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Anthony Moraglia
Fantasy football extraordinaire. Disney World lover. Rookie vexillologist. Proud Golden Girls Fan. #FlyEaglesFly

A Beginner’s Guide to Fantasy Football

So you’re interested in starting fantasy football, eh? Well, you came to the right place. Fantasy sports is one of America’s fastest growing hobbies, and fantasy football is by far the most popular sport for fantasy. The way I see it, it’s because football is America’s #1 sport, and fantasy football is sort of like the Goldilocks of fantasy sports. Its season isn’t too long or too short. It’s not too complex, but it’s deceptively deep. It’s one of the easiest fantasy sports to learn, but also one of the hardest to truly master. Today, I’m going to do a walk-through of how to play your first season come September. How do you know that I’m qualified to teach you? Last December, I beat nine other football crazed high school seniors for the coveted championship crown. Believe me, I know what I’m doing. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Step one: Get to know your league

Considering you’re probably a fantasy football rookie, you almost certainly aren’t creating a league yourself. That means you are either joining a group of friends in their fantasy football league, or you’re joining a league with other strangers. Either way, it’s important to consider a few aspects of the league before joining. If you’re joining a friend’s league, be sure ask the questions below. If you’re joining a stranger league, be sure to check the league’s settings before joining.

The very first question you should ask is “What kind of a league is it”? There’s two terms you’ll see all of the time in the fantasy football community. A “head-to-head league” (example here) is your traditional set-up, where you play a different opponent each week, and who ever scores more points wins that week’s game. Conversely, a “point-based league” (example here) is just a game of who can score the most points in the real life NFL season, with no match-ups whatsoever. Head-to-head leagues are far common, because it better simulates real football — playing a new “team” of players weeks; as opposed to see which collection of players can score the most points in four months. As a rookie, you should probably stick with the classic head-to-head leagues, especially if your doing it with friends. The weekly opponent is an easier concept to grasp, and it’s frankly just more fun to have a real opposing team to beat each week.

The next aspect of your new league is finding out what kind of draft is it. For those who don’t know what a fantasy draft is, it’s the time when all the fantasy players get together and select their real life NFL players. Their real world statistics will become your statistics in fantasy. For example, if you have Eli Manning, and he threw four touchdowns in a game, those four Eli Manning TDs will appear in real-time onto your fantasy team. In almost all drafts, the draft is in a “serpentine style”, meaning if you have the last pick of round one, you’ll have the first pick of round two, the last pick of round three, the first pick of round four etc. This is done to ensure fairness, and to make sure no player has an unfair advantage. There are three types of drafts:

  1. Live draft — The classic draft of picking players when it’s you turn. I recommend this draft style, just because it’s the most common, and easiest to follow.
  2. Auction draft — This draft is much more complicated. Each NFL player is bidded on one by one, and everybody in the league has “X” amount of theoretical dollars to spend. You shouldn’t try this style of draft until you really get into fantasy football, maybe a few years into the future. I’m a fantasy veteran, and even I don’t fully understand how these things work!
  3. Autopick draft — This is sort of the “anti-draft”. The computer randomly generates all of the teams with players, and done in a way that all teams are pretty much equal in talent. I also don’t recommend this drafting style, because it sort of takes away the whole point of fantasy football — you get to choose who’s on your team!

The third question you need to ask is “What players do I need?” Different leagues have different systems of who you can draft on your team. In a lot of beginner's leagues, the system is as follows: 1 (sometimes 2) quarterbacks, 2–3 running backs, 3–4 wide receivers, 1 (sometimes 2) tight ends, 1 kicker, 1 entire team’s defense (i.e. the Pittsburgh Steelers’ defense), and at least 5–6 bench spots of whichever players you want on your team. Here’s a few odds and ends to keep in mind:

