One of the things fantasy coaches always look for in national AFL drafts is the mature age player: a player who for whatever reason comes into the league significantly older than the 17 to 18 years of age that is the norm among AFL draftees. Think Darren Pfeiffer from last year’s draft, or Alwyn Davey of a couple of seasons ago. There are a handful of young men who fit the bill this year who should factor into your decisions. (more…)

Whodathunkit, it turns out that the media gets it right once in a while. The much-hyped late switch of Fremantle’s #3 pick from Daniel Rich to Stephen Hill took place as advertised, leaving Brisbane to get an early Christmas present. Those poor old stupid Dockers, when will they ever learn?! (more…)

We won’t have the official Champion Data player classifications until the AFL Prospectus comes out in January, but it’s possible to take some educated guesses at what the top draft prospects will be based on Champion’s own guidelines… so let’s cross-reference a projected list with my recent post on rookies’ first one and three games to look for some value. (more…)

I’ve been assuming for the purposes of the Fanplanner feature on FanFooty that draftees and rookies playing their first game of senior AFL football are going to score 50 fantasy points… let’s look at some historical data to see if that’s true. (more…)

As Barack Obama prepares to take over as the next US President from George W. Bush, there are a few more power shifts on the minds of fantasy coaches this off-season, with older players looking like they will give up their spots in the senior 22 to younger upstarts… with a few at the Power! (more…)

This is something I’ve been working on for a while now, and thinking about for even longer. FanFooty Guru is a set of numbers published for each round of the AFL home & away system giving a prediction of each selected player’s Dream Team and Super Coach fantasy point scoring for the week. They are now showing up in the Fanplanner pages and will be a regular feature of our Exteam and live scoring pages in future. (more…)

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…)

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…)

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…)