Well I am now ready to start my fantasy football campaign this season. I was lucky enough to find a posting on a board I frequest asking for owners in a Keeper league. I've always wanted to be in a keeper league so I jumped at the chance, and was able to get in. I'm taking over for someone who abandoned their team.

The team I have isn't the greatest, in fact, I'm not sure if there are even any keepers on it. I spent a lot of time today pouring over the league rules and trying to figure out the worth of certain players in keeping vs dropping them. You only get to keep 3 players max (plus 1 rookie if you have one). For each player you don't keep out of the 3, you get one extra draft pick, going up in the draft each player (4th round, then 3rd, then 2nd).

After much though and number crunching, I realized you're basically trading any player you keep w/ a draft pick. Thus, if I keep one player, I give up my extra 2nd round pick. Because of that it's easier to guage value, you just need to figure out if that player you're keeping is a player you would have picked by the 2nd round.

Or is it? Because other teams are keeping what are probably the best players, the draft/talent pool shrinks, and when you would have normally taken a player in the 4th round, might now be a solid 2nd rounder. It's a much tougher call. Add on to the fact that all players have contracts (determined by when in the draft they were drafted), and you can't keep a player who's contract is up in '03. Thus you also need to guage which players will flow back into the draft/talent pool who would have otherwise been someone else's keeper. As you can see, pre-draft takes a lot of time and work.

Luckly I have a pretty good plan in place, but I don't have much time. Draft is on the 18th, and there is info I'll need to know in order to figure out my keepers and how I want to draft. We find out draft style on the 13th, that'll influence my keepers, since one of my players is on the fringe if I want to keep him or not, it all depends on where I pick in the draft. Then we find out keepers on the 15th, which will really tell me the kind of pool I have to deal with on draft day.

One thing I know I'll do though is keep my rookie. Rookie keepers are traded for the 15th pick, which is almost a no brainer if you have a rookie of any value what so ever. Obviously this next week is going to be pretty hectic with this stuff.