  • Some leagues have something called a “flex”. The flex position is a bonus player from your bench to add to the starting line up. The flex can vary league to league, but the options are often a running back, wide receiver, or a tight end of your choosing. I’m personally not a huge fan of flex positions, but if this sounds interesting to you, don’t be afraid to try it.
  • Some leagues are totally bonkers and have you pick individual defensive players (IDPs). I highly recommend you don’t try IDPs in your first league, as the draft can be confusing enough as is for fantasy rookies. Even I don’t mess around with IDPs.
  • Different leagues will have slightly different scoring systems. For example, in some leagues, as TD pass by your starting QB will be worth 4 points. Other leagues will have that same TD worth 5 or 6 points. Keep an eye on the point values for things like touchdowns and yards gained, and negative point values for interceptions/fumbles. You can see these values in the league's settings when you first join.
  • One last term you should know is PPR (points per reception). PPR leagues award receivers points for the physical catching of the ball and the yards gained, as opposed to just yards themselves. PPR leagues will often award receivers an extra 0.5–2 points for the reception in PPR leagues. I’m not really a fan of PPR leagues, but if you’re interested in a lot of scoring, you’ll probably really like PPR leagues.

Okay, so keep all of this in mind when you select a league to join. Confused yet? If so, re-read what’s above, before reading part two. Things only get more complicated from here…

Step two: Prepare for the draft

Now that you’ve selected your league, its time to prepare for the draft! The closer your fantasy draft is to the actual start of the NFL season, the better, becuase a significant amount of players will get injured during the NFL pre-season in August. You probably shouldn’t trust any drafts before August 15th at the very earliest. Anyways, there’s some precautions you should take prior to your draft.

  1. Have a draft strategy — Since you’ve already done a bit of research on the scoring system and the number of player you need for each position, you should begin to formulate a draft strategy. Strategies can vary league to league. For example, if your playing a 2 QB league like myself, you should probably draft quarterbacks early on; becuase 2 QB leagues will naturally draw interest in QBs from other fantasy players. If your going to be drafting into a PPR league, it would be wise to draft receivers who are targeted a lot by their quarterbacks, as each catch will garner additional points. Whatever the case, be sure to have a strategy that will best benefit the league that you’re in.
  2. Do research, and find players to target — Leading up to your draft day, grab a fantasy football guide (There’s dozens of them in book/grocery stores) or find a reliable online fantasy source (I recommend Pro Football Focus), and do some research. You can find information about almost any NFL player, and you can begin to assess who you might want to draft onto your team. Keep the following in mind for potential players: Their past stats, their injury history, their age, the amount of talent around them, and their “ADP” (Average Draft Position, meaning the average point in the draft when they’re chosen for a team). It also might help to participate in a mock draft, a fake draft with strangers online, just to get a sense of when people are drafting certain players.
  3. Keep positions in mind— You might think it’s a good idea to draft one of every position first. This is a terrible idea, for a number of reasons. First of all, you have to consider depth. For example, running backs get injured more then any other fantasy position; so it makes sense to add an extra running back or two to you bench, before deciding which kicker or defense you want. Furthermore, you have to consider position scarcity. For example there are a lot great quarterbacks and wide receivers, but only a handful of great running backs and tight ends. Therefore, it might make sense to draft all of your starting running backs and tight end(s), before moving onto to the other positions. Of course, be sure to check you league’s scoring system and number of starters for each position to find the best option for yourself. One more thing — whatever you do, never be the first person in your league to draft a kicker or defense. They never score enough to be worth an early round pick. As a matter of fact, you should probably mock the poor schmuck who drafted the “best” kicker and defense early on.
  4. Ask yourself some tough questions — Leading up to your draft day, you need to ask yourself some tough questions. Questions like “How far should I wait before drafting a quarterback?”, “Are talented players with bad injury histories still worth taking drafting?”, “How should I best utilize by bench?”, and “Should I try to draft more older players with predictable sucess, or more younger players with the potential to be great or terrible?” are important factors consider. I can’t answer these questions for you, it’s up to you to find out what will best benefit your team.

