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Step 1
During the draft: Plan ahead and select your ideal and realistic team. I say realistic because you'll be drafting in rounds with up to 11 other people, so you'll never be able to have the top 10 players all on your team. Base your selection off of the typical yahoo or espn pre-season rankings.
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Step 2
Also during the draft, make sure you take a look at each player and team's bye weeks. (The week that specific team has a day off). If you select to players, all who have bye weeks at the same time, when that bye week rolls around, you're almost guaranteed to lost that matchup.
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Step 3
Each week, keep track of how your team is performing. Read the news about your specific players, and if there are any injuries or possible reasons why a person may not play the next week, make sure you have replacements or drop them and pick up a player that is not yet on a fantasy team in your league.
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Step 4
Try to watch the players on your team on television, if possible. Access how they move and perform, and if they just look sluggish (i.e. Shaun Alexander in 2007), don't be afraid to drop them for someone else.
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Step 5
Some leagues offer "Recent Activity" meters, showing which player is being picked up or dropped the most that week. Players can be "hot" for many reasons: maybe they have an injury, so obvious people will drop them off their team, or maybe someone is taking the place of someone is injured who was on the bench until then. The Recent Activity meter becomes your best method to find hot players that you can add to your roster.
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Step 6
If you need to make changes to your roster, do so on Tuesday morning, after the Monday night game. This will give you the greatest edge over the other players in your pool, as you'll have the first pick of who is hot and not already on a team.
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Step 7
When selecting your roster each week, make sure you check out which teams are against who. For example, if you have the Green Bay Packer defense and the Dallas Cowboy Quarterback or Running Back, you're clashing two of your roster spots. If the Cowboys do well, you earn points with them, but lose points for your GB defense. If the GB defense does well, you get points with them, but not the Cowboys. See how that works? If possible, try and drop some of your bench players to open up spots so you don't clash your own roster.
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Step 8
Keep a close eye on injury updates. A lot of times, players can be injured before the season, or during the middle of the season, and will not be assigned to any team. Of course! Who would want an injured guy on their team? Well, if the injury report says a certain star player is due back on the field in 2 weeks, maybe you should think about picking that player up now before it's too late.
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Step 9
If your league is a "Point per reception" league, if you have open running back spots, see if you can pickup a running back that gets thrown to a lot as well. These are easy points that can be the difference between a win and a loss. To find out which RBs to pick, you can use the weekly "high reception" or "looks" report that yahoo and/or espn usually supply each week.
