Still Here, Plans for off-season

Sorry I have been absent for the last few weeks - to make a long story short, never get into the rental housing market. Or put more clearly, never buy a rental property that is situated on ground that makes Heinz Field in December look stable. So after paying a boatload of money to a foundation repair company and fixing about 100 drywall cracks, I am ready to return to my true love - fantasy football.

For the off-season, here is what I plan to do -

1. Enter all the 2006 game data into my database. I currently have 2007 and (most of) 2008, so this will give me three year's of data, which I think will be good for projection baselines.

1a. Speaking of projections, I will write one or two articles patting myself on the back for 2008 projections - for instance my sleeper list from before the season has a lot of great names on it, in hindsight.

1b. I will also look for projections where I was way, way, wrong (Joseph Addai, anyone?) and see if we can learn anything from it.

2. Try to get the projection system to start spitting out 2009 projections by the time free agency starts, so I can easily make adjustments as players switch teams. This includes an easy interface to change a player's projected playing time, which could happen with free agency movement or with coaching changes.

3. Post the first set of projections shortly after the draft, giving more time during training camp to peruse camp stories and make tweaks to the ratings.

4. Figure out how many weeks of the season to use for projections. For example, in week 10 of the season, is a team's projected defensive performance indicated by an equal weighting of their performance in the first 9 weeks, or should more recent weeks be weighted more heavily?

5. Make the in-season weekly rankings spit out of the projection system more easily, so it becomes more of a cut-and-paste job to put them on the web site, so I can have more time to write quasi-interesting articles instead of being a slave to getting rankings done by the end of the week. This also includes the ability to tell the database that a player is on IR so I don' t have to remember to delete Nate Burleson every week.

On the subject of the projection/ranking software, I have a dream of it some day being a program that people would actually want to pay for, but it won't be there in 2009. However, I might be interested in giving an early version of the software to a handful of beta testers for the 2009 season. If you are interested, drop me a line.