Hi there Sweet Sugars, I hope everyone is having a fantastic weekend and getting more excited about football season with each passing day. Since it is the middle of the summer, there's not too much going on to research just yet so this first post is just going to be some links to get you on the way to making the best fantasy team you can!

Since our league is a Yahoo! league why don't we start there hmmm? Yahoo! is pretty straight-forward when it comes to team research. Once you sign in to your fantasy account there's a little tab that says "Research" on it, click there and voila, Yahoo! has done my job and compiled research from several sources such as RotoWire.com and FantasyGuru.com. There's not a whole lot going on around there lately since it's pretty early in fantasy-land; just a few articles, NFL headlines and the Buzz Index, which lets you know which fantasy free agent players are being added and dropped by managers who've already drafted. The Buzz Index can be a useful tool unfortunately in order to see more than the 5 players it lists on the main page you have to purchase Yahoo's Fantasy Football Plus.

ESPN.com has quite a bit more research activity going on than what I'm going to focus on but what I found that would be most helpful to us is the player news section:

Player News

Here you can find news blurbs for any NFL player who has something going on. It's updated daily and you can filter it to include all news, only injury news or injury updates. A good tool to keep an eye on any players you're gunning for in our draft.

Our fearless league commissioner Woop also pointed me to ESPN's mock draft lobby. If you're like me and are going to be drafting your own players for the very first time this is a vaulable tool to play with and practice selecting players to kind of see what it's like. Keep in mind that our league is on Yahoo so the draft process may not be exactly the same but it's still nice to get some practice. In order to participate you need to register for a free account.

Mock Draft Lobby

Finally, you can always check out NFL.com to get to specific team websites, where you can find news & info about players, mini-camps, training camp and pre-season/regular season schedules.

Next week, I'll take a look at The Big Board feature of Yahoo! and discuss player ranking systems.

Don't forget our draft is currently scheduled for Sun Aug 24 12:15pm PDT, only 57 more days!

Have a great weekend everyone, I'll see you here next week, same time!