Fantasy: Looking ahead to 2012 Free Agency

When it comes to Fantasy Football, particularly in Dynasty formats, half of the fun (and battle) is figuring out where players will land during the off-season.

Will your star wide receiver and impending unrestricted free agent land in a pass-heavy offense with a superstar quarterback? Could that talented back-up tailback you've been hanging onto for two years finally sign with a team that will give him a regular workload? Is that talented pass-catching tight end that has been sitting behind a superstar at his position finally get his break?

For Dwayne Bowe, Michael Bush, and Martellus Bennett owners, those are some very important questions.

Today, I won't be doing any analysis, but I'll simply be previewing the upcoming free agents at Fantasy Football-relevant positions (and fullback. Burn!).

Some notes:

• Although I do my due diligence, this won't be perfect. I don't have contract info on 100% of the players at these positions, but I do for most of them and definitely for the relevant to semi-relevant players. If you see something that appears to be off, let me know and I'll investigate.
• Key: UFA means Unrestricted Free Agent (can sign with any team). RFA means Restricted Free Agent (current team has first shot at the player). ERFA means Exclusive Right Free Agent (As long as the current team picks up the player's salary, they will stick around).
• Players are sorted in three ways: (1) By Position, (2) By Free Agency Type, which is explained in the point above, and (3) by a ‘ranking', if you will. Obviously, Drew Brees has the most appeal among UFA quarterbacks, but the rest are debatable. They're simply ranked as close to the appeal of NFL teams as possible, but – for the love of the McCown brothers – please don't take them as in stone and trash everything in the comments section.
• With only about a half-dozen exceptions, I included only players currently rostered. I did throw in a few players who were cut earlier this year (eg. McNabb, Berrian) and who weren't rostered this season (Pennington, Owens).
• Finally, thanks to Rotoworld.com (most notably Evan Silva, who does the dirty work), for their fine contract database. It certainly helped fill most of the gaps I had.

UPDATE – Down at the bottom of the page, you'll now see a ‘Need Chart'. This ranks each team by position to show you which teams have the biggest (and smallest) need at each of the four main positions.

Need Chart

1 = Major Need … 32 = Low Need