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.

For the past three seasons, Wes Welker has been a reception machine for the Patriots.  His touchdowns may be few, but he’s averaged 115 catches and 1,229 yards since joining New England.

His torn ACL and MCL at the end of last season had many people skeptical of a timely and fully healthy return for 2010.  As a result, Welker was being drafted in the sixth round back in April, and his replacement, Julian Edelman, was being taken just a few draft picks after him.

However, as a continuous stream of good news of Welker’s recovery has come out of Foxboro, Welker and Edelmans’ ADP have slowly drifted apart, as shown in the graph below for 12-team, non-PPR leagues:

Welker is now being drafted at 4.03, and Edelman has plummetted to 10.03.

Welker has risen nearly back to his 2009 ADP, where he was being drafted in the mid-third round at 3.07.  Although he doesn’t appear to be back to 100% yet, he’s now being drafted as if he will be when Week 1 rolls around.

If you were hoping that you could snag him at a discount later in the draft while others were scared off by his injury, you’re too late.  You’ll have to pay full price to get him in your draft this year.

New on the site is a cool feature tied into the mock drafts.  You can now use Football Guys’ Rate My Team tool on any mock draft that you participate in.

Just enter your email address on step two of the mock draft signup page and then you’ll see a button inside your draftboard.  When the draft is over, click on that button and your team will be sent to the Rate My Team tool.  You’ll then get an email with a link to your automatically analyzed team.  All of the league settings will be pre-populated for you.  Analyzing your team will also sign you up for Football Guys’ informative daily email newsletter.

Check it out the next time you do a draft.  The analysis is extremely thorough and you’ll get tips on how your roster could be improved from multiple Football Guys experts.

What’s your wide receiver strategy?

If you’re like most other people this year, there is less emphasis on wide receivers in the first round and more emphasis on second round wide receivers.

Thanks to the archived ADP data, we can see that in 2009 for standard 12-team leagues, there were:

• 4 first round WRs
• 4 second round WRs

Fast forward to the 2010 ADP for 12-team standard leagues and we have:

• 3 first round WRs
• 6 second round WRs

The shift could be because people went too crazy with wide receivers last year.  The combination of increased passing and more RBBC in the NFL seems to have caused a mini wide receiver bubble last year.

The lesson from last year may have been that wide receivers are important, but they’re too risky to take in the first round.  The second round offers a much better value for that position this year.

PPR Mock Drafts are finally here!  Just head on to the mock draft page, and click on the PPR/Flex tab to see drafts that are being offered in that format.

It’s been by far the most requested addition, and you can rest now that it’s officially part of the site.

The scoring format for the PPR drafts also include a change to the starting lineup.  Instead of 3 WRs, it’s now 2 WRs and a RB/WR flex.  That kind of format seems to be one of the most popular, and fits well with the one point per reception.

The rankings for the PPR drafts are nearly identical to the standard drafts at the moment.  However, as more PPR drafts are conducted, the rankings for the PPR drafts will eventually reflect more accurate PPR rankings over the course of the next few days.

Also, the ADP page will show average draft positions for PPR/Flex drafts after a few days worth of data have been built up.

Lastly, premium members have the new PPR/Flex option in the Draft Calculator and Draft Simulator as well.  If you have one of those formats for your main league, you’ll now be able to more accurately practice with that draft format.

Have fun mocking!

The ADP graph is live again on the average draft position page.  You can use it to see how players have moved in ranking so far this year.

The graph of Lendale White’s ADP in 10-team leagues shows that he’s gone from an undrafted afterthought to viable RB sleeper.

Go ahead and play with it.  It’s going to be a fun year.

This morning, the site was upgraded to bigger, faster servers.  You may have noticed the site being sluggish lately, and that’s because traffic is higher at this point in the year than it ever has been before.  It seems like everyone wants to get a head-start with their mock drafts for 2010.

Since traffic varies so much over the course of a year, the site always gets a hardware upgrade just before the big draft season starts, and moves back to smaller hardware in the off-season.

The upgrade is complete now, and you can knock yourselves out with all the drafts that you want.  Feel free to contact me if you notice any issues or problems with the site.

Starting at about 9:30 PM EST, the mock draft frequency will double from one every five minutes to one every 2:30.  There’s an emphasis on the 10 and 12-team drafts which have been filling up pretty quickly.

Also, just about all of the drafted rookies from the first few rounds have been entered and assigned to their respective teams.  Ryan Matthews is already a fifth round pick, and he may be on his way up higher.  Get your mock on and get ready for 2010!