Pet & Animal: How to Play Fantasy Football

Fantasy football allows you to simulate being an NFL or college team owner or manager, adding an extra layer of fandom to regular football watching. After you assemble a team, you'll rely on what your players do in actual games every week to generate points. Suddenly that Browns-Panthers game that's tied 3-3 in the fourth quarter just got a lot more interesting. Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned pro, it never hurts to brush up on Fantasy Football 101. See Step 1 for more information.

Steps

Picking a League

Choose a league that fits in with your time and commitment. Fantasy football, like regular football, relies heavily on competition. Playing in a league allows you to build relationships and camaraderie, as well as providing an extra incentive to choose your players wisely. There are several types of leagues to consider, so try and pick one that fits in with your commitment, your experience, and your seriousness.

Consider a standard head-to-head league or a standard points league. In head-to-head play, your team matches up against a different team each week, and the team that receives the most points is declared the winner. In a total points league, teams accrue points throughout the season on an ongoing basis. At the end of the regular season, teams with the best won/loss records meet in the playoffs to decide an eventual champion.
- Head-to-head leagues are fun to play with your friends, so you can have fun trash-talking during the week, leading up to an end-of-season playoff among the teams with the best records.
- Points leagues are good if you like watching the NFL games over the course of the weekend, giving you more stake in the action when your players are playing and keeping track of the individual players. It's better if you have less time to commit to the season.

Choose your roster and scoring options. You can choose between various ways of accumulating points for the performance of the players you draft, as well as the structure of the roster. Most normally you'll play the head coach, playing individual players and picking the best guys to give you the best chance of winning.
- In terms of scoring, most leagues employ a "points for reception" scoring style, which gives points not just for points scored by individual players, but for stats like receptions, yardage gained, and sacks. The score-tallying won't affect the way you "play" fantasy football, but it might affect the way you choose players to play week-to-week.^[1]
- IDP options utilize defensive players on an individual basis, as well as using team defensive units. Other leagues simply use team defenses. The additional players and positions to fill require owners in an IDP league to do a lot more research to determine which defensive players to draft and when to draft them, and makes it more difficult to determine which players and positions are most important. However, these leagues can be rewarding to win for big football fans.

Find a league that fits in with your desires and sign up online. You can sign up for leagues via ESPN and Yahoo, probably the two most popular ways to play. Go to their Fantasy Football tab and search for open standard leagues that are free, or contact friends that play in leagues you'd like to join and get the administrator to give you an invitation.^[2]
- You can start new leagues, but try and get a little experience in different types of playing and play a few fantasy seasons before you try and start a league of your own.

Drafting Players

Participate in a draft. Just like regular football, fantasy football leagues hold drafts each season. Players can be "dropped" to become free agents, and trades are possible, but for the most part you'll be assembling your team from the players you draft, so it helps to have some familiarity with the big names and talents. There are two basic types of drafts:
- In a serpentine draft, owners take turns drafting players in the interest of fairness. For instance, the owner who picks first in odd rounds picks last in even rounds, and so on.
- In an auction draft, each owner has a predetermined, imaginary budget to spend on players. Players are listed auction-style, going to the team of the owner who bids highest.

Pick as many of the best players at the most important positions. A mistake a lot of fantasy rookies make is selecting their favorite quarterback right out of the gate and then moving on to other positions. By the time they get around to picking a backup, there's only the 3rd-stringer who played college ball at Southeastern Louisiana Tech left. Oops.^[3]
- Draw up a draft-day cheat sheet. Your cheat sheet should list your ideal picks, as well as back-ups and long-shots. Cover it as well as you can during the draft and keep a running tally of picks you grab and how much money you have left, as well as your ideal picks that get snatched up by someone else. For instance, you could have a few highlighters on-hand to mark who gets what.

Pick some long-shots. Shake up your roster by drafting a few rookies who could go big. Part of the fun of fantasy football is seeing a sleeper player suddenly score huge points out of nowhere.
- Save your hometown heroes until you've got the major choices figured out. If you're a big Dallas Cowboys fan and you want to pick a bunch of their players, you might get into a kind of trap when they all have a bye-week at the same time. Be wary of picking too many players from the same team.
- Get the best players at the high-stat positions figured out. Remember, you're not making a real football team, so you don't really need role players. They help, but you want guys who are going to build lots of stats.

