Homework, but the fun kind
Never played before? Start with the four cards marked start here and stop. That's genuinely enough to draft a competitive team. Everything below that is for people who want to go deeper.
The one site to use if you only use one. It averages rankings from dozens of experts into a consensus board, and the free printable cheat sheet is already set to half PPR at this link.
Yahoo's own rankings and projections are built into the league you already joined, and they're tuned to our exact scoring settings. Free, decent, and zero setup.
Free rankings, positional tiers, and a huge library of beginner-friendly articles. Good second opinion when FantasyPros and Yahoo disagree on a player.
Grades every player on every snap. The free content is solid; the paid tier is where the deep target and route data lives. For the curious, not the casual.
Long-running projection shop with strong accuracy records and useful strength-of-schedule tools. Mostly subscription, but the free articles are worth a read.
The old guard. Deep player-by-player write-ups and staff rankings that explain the reasoning instead of just handing you a number. Their free daily newsletter is genuinely worth the inbox space.
Plain-English walkthrough of drafting, lineups, waivers, and trades. Read this one first if the whole thing feels like a foreign language.
A community-written beginner guide plus the busiest fantasy forum anywhere. The daily "who do I start" threads are surprisingly useful in-season.
The biggest fantasy podcast, and the friendliest to newcomers. Their preseason draft-prep episodes will get you dangerous in a week of commutes.
Where players typically get picked across thousands of real drafts. The single best tool for knowing whether you can wait a round on someone.
Fastest free injury feed with practice participation for every team. Check it Friday afternoon and again 90 minutes before kickoff.
Who is actually starting, updated constantly. When a starter goes down, this tells you which backup to grab off waivers before anyone else does.
Feed it two players and it tells you which one the experts favor this week. Settles most lineup arguments in about ten seconds.
The raw box scores and career stats behind everyone else's analysis. Free, ad-light, and the place to settle a factual argument at the dinner table.
Advanced metrics — target share, snap counts, opportunity — with free player pages. Useful for spotting a breakout before the rankings catch up.
Daily newsletter that packages the week's news into something readable in five minutes. Good if you want to stay current without living on Twitter.