Prep Time

I finally found a few minutes to start preparing for 2013 fantasy last night. I started with NCAA where I pulled out the Hovell Index xls and started filling it out. The first two columns are "week 12 rank" and "week 16 rank". Then there's a column to see the difference between those two columns. That helps me get a feel for which teams are hot and which teams are falling. Then I pull up the rosters and stats for each of the top 25. I'm looking at depth (which is the number of guys that play more than 10 minutes per game) and I'm looking at height of the starting 5. That's as far as I got last night. When it's done, I will have watched many games, listened to the experts and filled out the Hovell Index (which is on Wikipedia), to select my winner.

Then I moved to baseball. I'm so excited to try an auction draft this year! I pulled out my baseball template and I bought the exclusive pack on rotoexperts.com. I copied their projections and auction values into my xls. I started with 620 hitters and I took it down to 320, which is still way more than the 175 that I estimate will go in our draft. I deleted a lot of hitters because we use strikeouts as a negative hitting category and guys that have zero k's were jumping up too high in my ranks (be ayes they were leaders in one of six categories).

It was fascinating to see a few guys pop up higher on my chart than what any experts say. I'd put their names here but sorry I don't have my xls in front of me at the moment. I also created a position scarcity chart because I like to use that as one of my inputs. It looks like this year there are some clear tiers at each position, even in the outfield.

Next, I'll finish my NCAA xls with all of the team data and then I'll finish pitching on my baseball xls. Then I'll need to run some mock drafts and determine exactly who I'm targeting in the draft...

2013 getting underway!

We've decided to switch from "wins" to "quality starts" in baseball, so I'm starting my planning for that. We thought about switching from saves to saves+holds, but that didn't pass a league vote.

For NCAAB, I've started recording games and watching them, I don't have any early favorites yet, it seems to me that this year might be really hard to predict (which is great!)