Tuesday, April 02, 2013

The time has come: 2013 fantasy football links are here!

Greetings! It has been a long, quiet winter here on FFLibrarian and now I feel like a bear coming out of hibernation; or at least how I imagine that might go. Spring is in full bloom here in Tennessee and it seems like the time is right to finally emerge from the longest break I have ever taken from FFLibrarian. Life is good here in my world and I hope this update finds you all well, too. I really appreciate you guys hanging in here and coming back for the latest and greatest on the 2013 season.

Baseball has begun, the Masters is right around the corner, and NFL Draft prep is in full swing. So let's get to it and see what's spinning around the fantasy football world these days.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

2012 Accuracy Results!

I've been in mourning over the Broncos' loss a few weekends ago, so I'm finally coming out of my shell to let you all know that the 2012 FFLibrarian/FSTA Rankings Accuracy Challenge results are here! For those who are new to this contest, I've been running it for 6 years now and I compare experts' preseason rankings to how things shook out at the end of the season and use this analysis to determine which site is the most accurate of all. King of the fantasy football hill.

The results were presented at the FSTA Winter Conference last night and posted on the NYTimes' Fifth Down blog early this morning: Fantasy Football Accuracy Rankings for 2012. This link will give you the top 15 overall sites and then the top 10 at each position. This year I included the average ranking across the 4 positions to give you a sense of how closely the sites all line up for the most part. The top 2 sites though clearly had a bit of a lead on the rest of the field and on that note...

Congrats to both RealTime Fantasy Sports and FFMagicMan. Yup, two winning sites. Something unique happened this year: since I run this contest in conjunction with the FSTA, one of the rules is that the official winner must be a member of the FSTA, but I welcome submissions from any site that wants to throw their hat in the ring. FFMagicMan came away with the best accuracy scores (and scored in the top 10 in all 4 positions, something that I've never seen happen before), but is not an FSTA member. So instead the winner is RealTime Fantasy Sports, who also had an amazing performance by coming in the top 10 in 3 of 4 positions. As I've told both sites, this really is a spectacular job considering the hugely talented pool of 61 experts.

Last summer I finally created a multi-year analysis of these contests and I'll be adding these results in over the winter/spring. I'll post the results when they're available, but it will be well before the 2013 season begins.

There were 61 participants this year, listed below in alphabetical order:

4for4
Absolute QB
Advanced Sports Logic
Ask the Commish
Athlon Sports
Bruno Boys
CBSSports, Dave Richard
CBSSports, Jamey Eisenberg
CBSSports, Nathan Zegura
Cheatsheet War Room
Draft Analyzer
DraftCalc
DraftSharks
Drinkfive.com
edraft
ESPN
Fantasy Football Sherpa
Fantasy Insights
Fantasy Sharks
FantasyFootballManiax
FantasyFootballNerd
FantasyFootballStarters
FantasyPros.com
FantasyPros911
Fantazzle
Fantistics
FF Guidebook
FFMagicMan
FFToday.com
Fleaflicker
Football Outsiders
Footballguys
FOX Sports
Hatty Waiver Wire Guru
Joseph Sigal
Junkyard Jake
KFFL
LeagueSafe
LeagueSafe Post
Lesters Legends
NFL Soup - Keet Bailey
NFL Soup - Kevin Roberts
Pigskin Addiction
ProFootballFocus
ProFootballWeekly
Pyromaniac.com
RealTime Fantasy Sports
Roger Rotter Sports
RotoExperts
Rotoprofessor
Rotoworld
Sandlot Shrink
scoutPRO
SI
The Fake Football
The Hazean
The Huddle
The War Room
WhatIfSports
XML
Yahoo  

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Join FFLibrarian's 2013 Playoff Challenge

Greetings and happy 2013. We've had a lot of travel and holiday fun in our home with a hearty dose of great fantasy football season endings. My sister, a fantasy football newbie, made it to her league's championship game but did lose by a mere 4 points; not too shabby for someone brand new to FF though, eh? Also a huge thanks to the Fantasy Football Nerd for running his annual league which donates $500 to the league winner's charity of choice. I ended up winning the league so Joe at FFN made an extremely generous donation to the Healing Hearts Fund here at a local hospital in Knoxville, which provides support for families who are coping with the loss of a baby. For those interested, my team dominated the season thanks to a combo of Doug Martin, Jamaal Charles, Julio Jones, and the Bears DST, among other gems.

