Bad news.  The cat is out of the bag for several sleeper picks this year.  Make sure you don’t wait too long to snag one of these fast-rising players.

The data below are from 12-team standard-scoring ADP from Sept. 2nd and Sept. 3rd, 2011.

Tim Hightower

He’s got a hold on the starting running back job.  If he can just keep a hold on the football, he could put up his best year ever.

Six weeks ago, Hightower’s ADP was in the 13th round.  Now he’s being drafted at the end of round 5. The Washington offense isn’t going to put up huge numbers this year though, so his upside is limited a bit.

Mike Tolbert

Any way you break down the stats from last year, Tolbert was more productive than Ryan Matthews.  All signs point to a similar year again in the San Diego backfield.  Only this time, most people have caught on and you’ll actually have to spend a 7th round draft pick on Tolbert.

Mario Manningham

The Giants’ receiving corp has been in flux for the past few years, and it can be hard to keep track of who’s got the hot hand.  Hakeem Nicks is the obvious leader, but his ADP is in the 2nd round.  Mario Manningham could end up being a much better value than Nicks this year.

Manningham started slow in 2010, but over the last three games he averaged 5.3 catches, 115 yards, and 1.3 touchdowns.  He’s a late fifth-round pick with a lot of upside.

Philadelphia Defense

And finally, the biggest fantasy draft pick that benefited from free-agency is… the Philadelphia Defense.  After they signed Nnamdi Asomugha and traded for Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, the Philly D rocketed up 5 rounds to become the #3 fantasy defense by ADP.

With the best cornerbacks in the league, they’ll surely put a stop to the big passing plays they allowed last year.  But will they have much more of a fantasy impact than cutting the points per game allowed?

Last year, Philadelphia was already 3rd in the league in defensive interceptions with 23.  How many can they expect to have this year, 50?  Yes, the improved pass coverage can give the D-line more time to cause sacks (and fumbles).  And maybe they’ll get an additional pick-6 or two.

The problem is that good fantasy defenses aren’t always good in real-life also.  Last year, the #1 fantasy defense was the Arizona Cardinals, who were near the bottom of the league in points allowed per game.  Also, the Raiders were the 3rd-best fantasy defense, and they were an average defense at best.

But wait… didn’t both of those teams have their #1 cornerback sign with the same team this past off-season?  Which team was that again…

Good news for you drafters who prefer old-fashioned pen and paper.  The ADP now comes in a printable PDF!

This new feature is available to all premium members.  Every format and league size of ADP now has a link that will generate a color-coded, draftboard-style, 1-page PDF for you.  Here is an example PDF, and below is a small thumbnail of what it looks like:

If you’re the kind of person who prefers to check off names as they’re selected in a draft, then give the printable ADP a chance.  Sign up for a premium membership to get instant access to the PDFs.

It’s time to get up to speed on your signal callers.  This edition of the Fantasy Football Calculator Average Draft Position update will highlight a trend that you need to be aware of.  Many early and late-round quarterbacks are rising in ADP.  If you’re targeting a specific quarterback, he may be drafted sooner than you expect.

(All graphs below use data from 12-team mock drafts, with the most recent update on Sunday, August 21st.)

Late-round Risers

Some of the biggest risers are the young guns Matthew Stafford and Sam Bradford.  They have moved out of the backup fantasy QB role and are now being considered as low-end QB1s as the 12th and 14th QBs taken off of the board.

Another late-round pick that’s getting more popular is Kevin Kolb.  He’s the 15th QB off the board in round 10.  Considering that he has Larry Fitzgerald to throw to, expectations still seem somewhat low for the unproven quarterback.

Early-round Risers

Not only are late-round sleepers climbing out of the cellar, but stud QBs are becoming even more expensive as well.  Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, and Tom Brady are all showing increases in ADP:

Is Anyone Falling?

Yes, there are some quarterbacks who are actually falling in the drafts.  Peyton Manning, due to his latest neck injury concerns, is the most notable quarterback falling in the drafts.  He’s now slipped into the beginning of the fourth round.

In addition to Manning, Jay Cutler and Joe Flacco are getting cheaper to draft every day.  The change in their ADP may be due to lack of upside.  They’ve been passed up by Stafford and Bradford, who both have higher ceilings.

Draft Them Early!

Regardless of who you’re targeting as your fantasy QB, he’s probably increasing in value.  Keep an eye on his ADP and make sure you know when to pull the trigger.

Today, the site had significant server upgrades to help handle the high traffic of the upcoming season.  It was also the final step of switching over from Amazon hosting over to Linode.  This is in response to the issues described in my post about downtime back in April.  The site is now on more reliable hardware and takes more frequent off-site backups.

However, most of the day today had glitches due to software bugs with the mock drafts and premium applications that were caused by the upgrade.  Those issues have now all been fixed, and it looks like everything is running smoothly.  I apologize for the bugs that happened today.

Anyway, this is hopefully the last administrative blog post I’ll need to write this year.  With this migration complete, there should be more time for traditional fantasy football related posts in the near future.

To celebrate the end of the lockout, the mock drafts now have a new, highly-requested feature: hide players that have already been drafted.  The checkbox to toggle that setting can be found above the list of players:

This should greatly help out people doing drafts from mobile devices that can’t scroll down the list of players.  As a reminder, if you’re on an iPad, here are the instructions on how to scroll the players list on the iPad.

