Skunk Sports kicks off, and the NFL Fantasy Season 2017 is Almost Here!

Though my wife may disagree, it's an exciting time of year in the Skunk house. The new NFL fantasy season is about to begin! With my home league PPR draft already completed and another PPR draft coming on Monday evening, I've been completing my research, adjusting my rankings, and crystallizing my opinions on just about every fantasy-relevant NFL player who survived final cuts. My early round of posts will focus entirely on the upcoming NFL fantasy season as there isn't a lot of time left before the games start to matter and all of our hard work and tough draft choices start to either pay off, or leave us pounding the couch in disgust. Obviously, I've started things off too late for all the pre-season rankings and write-ups to matter for anybody's actual draft, especially since my page has had exactly 0 views so far. Still, I want to post all the requisite pre-season information for posterity and review both during and after the season. Let's see how useful this info could have been if anybody had actually been reading it before their own draft.

First, though, a little about me. My name is Dan Thompson and I've used the Skunk moniker since AOL was still called America Online and the aggravating tones of dial-up could be heard across the country. I presently live in Chicago with my awesome wife Andrea and my future fantasy co-owner; son Henry. I've played fantasy sports for almost 20 years now, with a fair amount of success. In real life, I work in university financial aid, but in fantasy life, I'm an avid consumer of sports and play in baseball and football fantasy leagues, SimLeague Baseball on whatifsports.com and various NFL confidence pools and pick-'ems.

On the baseball side of things, I play in a 22-team standard 5x5 mixed roto auction league that has been around since 1989. We can also keep up to 12 players each year with a contract system that allows a player to stay on your roster for up to 6 years. I started playing in 2003. It's a tough league to win because of its depth and the contract/keeper system, but I did finally break through with a league championship in 2014 and then again last year in 2016. As we wind down 2017, it's a two-horse race at the top so I'm currently fighting it out for 3rd, which isn't a bad finish considering the level of cheap talent I had to trade away last year to win (Aaron Judge, George Springer, Aaron Nola, and Adam Duvall amongst them). It's a cyclical league so finishing 1st, 1st, and 3rd in a four-year span would be a nice accomplishment. After my recent run of success, the keeper cupboard is bare, so a rebuilding phase will begin in 2018.

For football, I play in two 12-team PPR leagues; my home league with friends and a league of guys from New York state that my brother got me hooked up with last year. Both are relatively competitive for amateur leagues. I won the home league 3 consecutive times from 2012-2014, but haven't found the same level of success the past few seasons. Last year, my first in the New York league, I finished with most points and best record but was ousted in my first playoff match-up in Week 15.

While I would hardly consider myself an expert, I've done a reasonably good job with rankings and projections for MLB and NFL fantasy leagues and enjoyed the benefits for myself, so I figured, why not put my opinions, ideas, philosophies, rankings, projections, theories, and general fantasy banter out there for everyone else to see. If there's one thing the fantasy sports world needs more of, it's another idiot's useless opinions, right? Well, you're getting them anyway. Buckle up...