Drafting your fantasy football team is a very exciting time for all fantasy football owners. As you begin your draft, you look at the players you are selecting through the first 3-4 rounds and think you are building the best dynasty in the league. As you get into the later rounds, however, you begin to struggle through your selections and the owners who have failed to put the needed research and practice into their planning will generally stand out in a very bad way. Proper planning of your fantasy football drafts, if you want to win, consists of plenty player research and the following of a lot of NFL related news. Just as important to all of these things is practice, and the only way a fantasy football owner can practice for the upcoming season is via mock drafts.

Normally, I start participating in mock drafts in early June and continue them constantly all the way through training camp up until the time I have completed all of my real fantasy football league drafts. These drafts are done online with different people each time, which allows me to face several different scenarios. How does this help? Most importantly, it gives you a very good idea regarding where all of the players you are targeting can most likely be drafted. As you look at different websites for player rankings, as well as making your own fantasy football player rankings, you realize that these lists are much different from one site to another. All of the people you are doing these mock drafts with are studying the same material that you are studying. The mock draft is where it all comes together. It allows you to see just where those later round sleeper picks you are targeting are most likely to fall when it comes time to draft for real.

There are several places to participate in mock drafts. We host them here at SportsOutlaw.com, as do other fantasy football websites. My favorite place to participate in mock drafts currently is AntSports. AntSports has put together an amazing mock draft system. What's even better is that they take it one step further by combining the mock draft results into a database that shows the average draft position of all the fantasy football players you are targeting according to position, draft type, and other factors. If you haven't yet participated in mock drafts, give them a try and you will find that they are very beneficial to your success in the great sport of fantasy football.