Nice researching, rookie! Now that you have your draft strategy all figured out, it’s time for step three…

Step three: The draft

It’s draft time! If your a popular person playing friends, you might have your draft at a live draft party, complete with a draft board. In this case, you select your player when it’s your turn, often with about a sixty second time limit per pick, by putting the player’s name on the board. The commissioner will put the teams into the computer system once the draft is over. However, if your in a stranger league or in a league filled with nerds like myself, you’ll be drafting directly onto to the computer system (Probably either ESPN, Yahoo, or CBS sports). In this case, try to login to the draft 10–15 minutes early, just ensure your ready to draft, and you’ll see your draft position. Once again, you select a player and draft him when it’s your turn, and then you wait until it your turn again. If you can’t make your pick in the time limit, the computer will “autopick for you”. When drafting, here are some important things to keep in mind:

  1. Follow your strategy — Although it may be tempting to chuck your plan when once the draft starts due to other people’s early round picks, try to stick to your plan. Your earlier, more rational self thought the strategy through very carefully, so try to do the same. With that said…
  2. Prepare to improvise — It’s an unfortunate reality that your original draft strategy will likely not play out perfectly, so temporarily ditching the plan can be a useful tool. For example, if your initial strategy was to wait until round six to grab your first QB, but the QBs are really starting to go by round three, it would behoove you to follow the trend and draft your first QB sooner then round six, or else you’ll fall behind in the QB department.
  3. Pay attention to who others are drafting — I sort of hinted at this a minute ago, and I’ll make it more clear here. It’s very important see who everyone else is drafting, so get a sense of the trends in the draft. By doing this, you can get insight on certain aspects of the draft that you didn’t plan for. For example, if wanted to grab a great defense, you might plan on drafting one by round ten or so. However, if nobody’s touching the defenses after those first ten rounds, don’t take the bait and be the sucker who takes the best defense in round ten, when you could have gotten a comparably good defense in round thirteen, and build depth in your other positions instead. Sometimes, it makes sense to ride the hot hand when drafting.
  4. Don’t forget about the bye weeks — All NFL players have a bye week in the season when they have the week off, so keep them mind when drafting. A player’s bye week is listed next to his name on the draft screen/board, as well as in the strategy guides. Try your best to spread out these bye weeks, so no week will be too damaging for yourself.
  5. Look for depth — Depth is important for your team, and you should address it early. Some players (practically RBs and QBs) get injured more often then others, so it’s common to see some people draft back up RBs and QBs earlier then you would expect in the draft. Conversely, it’s not uncommon to see people use their last two picks on their kicker and defense, becuase kickers and entire defensive units will basically never injured. It might be wise for you to draft with a similar philosophy.
  6. Take risks, especially in the later rounds — A good rule of thumb when drafting is to draft more “high-risk-high-reward” type of players later in the draft. It makes sense, becuase you want the early round players, the ones who theoretically should be the highest scorers for your team, be closer to sure things. In the later rounds, the caliber of players is reduced, so you may as well go bold and get the ones who will likely either be great or bust.

Look at that! You finished your first fantasy draft! Nice work, your team (probably) looks great. Your night isn’t over yet, mister, there’s still some precautions you should take immediately following the draft…

Step four: Post-draft

Immediately following the draft, there’s three things you should do before you go to bed that night:

  1. Find a good team name — It’s fantasy football tradition that you should name your team in a clever way after one of your star players. Have Tom Brady on your new team? Call the team “The Brady Bunch”. Drafted Ben Roethlisberger and the Packers defense (ie. the cheeseheads)? Call your team “The Cheese-Bergers”. You got Julio Jones? Name the squad “Bad to the Jones”. You get the idea.
  2. Check and see who wasn’t drafted — After the draft, it’s always a smart idea to see all of the undrafted players. Any player who wasn’t drafted will show up as a free agent, and you can swap them onto your team for one of your drafted players. Who knows, maybe there’s a diamond in the rough of undrafted players to find, so it’s important that you get there first. Just know that some leagues have sort of complicated “waiver rules”, so be sure to be on your toes for them. As a rookie, it’s preferable that you find a league with fully open free agents, but it’s not a deal breaker if you can’t.
  3. Analyze your team — Check out your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Maybe yours has a great group of receivers, but a terrible quarterback situation to deal with. Maybe your team looks really good on paper, but they’re all riddled with bad injuries, which could spell bad news for the team later. There’s no such thing as a perfect team, so finding your team’s weaknesses will help you have a game plan for how to improve your team.

