Fantasy football is one of the most commonly played games in the United States. 

It is usually played between friends, family, and coworkers every football season, and the majority of fantasy football platforms are available to use for free. 

The best part about fantasy football is that football fans and non-football fans alike can all play and both be just as good too.

There are countless tools to use on the internet for free that people can use to gain an edge this year in their fantasy football league. 

We will go through some of the best tools and options in this article below.

Fantasy Cheat Sheets

Player Cheat Sheets

Most people who play fantasy football don’t know every single player that will be drafted in their fantasy league, let alone how each player should be ranked in various formats that their league could have. 

There are tons of options out there that will rank players based on how they are projected to perform based on the different popular scoring systems that leagues could have.

ESPN has one of the biggest free fantasy football websites that millions of people play on each year. 

They also have some of the best free tools as well that anyone can use even if they are not a part of an ESPN fantasy league. 

Below you can see a snapshot of just some of the free player cheat sheets that can be downloaded directly from ESPN.

Bye Week Cheat Sheets 

Knowing the bye week of the players on your fantasy team is crucial. 

You don’t want to draft two quarterbacks that have the same bye week or two tight ends either. 

This can greatly affect the way that you draft your team and who you take at certain positions. It can also be something to look out for when trying to complete a trade. 

There are strategies to draft players that have the same bye week as well so your team will essentially give in one week of the season, but you will have a full-strength roster for the rest of the following weeks. 

The cheat sheet for player’s bye weeks on Fantasy Pros even shows the positional rank of each player as well. 

You can check this out down below as they have this breakdown for each week during the NFL season where there is at least one team on a bye.

Trade Value Charts

Trading in fantasy football can be extremely tough. 

Every owner wants to feel like they are not getting ripped off and most owners will overvalue their players when offering a trade to another team. 

Besides looking at their current stats during the season, there is not much else that anyone can look at to decide if the trade they are offering or are being offered is of fair value.

While most standard leagues that are redrafted every year will commonly have very few trades, it is more common to have trades in dynasty or keeper leagues. 

This is where owners will want to have some kind of ranking or chart that shows each player’s value. 

Fantasy Pros has a great trade value chart for leagues such as this that is shown below in the screenshot from their quarterback rankings.

Trade Value Analyzers/Calculators 

An easy way to find the value of a trade that has been offered to you or a trade that you are offering is to use one of the many fantasy football trade calculators that are available on the internet. 

Most of these calculators will work on a system where each player has a current trade value that is ever-changing based on their recent performances during the year. 

Rototrade is a website that is dedicated to their fantasy football calculator. 

They give a ton of options to people using this calculator to find out if their trade is of fair value. 

Users of the calculator can sort by things such as a redraft or dynasty league, PPR league value, two quarterback leagues, and even package deals that offer varying amounts of players on each side of the deal.

Depth Charts

Depth charts are a pivotal part of fantasy football. 

For the most part you will only want to play the players that are starting in your fantasy football such as the starting quarterback or one of the three starting wide receivers. 

To get this information you don’t even need to go to a fantasy football website. ESPN has updated depth charts directly on the team page for each NFL franchise. 

This page for every team will show who the current starter is at each position as well as their backups. 

Handcuffing running backs is a popular option for fantasy owners who draft the backup running back to a starter. 

Looking at depth charts is a great way to find these handcuffs and who could be in line for the majority of the running back snaps in the case of an injury.

Team Grader Tools

Most people want to know how their team will stack up against others as the season is about to kickoff or even in the middle of the year. 

Some fantasy websites will give users a grade for their draft immediately after it is done, but other sites won’t do that. 

Thankfully there are some other grading tools around the internet that will grade your current roster for you. 

To use most of these websites you will have to fill out some necessary information about the league that you are in. 

This is information such as how many teams are in the league and the scoring format. 

Next, you will need to add every single player you have rostered to get the most accurate grade based on their system. 

Fantasy Owner has one of the best and most in-depth team grader tools. 

They will give you feedback on your roster based on a ton of different aspects. Some of those are the overall team, starters, and depth. 

They also will grade every player on your roster such as how your WR1 stacks up against WR1’s but also how your WR5 stacks up against other WR5s, which can be valuable feedback.

Player Comparison Tools

Player comparisons can be extremely useful during the season. 

Each week there are questions on what player you should start at various positions. 

This especially comes into play when looking at the flex position in fantasy football as commonly a running back, wide receiver, or tight end can be the player that can be used in that spot making for tons of potential options.

The easiest way to decide this is based on the fantasy site you are using and what their projection will be for each player in question that week. 

Another way is to use a free tool such as Fantasy Pros sit and start tool. This can compare players and gives you a recommendation on who to play based on all of their expert’s rankings.

Team Name Generator

Making a good team name obviously isn’t going to affect the way your team plays, but it is a fun way to show your personality with your team and make your friends laugh. 

Making a team name should be fairly easy to come up with but to get some ideas or find one, it can be done with a team name generator. 

These can have different categories or adjectives added to them or they can also just be completely random. It is a good way to get a quality fantasy football name fast.

Mock Draft Simulator

Fantasy football mock drafts are important for people who are looking to get ready for their fantasy football draft. 

It gives a real-life fantasy draft that people can partake in to see how each team would go about drafting a specific full roster. 

