Fantasy Football Magazines Are Evil

or What do you mean he’s out for the season?

Buying fantasy football magazines is one of the best investments you can make. Not exactly the first sentence you expected in an article detailing the evils of these rags, huh? It is important to understand where I’m coming from, though. The odds are that 70-90% of the owners in your draft will be using these outdated bird cage liners, and in order to maximize the value you get at every pick, you have to know what value other owners are placing on their players. Once you’ve done that, hang on to your wasted tree, and see how far off it will be when the NFL season closes. Without trivializing the difficulty of projecting stats, it has to be noted how appallingly inaccurate these issues are due to inherent flaws in their creation process.

First, there are a few good things about fantasy football magazines that need to be noted. Usually, there are some insightful articles on the intricacies of fantasy football, and often times, there is a good list of last year’s stats. Unfortunately, these can be had (often times for free) from several places all over the internet. I say unfortunately because so many unknowing lemmings throw money at these publications to satisfy their need to conform to the old standards. They don’t realize that the copy they are reading isn’t worth the ink used to write it, and the problems with these magazines could be their draft day downfall.

The most obvious problem with this antiquated method of filling out a fantasy football roster is the age of the data. Unlike the internet, print media has deadlines it has to meet. Most fantasy football magazines are in printing by June, well before many rookies have signed, veterans have restructured their contracts, and final personnel moves have been made. Without this knowledge, creating an accurate cheat sheet isn’t next to impossible; it is impossible. On top of this, football is a brutal sport that looses players, often times stars, every preseason. Blindly entering a draft without knowledge of these issues is fantasy football suicide. Without a doubt someone will waste a high pick on a player that never plays a down of regular season football because they will go straight down their cheat sheet trusting their magazine as though it were the holy inspired word of God.

Not only is the info they provide outdated, their rankings are rubber stamped, unimaginative, and often times just plain boring. The magazines don’t have the guts to make a call on a player that goes against the main stream. From a business standpoint, this makes sense. It’s bad marketing to not have the consensus top ten players ranked as your top ten. With the ridiculous amount of magazines to choose from, an uninformed consumer may look through four or five magazines and leave one at the counter because the cheat sheet was unconventional. The number one goal of fantasy football magazines isn’t to help you win your league. The number one goal of a fantasy football magazine is to sell copies.

Until fantasy football magazines step up and make some serious changes to the way they are operated, they will remain the evil that holds down the average fantasy football owner. Times have changed, but fantasy football magazines have refused to change with them making them the last dinosaur of this great hobby. So buy a magazine for competitive research, but get a real fantasy football draft tool to make your picks.

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