2012 Fantasy Football Rankings, Projections, and Cheatsheets

Top 30 Undervalued Fantasy Players

If you’re going to win your league, you need a few studs.  It also hits to hit a big keeper or two.  What really helps is being able to identify players being drafted a little too late right now, given their production and upside potential.  Using our rankings and a little ADP magic, we’ve come up with the top 30 undervalued players for standard scoring, 12-man leagues.

You’re probably wondering how we want you to use this.  Well, these are the guys we like that provide a lot of value for their draft position.  A lot of them are later picks.  If you keep them in mind as you draft, you can target drafting them in later rounds.  This gives you a “plan” as you draft in the earlier rounds.

Big takeaways:

Wait on a QB, a LITTLE at Least
We don’t like you grabbing the first 6 guys off the board.  Rivers actually made the top 50 undervalued, but really you should be targeting a guy like Romo/Ryan.  If you miss them, you might as well just wait a while and snag Freeman or Cassel in later rounds.

There is RB value throughout the draft
We’ve heard a few people insisting that you need to take 2 RB’s with your first two picks this year, because there are so few sure things.  Not true.  You just need to take enough running backs with upside, and one (or hopefully more), will turn out to be productive RB2′s.  We still want you taking a top RB with your first 6 picks, but they don’t come up on our undervalued board, because well, they’re worth every penny.  But hold off on your 2nd RB if you can.  There are plenty of guys like Mathews/Best in middle rounds, as well as some great value late.  Hell, you don’t even need to take a first round running back if you want to get McFadden/Gore/SJax in the 2nd.

WR’s are Deep, and in general are overvalued
There aren’t any big names on the WR list.  The NFL is so pass-heavy these days that it’s easy to have multiple receivers per team providing good value to the point where you might as well wait and draft the value later.

TE Value is concentrated at the beginning and end
Antonio Gates is far and away the top guy at the position and lands on our list, just because he’s being draft closely with the next tier.  Vernon Davis is a top talent who will see plenty of targets on that offense, and he’s going too far down the TE board.  Aside from that, there are a lot of great players in the 8-16 range.  Maybe not great, but certainly not a lot worse than the other ones.  You can easily grab a tight end as a reasonable starter in one of the last couple rounds.