Read this before the table
Three terms recur. ADP is average draft position — where a player actually goes in real drafts, averaged over many of them. A depth chart is a team's internal ordering at each position: who starts, who is second. A snap is one play; a player not on the field for a play cannot score on it. These and every other jargon term here live in Fantasy football glossary.
The landscape is cheap. Nothing load-bearing in the requested 10-team home league needs a paywall before the draft. What costs money — charting grades and advanced efficiency metrics — usually matters less than fresh role, health, projection, and market data.
The table
| Source | What it is | Best for | Cost | Format it speaks | Do not use it for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NFL.com transactions wire | The league's own log of every signing, release, trade and injured-reserve move | Confirming a roster move happened, and on what date | Free | Dated one-line entries, no analysis | Working out what a move means. It never says who inherits the carries |
| Team official sites | Each club's press releases, transactions page, and posted depth chart | The same moves, usually earliest | Free | Press-release prose plus a depth-chart grid | The depth chart itself. Coaches publish these; they are diplomacy, not information |
| Official injury report | Practice participation and game status, filed by every team Wednesday to Friday in season | The single best in-season input: will he play | Free | A fixed vocabulary — did not practice / limited / full, then questionable / doubtful / out | Anything before Week 1. The report does not exist during camp or preseason. See Reading the NFL injury report |
| ESPN fantasy site | The host platform — your league, your roster, your scoring | Settings, lineup locks, waiver rules. The only authority on your own league | Free | Web app plus a news feed | Its rankings, which are generic and not re-scored to your league's rules |
| ESPN ADP | Where players actually go in ESPN drafts, averaged | The only ADP that literally describes the draft Andrew is in | Free with an account | A ranked list with an average pick number | Nothing — it is the right number. The problem is obtaining it; see What I checked and when |
| FantasyPros consensus rankings | Dozens of published expert rank lists averaged into one order | Sanity-checking a board. A 30-slot disagreement is a flag worth chasing | Free tier, paid tiers exist | A ranked list with a high/low range | Building value. A rank has no distance in it — you cannot subtract two ranks and get points |
| FantasyPros projections | Averaged point forecasts, published per scoring format | A second opinion against any single projection source | Free tier | Point totals, tagged by format | Non-standard scoring. The totals bake in somebody else's rules, including their kicker and defence assumptions |
| Fantasy Football Calculator | Free public mock drafts, aggregated into ADP by format and league size | The cleanest free ADP, with the sample size and date range printed on it | Free | Ranked list, ADP, mock count, date window | Describing an ESPN draft. Different platform, different drafters, different default scoring |
| FFToday | Projected stat lines — carries, catches, yards, touchdowns — rather than points | Scoring under your own rules. Stat lines are the only projections you can re-score | Free | Plain per-player stat tables | Its own points column, which is standard scoring and not this league's |
| Pro Football Focus | Every player on every play, charted and graded, plus snap counts | Role questions: who is actually on the field, and on which downs | Mostly paid | Grades 0–100 and snap-share percentages | Fantasy points. A grade measures quality; fantasy pays volume, and the two come apart constantly |
| Advanced-metrics sites (Football Outsiders-style) | Efficiency measured per play and adjusted for opponent strength | Understanding why an offense scores and whether it can keep doing it | Mixed free and paid | Team and unit rate statistics | Player-level draft decisions. These are team metrics with a rate denominator; fantasy is a counting game |
| Vegas and sharp betting lines | Point spreads and game totals set by markets with money at stake | Implied team total — how many points a team is expected to score — the best single weekly start-sit input. See Implied team total | Free to read | Two numbers per game | Season-long value. Lines only exist about a week out |
| Season win totals and futures | The market's preseason view of team strength | A cheap prior on which offenses will be good | Free to read | One number per team | Individual players. A good offense can still split its touches four ways |
| Beat writers, one per team | A reporter who physically attends one club's practices | The best information anywhere on role and usage — for that one team | Often paywalled | Prose, posted to social and in articles | Cross-team comparison. Every beat writer is structurally optimistic about the team they cover |
| News aggregators (Rotowire-style) | Every beat-writer note compressed into a dated blurb, per player | Not missing news, and reading a player's whole history fast | Free tier | Timestamped one-paragraph blurbs | The analysis sentence at the end of the blurb. It is written fast, at enormous volume |
| r/fantasyfootball and forums | Crowd discussion, with the same questions recurring every August | Discovering that a question exists at all | Free | Threads, with quality varying wildly inside a single thread | Any factual foundation. Community evidence yields leads, never conclusions — Evidence and confidence |
| Discords and niche communities | Small self-selected analyst groups | Fast early signal on a depth-chart change | Free or paid | Chat, unsearchable later | Anything you cannot re-source to an official or reported item |
| Aggregator apps (Sleeper, Yahoo and similar) | Push-notification news feeds, usable even if you do not play on that platform | Speed. A phone alert beats remembering to check a website | Free | Push notifications | Their rankings and ADP, which describe their own platform's drafters |
| Podcasts and video shows | Long-form discussion | Learning the vocabulary and how analysts reason | Free | Audio, hours long, effectively undated | Anything time-sensitive. A Tuesday take is stale by Friday |
| Weather services | Forecast wind, precipitation and temperature at kickoff | Late-season outdoor games. Wind is the one that actually moves scoring | Free | Hourly forecast | Anything before the Thursday of that week. See Weather and the fantasy playoffs |
| Preseason box scores | Statistics from games the starters barely appear in | Nothing | Free | Standard box score | Anything at all. The preseason rushing leaders are largely players who will be released at the August 30 cutdown |
What a working set looks like
Twenty-one sources is a map, not a routine. The routine is four things:
- One official channel for facts — the injury report in season, the transactions wire the rest of the year. Identity, status and dates come from here and nowhere else.
- One projection source that publishes stat lines, so points can be recomputed under this league's rules instead of imported with someone else's.
- One ADP, explicitly labelled with the platform it came from.
- Beat writers only for the teams you actually own players on — after a draft, about eight teams, not thirty-two.
Everything else is optional. The failure mode is not missing a source; it is reading six, finding disagreement, and mistaking the disagreement for information.
The July build used FFToday stat lines and 12-team FFC ADP; those inputs are now historical control material. The released 2026-08-02 freeze uses FFToday’s complete 419-row 2026-07-30 stat-line snapshot and FFC’s 10-team PPR feed (4,121 drafts from 2026-07-26 through 2026-08-02), promoted into 237 canonical player rows; see What I checked and when. FFC remains a labelled proxy for ESPN ADP, which has not been publicly extractable.
For D/ST, the freeze retains the validated modeled values: FFToday’s public D/ST output exposes incomplete value brackets, so its 20 raw team rows are used as an audit input rather than a replacement scoring source.
Open questions
- Is there a free, extractable route to ESPN's own ADP? Every attempt in July 2026 failed, and running mock drafts on ESPN is currently the substitute measurement rather than a real fix.
- Which single beat-writer feed per team is worth following once the roster is set? Untested — this is a post-draft question, not a pre-draft one.
- The advanced-metrics tier is asserted here to be low-value for a 10-team home league. That is a judgement about effort-to-payoff, not something this build measured.