Pick up free agents. In a fantasy football league, a free agent is any player who is not currently on a league team (i.e., did not get picked in the draft or was dropped by a team at some point throughout the season). As the season goes on, a player's real-life performance might inspire you to pick him up as a free agent for your fantasy league. Generally, free agent picks are submitted after the weekly Monday night football game and processed later in the week.
- If more than one team wants to pick up a free agent, the player goes to the team with the highest waiver wire ranking. Waver wire ranking is determined by a variety of factors, including win-loss record and the number of free agents that team has already added. After adding a player to your team from free agency you go back to the bottom of the waiver wire list. Different leagues might have different methods for calculating these rankings.

Trade players. Just as in regular football, fantasy owners can trade players. Some leagues have specific trade deadlines established. They may also have all the owners in the league vote on whether or not a trade can proceed.
- Trades within fantasy leagues can be controversial, and may require the intervention of a fantasy trade referee. There are several trade referee websites where an objective third-party will rule on the validity and fairness of a certain trade.

Playing Week-to-Week

Play the players with the highest potential to succeed in their game that week. From week to week during the NFL season, you'll be able to slot players in all the major positions, picking your starters for the week. Their performance in their game will gain you points in your game.
- Make sure the player is available. Usually, these players will be labeled with an "A" for active. If they're injured or their team is on bye, they'll be inactive and you'll have to replace them with other players.^[4]
- One particularly helpful stat to take a look at when you're trying to decide which of your QBs and which of your RBs to play, is the strength of the player's opponent for the next week. If you've got the undeniably-great Peyton Manning on your roster, but also the equally-great Tom Brady, see who each of them are playing that week. If Manning's playing the best team in the nation, but Brady's got a team in the gutter, it would help to take that into account.

Arrange your roster. Most leagues have a predetermined number of players an owner must have on a roster, and each player is assigned a position. You might also have "starters," which must be used in each game, as well as players that you "bench" for specific games. Owners are required to choose their starters for each week's games before a deadline.

Rack up points. Watch the game and see how your players do! Each individual league will have its own scoring system. However, one thing remains the same: the real-life actions of your players on the field that week will determine how many points your team earns compared to your opponent's team. When the day of games is over, you'll be able to log into your league page and see how you held up.

Watch out for the upcoming bye weeks. If you've got a good starting line-up that's working well for you, what are you gonna do in a couple weeks when your starting skills-position players are all going to be out? Who's going to back them up? Draft a team that won't be decimated on one bad bye week and start planning now for those gap weeks. Make sure you have sufficient back-ups without overlapping byes.

Think about trades as the season progresses. As the draft goes on, have a running list of players you would consider trading or for whom you would trade. For a player you really want on your roster, develop a killer trade strategy beforehand in case he goes to someone else.

Ride the season out. Fantasy football basically gives your regular NFL obsession an added dimension by giving you more of an attachment to the individual players. You'll suddenly have a big stake in how the Seahawks play if you've got Golden Tate on your fantasy football team, even if you've never been to Seattle. Watch, check the stats, and have fun.

Printable Fantasy Draft Board

Fantasy Draft Board Template

Video

Tips

Having and acting on exclusive, timely information is the single most important difference between winning and losing in fantasy football.

Know your league waiver wire rules. Are the rosters locked over the weekend? Are pickups and drops allowed at any time? etc…

At the draft, you should have a sheet listing stats, a copy of the rules, paper, and a pen.

Make sure that you know the deadline for lineup changes each week.

Do your homework. Before you head into a draft, know the entry fee, rules and prize disbursement. Read up on potential sleepers and try to have an edge on your competition by being better informed.

A keeper league is a hybrid between a standard draft league and a dynasty league. Each preseason, most of the players are drafted, but owners are allowed to keep a predetermined number of players on their roster from the year before. Most league rules allow only a handful of players to be retained by each team from year to year.

Dynasty leagues are for the serious fantasy football owner, and require a commitment over multiple seasons. After the initial draft in a dynasty league’s inaugural season, a predetermined number of players remain on the same roster from one season to the next unless they are traded or released. Each year after the initial season, a draft is held for NFL rookies, so fantasy owners must be more in-tune with the talent in college than an owner in a standard draft league.

Auction leagues can utilize either an H2H or total points system. The difference is that owners are given a predetermined amount of money to bid on players to fill their roster. Each owner may bid on any player he or she likes, and individual players can end up on more that one team. If an owner overspends on one player, the rest of the roster might suffer without enough remaining cash to fill other positions with quality players. This format requires you to put your money where your mouth is and make big gambles, similar to the stock market.