Following on from the team trends post earlier this week, and echoing a successful post from February about a 2008 Super Coach team structure, I thought it might be helpful to give an overview of how a fair few of the Fanplanner plan teams are being structured in terms of the distribution of premiums, mid-price players and rookies.

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Sometimes you can congratulate yourself for zigging when others are zagging when it comes to fantasy footy, be it though luck or good planning… or a bit of both. (more…)

One of the advantages I have in giving you fantasy coaches out there advice on who to pick up is being able to watch player popularity in the FanFooty Fanplanner feature, which is now running hot with coaches testing out different plan teams in preparation for the 2009 season using approximations of their actual prices and salary caps for the Dream Team and Super Coach competitions. (more…)

One of the less well understood aspects of the move to 17th and 18th teams in the AFL - with Gold Coast scheduled to debut in 2011 and Western Sydney possibly the year after - is how it is going to affect fantasy competitions.

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Fantasy coaches look at the AFL draw a little differently to normal football fans. We don’t particularly care about how many interstate trips each team gets, whether they start with a home game or how many times we have to play at the new Jihad (sorry, Etihad) Stadium. For 2009, what we were most worried about was round 1: were the AFL going to schedule two Thursday night games to kick off the season as they did last year starting at 6.10pm AEST, which in conjunction with the 5pm cutoff for round 1 teams to be published led to the now-infamous 70 minutes of madness?

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After asking for comments on the concept of AFL depth charts in my last post, I decided to go ahead and construct charts for each AFL team. With the help of posters at BigFooty in a thread on the subject, I think the charts are fairly accurate now for most teams. (more…)

Those of you fantasy nuts out there who are interested in American sports are well into the fantasy giridron season, with the NFL into week 6, with baseball just finishing up and basketball about to start again. One of the features that is a staple of fantasy analysis in the States is the team depth chart, and I’m wondering if something like that would be useful for Australian fantasy coaches. (more…)

A rather underwhelming trade week is over for 2008, with only six trades made. Let’s go through each of them and look for value in the manner of Jordan McMahon, Martin Mattner and Brad Symes from this year. (more…)

The Eagles are one of the teams I expect to see using the cluster to great advantage, especially in playing against it. Subiaco is not all that suited to the cluster due to the wide wings, and the Eagles historically have had no problem playing that chip-chip game spotting up leading targets along the wings in home games so it shouldn’t hold that many fears for them. I was disappointed that the Eagles couldn’t continue their 400-possession-per-game style this year but I expect them to get somewhere near that again next year - not necessarily winning a lot of those games, but certainly embracing the new high-possession norm with open arms. (more…)

This has to be the most disappointing team of 2008 for me. Flying at 15 and 1 or something ridiculous when they played the Cats, then copped one bad quarter in that game and didn’t give a yelp for the rest of the season. Serious issues in their leadership group, I think. All that crap with rebuking Aker for being Aker, that didn’t sit right with me. It was amazing how they all dropped their heads after that one quarter and gave up on the season, just about. (more…)