It’s that time of year! If you love football like I do, then you can relate. The weeks leading up to the first official game of the season are filled with anticipation.
Will my team be amazing this year? And if you play Fantasy Football, you can’t help but think- will I win my league??
The answer to both in mid- August is always an optimistic YES!
Please don’t stop reading if you don’t like football, or don’t think you’d ever consider playing Fantasy Football. Just hear me out.
Because I think you might love the game even if you aren’t a fan of the sport.
This will be my third season playing Fantasy Football. So I’m by no means a pro, but I have to say I love it.
This year I’ll be playing in two different leagues: one made up of family members, which is light-hearted and fun, and then a more serious league, with people who have been playing for a long time.
For those not familiar with Fantasy Football, here are the basics.
You “own” a team in a league. The league is generally made up of about 12 teams.
Before the football season starts, you draft individual offensive players- like quarterbacks, wide receivers, running backs, etc. You also draft a NFL team’s defense, like perhaps my husband’s favorite, the New Orleans Saints’ defense.
You draft a couple of players for each position and once the season starts, every week you set your line up.
For example, you pick between your two quarterbacks. Starting the one you think will do the best and “benching” the other one.
Each week, you’re matched up against someone else’s team in your league. The person with the team that gets the most points wins that week’s match up.
As the season goes on you can pick up and drop players along the way. You aren’t stuck with the players you drafted at the beginning of the season. Which is good, because players you thought would be great early on can sometimes turn out to be lousy, or even get injured.
This is where the skill comes in, and it’s just like any other game.
You do some research, pick the best players for the week, and take risks along the way by dropping and adding players.
It’s a huge game of chance, but also strategy and learning to adjust as the season goes on. You don’t actually ever have to watch any football games to play Fantasy Football. That’s because the way you win is by researching which players on your team will do the best against an opponent for that week’s match up.
Total time investment for someone who wants to win: About an hour a week.
For someone who just wants to be part of the fun: Five minutes.
And I speak from experience. I won my family league last year. The fun was completely worth the small amount of time I put in. And winning $500 only sweetened the deal.
But beyond the money, it’s really just fun to be part of the conversation. I’m sure over the years you have been on the outside of Fantasy Football conversation at work or a cocktail party because you don’t play. Now you know you can fix that, without committing to be a football fanatic!
And don’t worry if you don’t do well. Even the most seasoned football fans have horrible seasons.
In fact, one could argue they are at a disadvantage. They may have loyalty to a quarterback that isn’t playing well, or might refuse to pick up the best available wide receiver because they play for a team they hate. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. My husband makes this mistake, but he knows it and does it anyway! Geaux Saints!
If I have convinced you to at least look into it, here are a few resources. Both leagues I’m in use the NFL Fantasy Football platform and I find it very user friendly. A few other options are Yahoo! or ESPN.
When it comes to figuring out who to draft and who to start each week, I use CBS Sports and ESPN projections. The experts almost always guess better than I can.
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