We introduced our series on Sleepers two weeks ago and thought that it would be a great idea to update our data one last time before the season kicks off. For those of you who still have fantasy drafts this week, this data may help you when choosing a mid to late round RB or WR. No one is suggesting that these players will win your league for you, but roster depth often comes into play when determining the best fantasy squads.

When we updated our data (based on our definition of a sleeper), it was not surprising that we did not have any QB or TE sleepers; only a handful of RB and WR sleepers surfaced.

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With fantasy drafts in full swing, now is a great time to take a look around the league at the injuries and suspensions that can impact the value of players. The last thing any fantasy owner wants is to be the person that unknowingly selects a guy who is going to be out of action. That’s why we’re creating a cheat sheet of sorts that summarizes all of the latest injury & suspension information so you’re up to date on the most recent player statuses.

What follows is a breakdown of all the important injuries and suspensions along with how long each player is expected to be out of action. We also note each player’s Average Draft Position (ADP) and Expert Consensus Rank (ECR) to give you an idea of how these players are currently being valued.

Significant Injuries/Suspensions

Let’s first take a look at the guys that are going to miss a significant amount of action:

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We’ve had a positive response to our objective way of finding the sleepers that individual expert’s love, so we’re continuing the series today with a look at Deep Sleepers. In the first post of the series, I laid out our sleeper pick definition and noted the need for a separate category for the guys that are being drafted at the very end of the draft (or not drafted at all).

To find these deep sleepers, I’ve gone through and filtered our ranking data by position. Let’s start with the WRs, since they typically have the deepest list of players. For WRs, I’m going to use the following requirements:

1. Have an ADP outside of the top 60 WRs. In a 12 team league, that means an average of 5 WRs already on the rosters of each team. Deep enough, right?
2. Have an ECR (Expert Consensus Rank) outside of the top 60 WRs. If all the experts feel like the guy is a sleeper, then he’s not really a sleeper!
3. The expert making the sleeper prediction must publicly rank the player inside of his top 60 WRs.
4. AND, the expert’s rank must be at least 24 spots better than both the ADP and ECR.

Here’s the list of WRs that made it through this filter. I think you’ll agree that it’s a pretty small list which is a good thing (sleeper lists that have a long list of players tend to just put me to sleep!).

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With 3 weeks of the preseason behind us, we asked 3 of our Featured Pros to give us their take on what to make of the guys that have seen their stock rise significantly. This week’s Featured Pros are:

Pat Fitzmaurice – Pro Football Weekly. Pat is a contributing writer at Pro Football Weekly and was the runner-up in our 2009 Accuracy Study. Nice job Pat!

Ryan Lester – Lester’s Legends. Ryan runs the popular blog Lester’s Legends, and is a featured columnist with the Bleacher Report.

Chet Gresham – Razzball.com. The “Doc” has a large following of patients that look for his fantasy football cures on Razzball and through Twitter.

This Week’s Question:

Of all the significant guys that have shined in the preseason, name some players that deserve the hype and some players that don’t. . . and tell us why!

Arian Foster’s name comes up a couple times as a guy worth reaching for, but there’s a big debate on Jahvid Best and no love for C.J. Spiller. Read each expert’s player insights…

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Next up in our sleeper series is a look at the QB position. For those who missed it, we previously covered RBs and WRs so feel free to check out those write-ups if you’re curious about additional positions.

Before we dive in, let’s quickly review our “sleeper” methodology. As with our previous posts, this analysis looks at every player the experts have ranked and compares their rankings to each player’s expert consensus rank (ECR) as well as the player’s average draft position (ADP). Whenever the expert’s rank is better than the player’s ECR and ADP, we take note since it’s an indication that the expert is higher on the player than everyone else. We then add each player to our sleeper list if they meet the specific criteria outlined in our RB post.

This sounds great but the only problem is that when we ran the numbers using the guidelines outlined by our definition, it netted us 0 QB sleepers. D’oh! As a result, we’ve loosened up our requirements and what follows below represents the closest guys to meeting our sleeper criteria (nice save, right?).

Whew, with that explained, let’s take a look at the list:

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