NFL Fantasy Football: This is the perfect time to hold your draft

As we head into the true Week 1 of the NFL preseason, it’s starting to become time to think about your Fantasy Football team, and that starts with planning your draft. Some leagues may already be holding their drafts after this weekend and the first preseason games. But there’s no need to rush. There’s an ideal time to hold your Fantasy draft.

The perfect time to hold your NFL Fantasy Football draft

Right now is a bit too early to start drafting players on your team. Let’s get through training camp. There are still inevitable injuries to occur and trades to make and rookies to watch and position battles to monitor. We need to see at least one preseason game before making any calls.

However, why watch just one when you could watch all three? The perfect time to hold your NFL Fantasy draft is indeed after the last preseason game and before the first regular season game.

Players can get injured at any time, of course. But it’d be an even bigger shame to hold an entire draft only to have one of your players get injured before the regular season even starts. Plus, you can get at least a small idea of who will be worth the risk and who won’t. Of course, that thinking can also be dangerous as preseason stars may flop completely come regular season and preseason flops may break out in the regular season. One just simply never knows.

A perfect time to hold the draft is Labor Day weekend - this year, that’s Friday, August 29-Monday, September 1. Everyone has a long weekend, preseason is over, regular season hasn’t started, and you pretty much know who is still healthy to start the season.

How late is too late to hold your fantasy football draft?

If you’re doing a season-long league and not just a daily, I would say you can pretty much hold your draft as late as the day before the regular season starts, but actually, most websites and applications have their own rules about this. It varies a bit, but the general rule is that you can start a season-long league as late as four weeks into the regular season.

At that point, I consider it cheating, but I digress. If for some reason, you never got around to it and you still want to play along with what’s left of the season, you can. After the four weeks though, most websites will cut you off and you’ll only be allowed to play daily fantasy football at that point. I don’t recommend starting after the regular season starts - it takes a lot of fun out of the draft and it makes your season even shorter.

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