Now that is one impressive looking draft board, fellas. Clearly, they are looking in awe at the brilliant pick that ended the the third round.

I did a guest post for The Hazean yesterday covering how to choose the right environment for your fantasy football draft. Read all about the pros and cons of each location at The Hazean.

Fantasy football drafts are a sacred thing, so you should always be mindful to have them on hallowed ground. With the right environment, you can establish the perfect balance of order and all out mayhem for your draft and league—assuring your name will go down in fantasy football history.

I somehow managed to reference both hookers and midgets in the same post without talking about midget hookers. I don’t know how I do it. It just comes off these fingers and onto the computer screen.

Last weekend, I asked all my Twitter followers what players ranked in the top 50 they didn’t want to touch in their fantasy football drafts.

I’m sure each one of you is hoarding some dark feelings towards one of the top 10 players in fantasy, but even knowing the hatred you hold in your hearts for some of the NFL’s best, I received a few curveballs in the responses. (Does that count as a mixed metaphor?)

So who does Twitter hate this season? Turns out they’re all running backs.

Brian Westbrook, Philadelphia Eagles RB
Current ADP: RB3, 3rd Overall

Brian Westbrook is not a hard man to dislike in fantasy football, and I am not even talking about that time he stopped short of an easy touchdown against the Cowboys last season. No matter what he does, Westbrook’s never good enough to please fantasy football fans when the draft comes around.

If you followed along with my recent expert draft, you saw me pass on taking a lot of depth at running back (RB) in the early rounds. Only in the later rounds did I really flesh out the RB position on my team.

Taking Tom Brady in the first round certainly didn’t help me snag several elite RBs, but he fell to me at the 10 spot. Come on, I had to do it.

In the first seven rounds, I only took two RBs, Ryan Grant in the second round and Jonathan Stewart in the fifth round.

I don’t hate the idea of taking two or three RBs at the beginning of your draft this year. In fact, I have in several mocks I’ll be posting about soon.

For a week now, I’ve been participating in an ongoing expert league draft put together by JunkyardJake.com. Other than a few small mocks, this draft is my first of the 2008 fantasy football season, and it’s also the earliest I have ever tried to put a team together for fantasy football.

Drafting this early is sort of like trying to sketch a picture of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s new twins before you’ve even seen them — and no, it’s not just hard because they still always look like stick figures. You know that it’s got to be some world-ending, judgment day kind of beauty when these fantasy studs come together in training camp, but without seeing it live and in-person, there’s still that level of unpredictability. Your rookie stud could burnout in training camp, your veteran’s injury could continue to flair up until he hits the PUP list and/or your sure-thing WR3 could get passed on the depth chart.

Last month, fellow fantasy football blogger The Hazean ran a two-round fantasy mock draft. (Round 1 and Round 2)

I’m not sure if some divine power of good — or most likely evil — took over after he posted it, but through some supernatural intervention, he was inspired to ask me for some analysis. A request for a critique? My tiny inner child jumped in pure excitement…before returning to the fetal position…and the crying.

Karma must be on our side, and I must immediately do something to correct that.

Rather than bust out the entire draft by teams to grade, I decided instead to take specific picks that I felt were reaches or steals to highlight.

Of course, these reaches/steals are based on my esteemed opinion, and the Fools always hear that we all are entitled to one. Until we can demand licenses for them, I’m being kind and also taking into consideration that we are looking at things one month later here.

Now that players have settled into their teams for 2008 — overlooking the few free agents still bouncing from workout to workout — it’s time to start preparing your draft cheat sheets and practicing your draft strategy with a few mocks.

Tiering your draft sheet is one very effective method of drafting a batch of strong contenders that I swear by — profusely. By tiering, you get a leg up on your fellow drafters.

Some fantasy football sites and sources will tier their cheat sheets for you. Whether you trust one source’s rankings or want to combine several intel sources into one power sheet (like I do), it’s always best to look over your draft notes and adjust the tiers based on updated info and/or any personal, gut feelings — that better be really strong to be considered better than mine.