Draft weekend sneaks up on everybody. You spend the summer watching baseball, half-watching training camp highlights, and then suddenly it's late August and your league chat is buzzing about pick trades and your buddy who hasn't set a lineup since 2019 is talking trash. Fantasy football season is officially here, and if you're drafting in the next couple weeks, you want to go in with a plan, not a prayer.

Jonathan Rubin, who writes the weekly fantasy column for the Charlotte Observer, has his draft primer up over at Yahoo Sports, and it's worth your time before you sit down at the virtual draft table. Rubin does this every week during the season, the kind of beat writer who grinds through snap counts and target shares so you don't have to. Though I'd argue you should anyway. More on that in a minute.

The core of any good draft prep hasn't changed much since the days when we drafted off a magazine printed in July and prayed nobody got hurt in the preseason. You need a baseline set of rankings, sure. But rankings are the floor, not the ceiling. The real edge comes from knowing where you disagree with the room, and why.

So here's the Ray version of draft advice, accumulated over three decades of leagues, some won, plenty lost. First, running back handcuffs matter more in August than people admit. Second, don't be the person who takes a kicker before the last two rounds. And third, when your leaguemates start reaching on rookie receivers because of one highlight reel, that's when you quietly stockpile the boring veterans who catch 90 balls and never make anybody's phone wallpaper.

Rubin's column will run weekly once the games start, which matters, because fantasy football is a weekly sport dressed up as a season-long one. The draft gets you maybe 40 percent of the way there. Waivers, trades, and the discipline to not start your heart over your head in October get you the rest. Dave Morgan over on our desk would tell you the numbers do the picking for you, and some weeks he's right. But I've watched too many title games decided by a third-string back getting 19 carries on a Monday night to believe it's all spreadsheets.

Stats support the story. They don't write it.

One thing I'll say for this year's draft season: the information available to the average fantasy manager would've been a competitive advantage worth cheating for back in 1994. Depth charts updated hourly, injury news within minutes, beat reporter threads on every camp battle in the league. You still have to do the homework, as I wrote about that thin DFS slate a couple weeks back, but the homework has never been more accessible.

So do yourself a favor. Read Rubin's primer, build your board, print it out if you're old school like me, and walk into that draft knowing who you want in round six before round one starts. Because the guy in your league who's prepared isn't necessarily the smartest football mind. He's just the one who decided not to wing it.

And if you draft a kicker before the 12th round, we can't be friends.