Pre Draft - Release the Keepers!

“People say I’ll be drafted in the first round, maybe even higher.” – Craig “Ironhead” Heyward

Preseason football is in full swing and we are just under a week away from our 2017 league draft. Hopefully, you’ve been doing your research and preparing yourselves, but if not there’s still time… don’t worry. Actually, yeah, don’t do any preparation. Trust me.

This Saturday marks the return of regular season football (unless you’re one of THOSE people that don't watch the college game); so, it’s finally time to move our league out of the offseason as well. Head over to the league page on ESPN and re-familiarize yourself with the layout if need be. This is also a good time to update your team name for the season/week 1 if you’d like to do so. It’s not mandatory to update your team name btw. Jacob’s been going like 4 years strong with his Hokie troll job and it hasn’t gotten old.

If you’d like a new name for the season, update it before the draft and I'll adjust the draft settings to reflect your changes. Our first league power rankings will come out in the “week 0” LM note, released in the days leading up to game 1 on September 7th.

Without further ado.

Danger Duck... fucking legend

Keeper List

Keeper selections have gone final, so we finally have the last pre-draft information we need to move forward.

Here are the league’s keeper selections, by draft order.

Phil – Le’Veon Bell, RB, Pittsburgh – Round 2

Thomas – Mike Evans, WR, Tampa Bay – Round 3

Pat Butler – Jay Ajayi, RB, Miami – Round 7

Jacob – Jordan Howard, RB, Chicago – Round 7

Joe – T.Y. Hilton, WR, Indianapolis – Round 4

Sam – DeMarco Murray, RB, Tennessee – Round 7

Nick – Julio Jones, WR, Atlanta – Round 1

Charlie – Aaron Rodgers, QB, Green Bay – Round 5

Pat Lockett – Melvin Gordon, RB, Los Angeles – Round 7

Brian – David Johnson, RB, Arizona – Round 1

The draft board has been updated to reflect these keepers. You can find the board either by joining the league link for Clicky Draft (I’ll get to that shortly) or by heading to the Drafts tab under History/Data on the league website.

Some random keeper notes:

- Every team took a keeper this year. Taking a keeper is not a requirement but based on the drafting positions and player rounds, everyone made the “correct” decision this time around.

- Round 7 was the most common keeper round, with all 4 players being running backs ranking in the top 10 of their position. I think this just shows that the draft is largely a crap shoot, where you’re simply trying to find value as the rounds move along and player “volatility” increases. This also adds some strategy to the draft as your late round picks can bring you massive value in the future.

- The average of all keeper rounds was 4.4, which exactly in the middle of our 6-round keeper window. There was a good spread of keepers throughout the rounds, so you can find value anywhere in the draft as well as the waiver wire.

- Round 6 is the only round without a keeper selection… round 6 must’ve sucked last year… Yeah, I just checked and it was worse than Taylor Swift’s new single.

- Six of the Ten keepers in this year’s draft were running backs, so the position will be unusually thin when the draft begins next Thursday.

Draft Preview

The 2017 JPFL Draft will be taking place next Thursday, August 31st, at 8:00 PM EST

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, we are running our draft through Clicky Draft this year. Clicky Draft is “an online fantasy draft board built specifically to accommodate live in-person drafts. Clicky Draft allows leagues hosting drafts to display a draft board through a TV or projector while also allowing people to view and make picks from their phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. It is a perfect draft board solution in a world where most drafts have a few members out of town.”

This will work exactly the same as our ESPN site drafts in the past with the addition of letting us enact our specific keeper rules properly.

1) The first thing you need to do is join our league in Clicky Draft. Go to this link and claim ownership of your team. You will be asked to make an account for login purposes. There isn’t a fee required, just make sure to use a username and password that you’ll be able to remember for the draft. It should take 3 minutes maximum to do all of this.

2) At 7:30 next Thursday I’ll open the draft room. At that time, I’ll provide you all with a new link to enter the draft room. When you click the link, you’ll be taken to the draft room and will have full control of your team’s draft picks.

This draft will be accessible from ANY DEVICE that has internet access via a browser. You can use your computer, phone, tablet, whatever. You can even use an Xbox or PS4. If it has an internet browser, it can be used to draft your team. If you’re on the go next Thursday, just hop on with your phone to make your picks. You can also take advantage of this feature to give yourself multiple screens to use during the draft. You can draft from an iPad while researching on your laptop. The draft board will resize itself to fit whatever screen you’re using, so you can display it on your TV screen if you’d like.

There are several viewing options for how you’d like the draft board to display on your screen:

- Draft Board will display like a classic draft board, simply listing teams across the top and rounds underneath.

- Player Ranks will show you the Fantasy Pros ECR rankings, sortable by position (including “rookies only”) and team. You can also sort the list by any statistic.

- Team Rosters will show all the teams with their drafted rosters underneath

- Snake Board will slightly modify the Draft Board display to show the picks in our snaking format.

- Standard Board will show the board the same as Snake Board except it will reorder each round to show the first pick in the round on the left progressing to the last pick on the right.

I recommend using either Snake Board or Standard Board to view the draft. The board also gives you the option to readjust the height or width of the pick slots and choose specifically what information displays for picks (player first name, last name, team, position and bye week)

Clicky Draft does have a chat room built in, just like ESPN. I will be setting up a video or audio conference of some kind for anyone to join if they’d like. Lockett has a phone conference from work we can sometimes use to call into. This worked really well for the March Madness draft we ran a few months ago. Skype might be another option or perhaps the group chat features on Facebook, which allow for group video or audio calls. If anyone has a preference, let me know.

Draft Order

1. Palting

2. Simmons

3. Butler

4. Wild

5. Bridenstine

6. Belka

7. Leon

8. Gaskin

9. Lockett

10. McAvoy

Check the league website for a live draft countdown… We’re very close to football. See you August 31st.