Solid Fantasy football advice -How will you approach your 2008 Fantasy Football Draft?

When the NFL league office implemented more stringent defensive contact rules for the 2007 season it made us think of the impact this could have in the passing game with officials paying more attention to defensive player contact this could sway coordinators to be a little more aggressive in the offensive play calling in hopes of either completing the pass down field or getting the contact call. In turn this would increase not only the quarterbacks but wide receiver’s effectiveness.

Therefore, I wanted to see some fantasy football statistics. My first step was to run our fantasy football software for trends then I compiled the relevant statistics from 2003 to 2007 (TE and RB omitted from receiving stats) converted to basic scoring, No PPR. TD 6 all – 1per20 pass (-1i),1per10 ru/recv and selected the TOP 20 fantasy football point producers from each the QB RB WR and placed those points into a spread sheet, then using the chart function I was able to get some interesting results for this fantasy football analysis. To be honest there is more info in these numbers than I can sum up in a few short paragraphs.

So in a “nut shell” Fantasy Football WR's where more productive than the RB in the NFL’s 2007 season. The top Ten fantasy football WR’s produced on average 197 fantasy points to the RB’s 182 fantasy points. This is a pretty significant difference and when you get to the bottom ten, WR’s 11-20 generated 145pts to the RB 141 pts. Not much of a difference between the 11-20 WR and 11-20 RB. Actually, 2005 was the Running backs most productive year from 2003 to 2007 with the top ten producing an average 248 points.

Is this increase in Passing and Receiving production attributed to the Contact rule? Not sure as it may take another season to tell, however 2004 did have a slight edge on the 2007 receivers as the top ten generated an average of 200 fantasy points over a course of sixteen games. This also before the defensive contact emphasis.

So with more NFL teams using Running Back By Committee (RBBC) it very probable that we could see more receivers generating the production. This should not change your fantasy football draft philosophy at least in the early picks, 1-10, that said if I am sitting with picks 12 and 13 all the backs you know that are going to get the carries and the two QBs are gone I would seriously consider top 2008 fantasy football WR picks like Owens, Wayne, Colston back to back or a Romo/Brees with an Owens/Wayne/Colston and I would feel very confident of landing a Rudi/Thomas Jones/Jamal type back with the 36th and 37th pick.

Author: Dana Valentine
As one of the co-founders here at fantasy football starters Dana has a passion for this game that runs very deep. He'd like to think as deep as some awesome river trout in the Arizona streams (wait they are very shallow). Either way, from time to time look for Dana to share some of his fantasy football insights, which are well thought of and have brought him FFL championships  over the past 20 years.