Fantasy Football – Top 10 Mistakes on Draft Day

Draft can be intense, exhausting, and a bit intimidating at times. But there are always multiple opportunities to harass your friends and co-owners for some draft day mistake they make. Just make sure you don’t make one of these common and almost inevitable mistakes on Draft Day. Someone will almost certainly make the following mistakes.

Here we go, in no particular order. Someone is going to …

• Recruit a player who has retired. (Years ago we had two guys fighting over Barry Sanders TWO YEARS AFTER he retired because they heard a ridiculous rumor.)
• unknowingly recruiting a player who is seriously injured. (If you read my other articles, you’ll know I did it my rookie year in a league many moons ago. Well, it happens to all of us.)
• write a QB RB and WR from the same team. (Don’t you love these idiots?)
• take the maximum time to make a selection in the first round. (I realize you’ve only had 6 months to prepare, so of course, take your time. After all, I know your first-round pick is a tough decision.)
• arrive late to the draft, hungover, without any investigation, and recruit a monster team. (I hate these guys. It’s easier to win the lottery 3 times in a row, but every year someone does this.)
• recruits players according to their abilities into some scoring system that exists only in their head, they vehemently deny that they have ever been told the rules, complain when someone reminds them that they wasted a pick, or picks, and mourn it all year. (You don’t need to say anything here. You know who it is).
• Don’t take notes, don’t look at the draft board, and REPEATLY try to recruit players who took rounds before. (This has to be my favorite reason; these guys are usually drunk with blisters in round three. Do they honestly think Terrell Owens is still available in Round 6?)
• he mispronounces the name of each player he pronounces. (I realize Houshmandzadeh is a mouthful, but you hear that sportscasters pronounce it all the time. And the Chicago RB’s name is pronounced “Matt For-tay” not “Matt 40”, LT is not LanDainlium, and Maurice Jones-Drew’s full name is NOT “Drew Jones, that guy from Jacksonville”).
• come without money, don’t bring food, (we always bring a covered plate each) burn everyone’s beer, blow smoke in the face of borrowed cigarettes, borrow their cheat sheets and do your research (and then lose them) because evidently $ 8 it’s more than they could save in six months to buy a guide and they usually try, with each opening of their hole, to prove that they are more idiots than they were 10 minutes ago. (Don’t be that guy. Really).
• pay for your fiery girlfriend to play and then spend the entire day choosing for her. (No conflict of interest here, huh?)

These are by no means the only missteps made on Draft Day, but they are some of the most memorable.

If you want to share with me some drafts of horror stories from the day, I’ll be sure to use them in future articles. Just contact me at the email address below. Good luck on draft day and remember, don’t be that guy.