Probably the greatest feeling you can have as a fantasy owner is standing atop the heaping corpses of your fellow owners as you grasp your trophy. Being declared the winner by the other losers is both poetic & ironic.
The only thing better than that feeling….. is standing on an even bigger pile of corpses. That is what I can testify too. Being a champion of a large league, no matter how bad the players, gives you fantasy confidence that when talking with the peasants of 10 & 12 team leagues makes you always right. You become the Trump of fantasy.
The first thing you realize when you mock your first large draft is that it’s very hard to find an 18-22+team mock draft. (I recommend FantasyPros Custom Mocks.) After that you will collapse in shock how deep these drafts go into names you’ve never heard. A big league is not something you can do casually, it takes hours per week in research, per league.
I consider myself a large league fantasy football specialist. I’ve played in the same 18team shark league for 24 years. We used to wait until Tuesday afternoon to find out who won. We used fax machines & the USA Today box scores to add up our points manually.
The one thing that has been constant in those 24 years is that Fantasy Football changes. Fantasy drafting “rules of thumb” have had major changes before & will again. As I wrote in this draft prep article, I think this year is going to see a huge change in the players who are the top fantasy scorers at their position. Read the article for more.
The importance of that article to a big league is even more important. The idea of a draft is to get the best value for your pick. This season you will be able to get great value from pick’s others stay away from because the fantasy guru’s told them to wait. Hybrid tight ends will score more points & have more players that if they were WRs, would rank higher. The rule of waiting on TEs because they all score the same amount is no longer true. Gronk & Graham have been the exception. I believe this year you will be able to add 6-8 guys to that exception rule. Drafting these new guys higher & keeping two is where you will find some great value in later but not last rounds.