Nice work, rookie. You’re well on your way to your first successful fantasy football season! Now get a good night’s sleep tonight. After all of this work, the actual fantasy season is about to begin!

Step five: The actual season

On September 8th, the NFL season will begin with Thursday night football. Effectively, so will your fantasy football season. You planed out this out very carefully, and you’re ready to go kick some virtual ass! Before you set up your week one starting line up, here’s a few things to keep in mind:

  1. Pay attention! — Please oh please oh please don’t become a lazy manager once the actual season starts. Be sure to check on your team at least weekly, to set up your line ups, make changes for your teams based on injuries, bye weeks, and match-ups, and be on the look out for any free agents to add to the team. After all the effort you put into your team, up-keeping the squad is the least you can do.
  2. Don’t be afraid to change your team around — Championship teams who win the league often look very different from right after the initial draft. Some teams change out of necessity, like when players get injured or become so ineffective in real life that they can’t produce any fantasy stats. Other teams (often the best ones) will change their teams for better opportunities. Be it via a “fair trade” that turns out lopsided, or finding an obscure player right before he has a huge season, great fantasy footballers will find ways to improve their teams. I’m not saying you should try to fix your team if it isn’t broken, but you should always look for new ways to garner more points. It’s really what separates the men from the boys.
  3. Be careful of trades, but don’t be too afraid of them — Just like in the real NFL, you can trade players with others in your league. Trading in fantasy football happens much more often then in actual football, likely because so many people are suckers who fall for bad trades. Don’t be one of those suckers. If you’re offered a trade, think about the pros and cons of it before you accept the offer. If the deal looks too good it probably is. Maybe the player you’re offered just got injured, or he’s having an unusually bad season or something, so the owner of that player is trying to pawn him off for one of your ostensibly “weaker” players. Also, don’t fall for the “I’ll give you three of my players for only one of yours” types of trades. Those are always set up for disaster on your end. With all of that said though, don’t be afraid to accept/make a trade with another player if the trade does seem fair. If the trade seems to benefit both teams, by all means take advantage of it, even if it feels a little bit risky.
  4. Don’t be Mr. Nice Guy — In most of my social circles, I’m considered to be ‘Mr. Nice Guy”, the perennially smiley, wouldn’t hurt a fly kind of goofball. However, those who I play fantasy football with will tell you that when I’m on the virtual gridiron, I am a stone cold S.O.B. Quite honestly, the winners of fantasy football are sort of ruthless. They don’t accept bad trades just becuase “Oh, well Dave sent me the trade, and I can always trust him.” You can’t trust anybody when you’re logged into your fantasy account. As a matter of fact, the good fantasy players (like myself) are those who are trustworthy and giving in real life, but takes advantage of that trust when in comes to fantasy football. I know that’s a tough thing to hear, but it’s absolutely true. You may play fantasy football with your friends, but their just your opponent on a given week when it comes to fantasy.
  5. Don’t give up — I mean it. If your team has a terrible start in the first few weeks, don’t say “Aww shucks, I guess I’ll have to find something meaningful to do on my Sundays now”. Have a positive attitude, and try to fix your mistakes. Bad starts may actually be a good time to turn the tables on you opponents, becuase they have their guard down when it comes to playing against your team. Fantasy football isn’t for everyone, but I recommend all rookies to try hard in their first season, before deciding if fantasy is worth committing to. Believe in yourself!

Well, that’s all the knowledge I have to give for your inaugural fantasy football season. If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to ask a fantasy veteran. Well, maybe a fantasy veteran in a different league. Now go out there, pop your fantasy football cherry, and have fun!