This is really a terrible time for a fantasy football draft. Rookies are unsigned, Larry Johnson is holding out, and important skill position players are ambiguously injured. But there's something so earnest about Chad Johnson's face in these ads. It's like every time you navigate away from the fantasy home page without registering a team, Chad hurts.

No one wants that. Except maybe DeAngelo Hall and every Steeler. So even though it's absurdly early, the Yahoo! Tank Johnson Desert Classic held its draft on Thursday night. This is, you might recall, a league full of sports bloggers. It's an indescribably funny group.

Literally, the funniness cannot be described. Right now there's an email exchange taking place between league members that's both amusing and almost entirely un-publishable. Here's a sampling …

Unsilent Majority wrote: Fantasy football without (unspeakable subject) would be like (repulsive criminal act) without a (graphic verb).

There are all sorts of problems with experts-only fantasy leagues, but the biggest one is this: they're full of fantasy experts.

We're predictable and dull. We travel in herds, drifting toward the same sleepers, often using similar draft strategies. Like most herd animals, we also graze. And a few of us are picked off each year by large, predatory cats. Brad Evans was badly mangled by a snow leopard in 2005. Very sad, but he's a fighter.

Preseason experts drafts are useful tools, of course. But as we play out the leagues, not many extraordinary things happen. You won't see many drunken 4 a.m. add/drops. Experts don't vengefully cut elite players after bad games. You don't see message board posts that read like this:

What teh (expletive)?! That trade is a (expletive) JOKE!!! Everyone should V-I-T-O!!!

In short, experts leagues are almost inexpressibly dull. They're shrewdly played by people who've played for many years. Fantasy experts don't want to embarrass themselves, either. Message

When the Chicago Bears defense is selected in the fifth round of your fantasy draft – and their average draft position is 46.3, so they probably will be – it's going to elicit a flurry of derisive chat. This sort of thing tends to happen:

WT--?
Too early
OMG!!!
:-0
LOL
Waaaay too soon for a D, bro.

The dude who drafts the Bears might feel a certain amount of shame and anxiety. Then someone will take either Tony Gonzalez (ADP 44.6), Hines Ward (47.1) or Santana Moss (49.5) and the draft room will quiet down again. Those picks tend to be accepted without disapproval.

But here's the thing: one of the worst mistakes you can make in a draft is to worry about how the league will react to your picks.

I've never been as viciously ridiculed in a fantasy draft as I was three years ago, after selecting LaDainian Tomlinson with the top overall pick ahead of Priest Holmes. It was a keeper league, too. Two championships later, the Tomlinson pick doesn't look so bad. In fact, it looked pretty decent

At least half of the fantasy-related email I receive confounds me. The other half is some combination of "Barry Bonds is a cheaterpants!" and "What's the deal with Jason Bay?"

But let's talk about the confounding half. It's not that the questions are complex or indecipherable. They're mostly requests to evaluate trades. And they're almost unanswerable because people rarely provide context.

As we've discussed before, we're way past the point in the fantasy season where you should be concerned about winning a deal in terms of pure value. Trade deadlines are nearly here, and owners should be concerned primarily with addressing needs. This is as true in head-to-head leagues as it is in roto leagues, and it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the categories in which your team is deficient. (There's a very useful tool in head-to-head leagues to get at this, by the way. Click on the "Head-to-Head Stats" link on that grey menu bar).

It's really kind of astonishing that in Week 17 so many

Mick Jagger once sang "I'm all sixes and sevens and nines."

That was 1972, so he probably wasn't referring to a roto league. But if he had been, Mick would have been in a terrific position to make a big move in the standings.

It's difficult to imagine Jagger being an attentive fantasy owner in the early 70s, but still. In a typical 12-team league, sixes and sevens and nines at this point in the season are just fine. Even fours and fives are manageable.

Basically, if you're near the middle of the pack in a bunch of roto categories in late July, you've still got a fair chance to finish among the leaders. It only takes a trade or two – and a marginal improvement in the right categories – to make a dramatic upward move.

If you're all ones and twos, though, it's really over. Thanks for playing.

It's often much easier to make the leap from three points to 10 points in a category than it is to jump from one point to three. In a normal distribution of data, you're going to have a couple of

Ray

The final score at Wrigley Field on Thursday was Cubs 9, Barry Bonds 6, every other Giant 2. Barry hit a pair of long home runs into an unfriendly breeze, in an overwhelmingly unfriendly environment. He finished 3-for-3 and drove in six runs. Like him or not, you have to be a little awed by Barry Bonds sometimes. We've discussed him at length here previously, so there's little else that needs to be said.

Except maybe this: he was dropped in 1458 Yahoo! leagues on Wednesday and 756 leagues on Thursday.

There's just no feeling quite like the one you have after dropping a player on Wednesday, then watching him have a multi-homer game on Thursday. It's the sort of thing that ends fantasy careers. People can't easily pick up and move on after a disastrous move like that. Plus it just sits there on the "Recent Transactions" list for everyone to see:

My first fantasy football draft stunk.

Literally, it stunk. The draft took place in a basement in Iowa City, and it smelled like Keystone and cigarillos. It was either 1991 or 1992. In those days, football drafts were boozy things that lasted five hours. You went into them with an NFL preview magazine and a spiral notebook. If you were lucky, you left with Warren Moon and a manageable buzz.

All I can clearly remember about my first draft, aside from the odor, is that my co-owner was useless and we selected Derrick Thomas very early. Too early, as it turned out. But at the time we felt that Thomas was among the best of the Individual Defensive Players (IDPs). In that league, in addition to the usual offensive skill positions, we started a full 11-man defensive lineup.

If your football league has similar settings, you'll need more than just this article. This is merely a primer. It's an introduction. If you're starting 11 IDPs, that's a pretty hardcore league. The guiding principles