Cheat Sheet
A few of you have asked for an updated Snarky150, or some kind of cheat sheet for your drafts, but I’m not inclined to make one, in part because a cheat sheet that doesn’t update isn’t worth much and also because I almost never hew entirely even to my own newly updated cheat sheet.
The truth is you don’t discover how you really feel about players until you have to pick them — what does it matter that you have one guy listed at No. 8 and another at 10, if you prefer at that moment to pick No. 10? Must you really pick No. 8 because it says so on the piece of paper?
What you really need is a good cross-off list, one that doesn’t omit anyone relevant when your pick comes up and also has all the late-round sleepers on it at appropriate ADP points. You can still jump them earlier, but even one or two rounds ahead, you’ll see them and be able to decide at the time. Accordingly, before every NFFC draft, I just go to their ADP page, which looks like this:
Put in the relevant parameters in the fields above and set the date range from two or three days before the draft to the draft date and hit submit:
Then hit download, and it’ll put the data into a spread sheet. Open the sheet into an excel file or copy and paste into a google doc. I just sort by position, leaving in the player’s overall ranking column on the left:
Here’s my cross-off list (RB and WR obviously go quite a bit deeper) for August 20. I don’t bother with kickers and defenses because you can use the default lists in the draft room for those. Again, I don’t agree with these rankings — I have CeeDee Lamb ahead of Davante Adams, AJ Brown ahead of Deebo Samuel, for example — but I won’t miss anyone when contemplating each round’s picks.
Here’s the next page of the list (I’d use a smaller font for my real drafts, so it would all be on one page, but it’s easier to read in this size for purposes of the post):
Notice how the training-camp sleepers like Romeo Doubs and Isaiah McKenzie are on the list where they’re getting drafted the last couple days, rather than buried like they would be on the default list which averages in drafts dating back to February when they weren’t taken.
Moreover, late in drafts, you should care only about upside, so lists based on projections (which necessarily average in downside) are similarly worthless once you get out of about Round 10. Those too usually have emergent training camp sleepers buried to the point where you’re not even aware of them when they come off the board. I’m not saying you *should* draft the August hype guys, but it should be a conscious choice to avoid them at ADP and not simply because you’re using someone’s projections that have Sterling Shepard and Marvin Jones ahead of Doubs.
Bottom line, there are really only two good options for building a useful cross-off list: (1) Make your own cheat sheet, be careful not to omit, forget about or bury anyone and keep it updated all summer; or (2) Spend the five minutes it took to make the one I did above.