In other good news, I spent a chunk of yesterday watching and celebrating as my Northwestern Wildcats finally won their first bowl game sine 1949. Go Cats! Go Big Ten!

But moving on to the NFL playoffs. If you've been around for awhile you know that I'm a huge Broncos fan so I'm feeling pretty great about the playoffs this year. I'll also be running my FFLibrarian Playoff Challenge through NFL.com again this year. I'd love to have you join in and I'll be thinking of a prize to send to the winner of the challenge - no password needed, just click this link and you should be good to go. If you have any trouble joining, just let me know.

In case you need some links to help you prep for your playoff league, read on - trust me, there's a lot of quality material here:

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Championship prep!

We head back to the DC area tomorrow, this time to spend a few days with the family to celebrate Christmas. Once again my son is super excited about the plane ride and keeps mentioning the "big suitcase" we'll be taking...and it is indeed gigantic. Other gigantic things include the fact that I'm in the championship game in all my leagues and my sister is still alive in her league as well. Very fun. One of the leagues I'm in is playing for charity: the Fantasy Football Nerd is donating $500 to the winner's charity of choice. I'm playing against Jordan Zucker of the Girls Guide to Fantasy Football fame. If interested, you can learn more here.

In the meantime, I've got some links for you this week:

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Week 15 consensus start/sit

Welcome back to the Consensus Start/Sit list for Week 15! With this feature I read through all of the start/sit articles that I linked to earlier in the week and tally up which players I saw most often with a start or sit vote. Players are listed below in no particular order. Good luck!

QB
Start: Josh Freeman, Brandon Weeden, Matt Schaub
Sit: Ryan Fitzpatrick, Tony Romo

RB
Start: Reggie Bush, C.J. Spiller, David Wilson, Knowshon Moreno, Darren McFadden, Shonn Greene
Sit: Vick Ballard, Beanie Wells, DeAngelo Williams, Michael Turner

WR
Start: Josh Gordon, Danario Alexander, Michael Crabtree
Sit: Brandon Lloyd, Larry Fitzgerald, Torrey Smith, Steve Johnson

TE
Start: Brandon Myers, Dennis Pitta
Sit: Jermichael Finley

D/ST
Start: Lions, Rams
Sit: 49ers, Ravens

Kicker
Start: Shayne Graham
Sit: no consensus

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Start/sit and rankings - Week 15

Well I'm settling in for the Thursday Night Football game and am finally, finally getting to a post this week. I was called out a bit for my lack of posting this week and you guys are right, I really have let you down during a crucial time and I'm sorry. I will endeavor to get back to a more regular posting schedule for the last week or two here - and will still be running a playoffs fantasy challenge come January. As always, there will be plenty of ridiculously early speculation on the 2013 season to come over the next month or two as well.

As a token of appreciation for your patience with me, I'll be posting my old consensus start/sit suggestions this weekend. If that's something that you miss from past years (I run through all the links and list the top 3-4 guys that I see listed most often under start/sit that week), please let me know in the comments since I want to be sure to focus on what you guys want as I plan ahead for 2013.

Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Get your fantasy team playoff-ready here

It's a big week for fantasy footballers and I may only get to posting once this week, my apologies (I'll do my best to post again on Friday or Saturday!). We're hitting the friendly skies tomorrow to fly home to northern Virginia since my 92-year-old grandma is there for a pre-holidays visit. If grandma travels, we travel...so I hate to leave you in the lurch without a ton of posts during the run-up to the playoffs, but I've got lots of links below for those of you with playoff fever. And to those of you in the FFLibrarian Monster League who have made it to the playoffs, a hearty congrats and good luck. Big times, my friends.

Saturday, December 01, 2012

Final Week 13 trimmings

We're revving up the holiday season here in the FFLibrarian house: today, we purchase the Christmas tree. Tomorrow we take a Christmas-themed train ride for our little trainophile to enjoy. In the midst of it all, there's plenty of fantasy football prep to manage with the playoffs right around the corner. So let's get to it...

