Consider the schedule of the player's team before your draft him
There's a chance you already use this strategy in your player rankings - you adjust a player's ranking based on how good or bad the team's opposing defenses will be next year.
In theory this is a good strategy. But it can get dicey since defenses can change so much from year to year.
So here's what we recommend. Don't use strength of schedule to adjust your entire player rankings on your cheat sheets. Instead, use this as one of your draft strategies. You know how it goes - at some point during the draft you're going to be stuck trying to choose between two or even three players. The clock is ticking...your buddies are mocking you for taking so long to decide...no fun, right? When you're in this position, use strength of schedule to decide. Think of it as a tiebreaker.
BIt's important to go into your draft with a schedule cheat sheet. Something as simple as 1-32 list of the easiest to hardest DE's, broken down to 'against the rush' and 'against the pass'. Then break it down into regular season and post season, like weeks 1-13 and weeks 14-16. Every year, there seems to be a team or two that has a very easy regular fantasy season and a difficult fantasy post season or the reverse. We tend to give the nod to the post season, simply because we always assume we'll be there;-)? Go back to draft page.