Sometimes these mock drafts can take a long time, however. 

Also, people will want to do a ton of them on occasion to get a good sample size of what a draft will actually look like. 

This is where the mock draft simulators will come into play. These essentially just need to get set up how the league will be and then a button needs to be clicked to spit out a full mock draft in seconds. 

This mock draft simulator from Rotowire has an auto-draft option that will return a full mock draft after that button is clicked on the top right.

Draft Assistant

Draft assistant tools can be connected to your fantasy football draft directly. 

This will give you in-draft tips on what position or even player to take when your pick comes up. 

These offer another opinion besides your own on what you should do with the current pick. 

It can definitely be insightful as they commonly will bring up specific stats or strategies that back up why that should be the pick in that spot. 

Pick Predictor

Pick predictor is a tool that probably many people haven’t heard of. 

This tool will actually predict the odds that a player still on the board will be available by the time your next pick comes up. 

This is a great way to know if you could pass on that player until the next round or a great way to get ready for your upcoming pick as well. 

Before a pick predictor, this was essentially just based on the ADP of the player from other drafts. 

Draft Analyzer

Draft analyzers will give fantasy players what they want to know immediately after they have finished a draft. 

That is how they did and how their team is projected to do for the season. There are draft analyzer tools out there that will break all of this down for you following your draft. 

Draft Wizards 

DraftWizard is an app that helps you with all things fantasy football draft. 

This gives you a full suite of tools to use that break down everything that you could think of that would be helpful to know while you are drafting.

Draft Kits

Fantasy football draft kits are full breakdowns of everything you will need to know heading into the actual draft you are about to do. 

Most of these are free and give a comprehensive breakdown to the drafter on full player and position rankings, sleepers, cheat sheets and more.

ADP Comparison Tool

The best way to get a full look at the average draft position of a player is to look at that across a bunch of the top sites for fantasy football. 

Fantasy Pros does just that with their ADP rankings, which include some of the top sites as you can see from the screenshot below. 

This way you can get an idea of players that may be going later than they should be on other sites to identify some sleeper picks.

Strength of Schedule Tools

Knowing a player’s strength of schedule can be pivotal before the season. 

This means knowing how hard the schedule will be for a certain player based on the position they play and who they will have to face during the fantasy football season. 

Some of the top players may have a brutally tough schedule while other players could have favorable matchups almost all year long.

NFL Nextgen Stats 

Looking at Nextgen stats is truly getting into the weeds of fantasy football. 

This turns you from an average fantasy football player to a true NFL scout from behind the computer or phone. 

The Nextgen stats break down things such as analyzing specific trends and player performance based on certain situations. 

These can be searched for free online and may find some stats that truly stick out enough to boost or lower a player’s grade for fantasy football.

Fantasy Podcasts

There are a ton of fantasy football podcasts nowadays. 

They started out years ago but there were only a handful of ones that were consistent and put in legit research and thought to what they were saying. 

The Fantasy Football Focus is one that has been around for a long time that features hosts that have been working in the fantasy football industry for a long time. 

Fantasy Pros is one of the most trusted sites in fantasy football as well and has a number of podcasts that are high quality and can be found by just searching for the company name.

Fantasy Newsletters 

A good fantasy newsletter can give you an edge over the others in your league. 

Most of them will not only give you tips but they can also recommend players to draft, trade for, or to sign as free agents. 

Look for some of these just by searching online or check out CBS Sports Fantasy as they have a ton of different ones for free.

Fantasy Football Reddit Community

Reddit is a great place to get a wealth of information from various people. 

As opposed to other sites like Twitter or even a site like ESPN Fantasy, you can get the opinions of a ton of different people and everything will be on topic. 

The r/fantasyfootball subreddit will be everything all fantasy football. 

There people post news updates that could affect fantasy, their opinions, and other information that could be useful for fantasy football players. 

Fantasy Football Apps

All of these fantasy football apps below can be played for free. 

They also have some added tools to give you more knowledge of the game during and before the season starts. 

A couple of unique extras will be broken down below about each of these free sites.

• NFL Fantasy Football – The NFL’s official fantasy football website also has podcasts and articles associated with it to give users additional insight and information on fantasy football.
• Yahoo Fantasy Sports – The best thing that Yahoo offers is their pregame live video streams that have real fantasy football experts breaking down who to play or bench right before kickoff.
• CBS Sports Fantasy – CBS has a ton of content they offer in addition to their fantasy site that is free to play. They have podcasts, newsletters, expert rankings and more. 
• Sleeper – One of the best things about sleeper is their chat channels that lets anyone create a chat channel around fantasy to ask questions or get other people’s opinions directly on the site.

ESPN Fantasy Football – ESPN has it all from their podcasts, expert rankings, news content, mock drafts, and a ton more you can find on their website for free.

Conclusion 

With the popularity of fantasy football growing every year, there are more and more free tools being created. 

These tools can be legit ways to get added viewpoints or expertise in certain areas like who to play each week or if you should make a trade that was offered to you. 

There is also a plethora of fantasy football content that should be taken advantage of such as podcasts, articles, and rankings that can be informative and also entertaining at the same time. 

Make sure to take advantage of some or all of these tools to get the most out of your fantasy football season this year.