This option will roll out to the Draft Calculator and Draft Simulator soon.

Let the fantasy football season begin!

If you’re a regular mock drafter, you’re already aware that Fantasy Football Calculator has had an extended downtime of more than 36 hours.  Although we’re far from the peak mock draft season of August, that type of outage is not acceptable.  I’m sorry that you haven’t been able to do mock drafts during this time.

Here is an explanation of what happened, and what the plan is to prevent this from happening again in the future:

Cause of the downtime

Fantasy Football Calculator has been hosted on Amazon Web Services for the past 3 years.  Their track record has been great in that time, with only a few problems here and there.  If you have experienced any technical issues with the website in the past, it was most likely not Amazon’s fault, and was an issue with scaling the website to handle the high traffic that it’s been receiving in recent years.

On April 21st, Amazon started reporting problems, primarily with their Elastic Block Storage (EBS) product, which FFC uses for it’s database storage.  Many other larger companies, such as Reddit and Netflix use this technology as well and reported that they were affected by it to varying degrees.  You can read Amazon’s description of what happened on it’s status page, and I won’t bore you with the technical details here.  Anyways, Amazon finally resolved the issues that affected FFC’s database, and the website came back online at 3:45PM EST April 23rd.  No data was lost and everything is back to normal.

Prevention and future plans

FFC has regular backups in place, but this outage prevented us from restoring from them because they relied on Amazon’s EBS technology that was disabled during this period.  The last off-site backup was taken a month ago.   Just before the site was restored today, another off-site backup was made.

Obviously, more frequent off-site backups need to be taken.  If that had been in place, FFC could have been restored from one of those, and that would have reduced the downtime significantly.

Also, in the near future, FFC will move away from Amazon’s EBS technology completely because it has proven to be unreliable.  It offers a lot of nice features, but with problems like this, it can’t be trusted.

Lastly, FFC may stop using Amazon for hosting completely and switch to another company, such as Linode.  One of the features keeping FFC on Amazon was EBS.  If that is no longer being used, then alternative hosting companies may be better options.

Summary

• FFC experienced about 2 days worth of downtime, which is unacceptable.
• It was due to a large problem with Amazon’s web hosting services that affected many other companies as well
• The plan is to stop using the specific product that failed (EBS) and make more frequent off-site backups
• FFC may switch away from Amazon hosting completely

To make up for the downtime, key rookies will be added to the database this weekend so that you can draft them before they’re drafted in the real NFL draft next week!  The bye weeks will be updated to reflect the recently released NFL schedule as well.

Again, I’m sorry that this happened. Feel free to leave comments or contact me if you have any questions.

[Edit - August 1, 2011]: The site has been moved off of Amazon’s EBS technology and off of Amazon’s hosting completely.  It’s now on Linode.  See the blog post about the migration here.

The first average draft position update for 2011 is out!

Below is a list of the top 15 overall players.  You can view the full data on the ADP page.

Not surprisingly, Arian Foster shot up the list and is currently tied with Adrian Peterson for the first overall pick.

Andre Johnson, Calvin Johnson, and Roddy White are the first wide receivers being taken off the board.  Although Andre Johnson is still the #1 receiver, he has dropped from last year when he was being taken at 1.06 on average.  For comparison, you can view the 2010 ADP data on the historical view of the ADP page.

The top quarterback right now is Michael Vick, coming off of his huge comeback year in 2010.  If you want to draft him, you’re going to have to snag him early in the second round.

Of course, these rankings will probably change after the NFL draft and during free agency, so make sure to check the ADP often.

For the third year in a row, wide receivers with 90+ receptions outnumbered running backs with 300+ carries.

Continuing the analysis from 2009 and 2008, below is an updated graph showing the number of high-use WRs and RBs each year:

In 2007, there was a monumental shift that favored stud WRs over stud RBs.  This continued trend is at the heart of why there are so many second round WRs being targeted this year.  If you leave the first two rounds without a stud WR, you may be at a disadvantage.

The WR is the new RB, and it may stay that way for quite a while.

If you’re one of the lucky people out there who owns an iPad, you’ll be happy to hear that you can do a mock draft your iPad.  It doesn’t require any special apps either.  Just sign up for a draft normally on the mock draft page, and you can use the same draft room as non-magical computers would.

There is one tricky part though.  The iPad has different touch controls for navigating lists, so to scroll through the list of players, you need to scroll with two fingers, not just one.  See the picture below for how it’s done:

It takes a little adjustment at first, but it soon gets pretty easy.

The Draft Calculator got two big improvements in the past few days.  You can now enter the name for every team in the draft, and also undo draft picks.

Enter All Team Names

This was a highly requested feature, and now your draftboard is even easier to follow.  Enter the name for every team in your draft so that you can remember who is at each draft spot.

Undo Last Pick

Another requested feature was the ability to undo the last pick.  Sometimes fat fingers cause incorrect picks when you have to enter every one, and now you can undo your mistake.

For those of you who are premium members, you have access to this now.  If you’re not yet a premium member, you’ve now got two more reasons to upgrade. You can sign up by going to the membership page.