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Week 13 linkage

I hope you all enjoyed a festive Thanksgiving weekend and are looking ahead to Week 13. Our weekend was a bit intense - my husband caught the same stomach bug as my son (by some crazy miracle I remained healthy) so I think I'm still slowly recovering. Apologies for the delayed waiver wire post here but I've got a handful of Week 13 links for you. And hey, the Thursday Night Football game is actually a good one this week, that's a little bonus, eh? I'll be back later this week with more start/sit and ranking links.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Giving thanks for ranks

This year hasn't turned out like I thought it would. I imagined myself as a round, rather pregnant woman for the holiday season, toasting my family to our good fortune inside my belly. But tomorrow, rather than being 30 weeks pregnant, I will be remembering our daughter who was delivered stillborn 12 weeks ago, and digging down deep to be thankful for all the blessings in my life. And they are many, don't let me fool you. Tonight when I said goodnight to my 2-year-old son, for the first time he got the whole phrase out, "I love you, too, mama." I am one lucky lady.

So I hope tomorrow you all are surrounded by loved ones, dear friends, and have a chance to remember all the reasons that your life is to be cherished. Thank you guys for stopping by the blog this season!



Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Thanksgiving week lineup links

When it rains it pours: having mostly recovered from a nasty cold, our son is now battling a stomach bug. Poor little dude. Hopefully he'll be better by turkey time! I may have my hands full with him again tomorrow, but I'll do my best to be back with more start/sit links in time for the Thanksgiving Day games.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Start/sit and rankings for Week 11

Sorry for the disappearing act this week - both my son and I have been sick so there hasn't been much time or energy for blogging. But I wanted to get these links up for you before tomorrow's games. Good luck this week!

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Week 11 waiver advice

I can hardly believe that Thanksgiving is just over a week away. This year I'm turning to some professionals for their assistance with the big meal. My husband is a vegetarian, which takes some of the pizazz out of the turkey prep, so we'll have the bird, gravy, and a few other items prepared by a local store. Mashed potatoes though? That's all me, not outsourcing that one whatsoever. Or the apple pie.

Anyway, I find it startling that we're staring down Week 11 already, too. Unclear where this season/fall has gone but here's hoping you're all in great position for the final third of the regular season. To keep your squad finely tuned, scope out these links:

Much more on the start/sit front to come later this week.

Thursday, November 08, 2012

Lineup advice for Week 10

Per the suggestion of our son's daycare teachers, we are now almost 2 weeks into potty training our son. I'm not gonna lie, this ain't for the faint of heart. I truly don't know if our son is old enough to really get it yet, but we're giving it a try and while it's so far relatively successful, it's also pretty intense; likely the most intense thing we've encountered with our son since getting him to sleep through the night. The first weekend we tackled this whole adios-to-diapers thing, my son, husband and I were all totally exhausted and sick of spending time in bathrooms and doing laundry. But we're deep in this now, we're gonna work with what we've got and give it our all...which is the way I feel about one of my fantasy teams. Yeah seriously, I'm making the potty/fantasy connection here because honestly one of my teams is like my son right now: a bit youthful and accident-prone but determined to get it right. My team has some nice strengths (Doug Martin) but far more weaknesses and underperforming players (Calvin Johnson, Matthew Stafford...yeah, I'm talking to you) - but I'm not giving up! Gotta work with what I've got, scope out the waivers, maybe make a trade, do what I've gotta do to keep the Ws coming.

Anyway, speaking of things that can help give your team a boost, I wanted to give you all a heads up that Pickemfirst is giving away a free upgrade to the Pro version of their product for the rest of the season. I've waxed on and on about Pickemfirst in the past but it's an awesome tool that I highly recommend for anyone in multiple fantasy leagues. Basically, it's a browser add-on that tells you which players are on your teams and also provides links to news, favorite sites, etc. Good stuff, you'll be really glad you're using it if you're a fantasy news hound...which you must be if you're here on this site.

Let's get to the Week 10 lineup links:

Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Casting your waiver ballot

I'm one of the many who is glued to the tv tonight awaiting election results while my husband is grudgingly accepting our evening plans since it's really not his idea of a great time. I realize the minutiae of the exit polls, projections, and chit chat with the various correspondents can be a bit much but I kind of love it all. Interestingly, this is the first time in my life that I am not voting from a swing state in a presidential election, so kind of a different vibe for me.

Anyway, shifting from politics back to what I know you all love: fantasy football. Let's take a look at guys the experts are targeting as some quality options off the waiver wire this week:

Looking ahead to other Week 10 items: