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NFL Draft Prep & FF Prep

I just occurred to me last night that I'll be on a plane, flying back east for a library conference during the NFL Draft on April 26. Rookie mistake, but my hopes for some live blogging of the NFL Draft are now squelched. It's probably for the best since there are so many other far more competent NFL Draft bloggers out there - for instance, check out Zobel's Blog, part of Draft Headquarters. For some wisdom on how things might go come Draft Day, check out Zobel's live chat transcript from last night.

For other thoughts and news in the football world, read on:
  • Favre sounds like he's really serious about not playing again - we'll see what happens, but personally I'm buying it for now. However, Troy Aikman is a little less convinced and hey, he certainly knows the world of the QB better than I do.
  • Earlier this week I posted some of Favre's fantasy numbers throughout his career for some perspective on how his fantasy output has varied over his time in the league. As I noted, Favre's best fantasy year was 1995, which is exactly the year that Football Outsiders has just painstakingly added to their data - so go old school and check out 1995 DVOA Ratings and Commentary for new insight on the league in the year in which I received my driver's license.
  • NFL.com's Michael Fabiano reviews the free-agency moves and their fantasy implications in Player movement alters fantasy football values.
  • Every NFL Draft fiend will be delighted by what Pro Football Reference has put together - check out the NFL Draft History and AFL Drafts for info on historical draft picks arranged by either franchise, year (1936-2007), or position. Includes career stats for players, too, which could be a total time sucker for me. I need to close that window immediately so I don't find myself sitting here three hours later, bleary-eyed and with lots of library work accruing.
  • If you're looking for a scouting report on some of the NFL Draft prospects, look no further than FFToolbox, which has a bunch of quality reports to keep you knowledgeable about the incoming rookies.
Last week I posted my 2007 version of How Accurate Were They?, where I looked at expert preseason rankings compared to season fantasy point totals to see which site was the most accurate with their rankings. I've been adding more site rankings and doing some tweaking over the past week - I need to do a little more work but am hoping to post about more of my findings this coming weekend. Additionally, Sports Data Hub is taking all of the rankings and incorporating them into their data section - they are still working on this project but soon you should be able to go in and play around with the preseason rankings vs fantasy point totals as you see fit. Just a quick note on that - you need to be a registered user of Sports Data Hub to access the data tool.
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