenarios to help you plan accordingly. Somebody picked the quarterback you were eyeing up? A simulator will arm you with the knowledge of what to do in such a sickening scenario.
Once you’ve built your roster, you’ll then obviously need to manage it week-to-week, or in between contests if you’re playing daily fantasy football. There is a wide range of tools to help with this, one of the most useful being a lineup assistant.
This tool takes a look at your roster, each player’s form, what fixtures are coming up and many more factors to advise you on what your starting lineup should be for that day or week. Likewise, you could also use a lineup analyzer tool to give you an objective rundown of how your chosen team is likely to perform on a given day or week.
Trades are another important aspect of fantasy football and can sometimes be the difference between your team making a championship run or falling by the wayside. That being said, it can be difficult to determine what the best trades are, which is where a trade analyzing tool comes in.
The software will assess all the available options and outline which trades you should aim to make in order to develop the most effective roster possible, as well as predicting what impact these trades will have.
Lastly, if you find yourself in charge of a fantasy league or competition, there are various tools which can help you to organize things, for example a tool which can randomize a draft order and create a schedule for the season.
Despite its name, fantasy football can be serious business and if you’re looking to maximise the performance of your roster then you might consider using one of the tools outlined above.
The software can be a convenient and effective way of processing the swathes of information available and help you become a championship-caliber manager.
