Fantasy Football 101: How to Play Fantasy Football
Okay. So, you feel like you’re a little late to the play here. You’re scrambling through the program in the dark, trying not to make a lot of noise, and you can’t figure out who Neil Patrick Harris is supposed to be playing and whether or not that spider tattoo on his neck is real. OR maybe you feel like you’re standing longingly downwind at the back end of a train you missed; now the thick black smoke is regrouping so it can billow back at your face. What is going on here? What in the heck is this thing called fantasy football, and why is it so socially acceptable?
Either you thought it was stupid (understandable), you hate how it makes people from your hometown root for teams that they don’t even care about (true), or maybe you’re annoyed by Devin from accounting, who talks about his team relentlessly (no, no one who plays the game cares about his running backs either). Maybe you’ve wanted to play but can’t figure out how to get started. After all, when the merry-go-round is already spinning, and that hyper-aggressive kid with the mullet who moonlights as the school bully is trying to see how fast he can get it to go, can you really still hop on? At some point, isn’t it just too late?
Not to worry, my friend. I got you.
This time, when Taylor from sales asks you to play – same as the past two years – I want you to say yes. Bookmark this page and refer back to it repeatedly. I’m going to hold your hand, mon amis, and you won’t look like a fool, I promise. Heck, you might even win! That’s what I like to do!
Like Pokémon, but the Most Powerful Monster Is Christian McCaffrey
You’re going to manage a fictional football team. There will usually be 9-11 other managers in your league; each of them will have a team of their own. The object is essentially to figure out how to stack the deck in your favor.
Think of it a bit like Pokémon. The cards have monsters that carry varying statistical probabilities for victory, and the most powerful monster is Christian McCaffrey. Whether you have the advantage or not, sometimes you win, and sometimes you still lose, but your best chance is to have the biggest collection of powerful monsters. The difference between good and bad fantasy managers is knowing how to collect the greatest number of good players at the most valuable positions (or knowing how to catch ’em all, if you will).
Before the real-life football season commences, it starts with a draft where you and the other managers select players from real-life NFL franchises; these players will be your game pieces. You will fill your roster with a number of them determined by your league in advance.
Trials by Combat: Choose Your Champions, Demolish Your Friends
Over the next four months or so, your fantasy team will engage in a series of weekly one-on-one contests against other fantasy teams in your league, which will coincide with the actual NFL football schedule. You and your opponent will designate a smaller combination of players from your total rosters to be in your lineup. The players you have chosen will score points based on different statistical accomplishments from their real-life games. Their points are added, and the sum forms your team’s score. Between you and your opponent, whoever has the highest score wins that week.
Your weekly victories and defeats will be kneaded into a yearly record; the teams with the best records will play in the fantasy playoffs. Although each league is a little different, most of the time, the playoffs are in Weeks 15, 16, and 17 of the real-life NFL regular season. The playoffs amount to a single elimination tournament, and the team that wins all their playoff games is the champion. That’s the whole enchilada in a nutshell encased in a ball of wax.
Admit It, It’s All Luck and Your Existence as an Analyst Is Pointless
I’ll admit luck is a factor, but calling it all luck is a bit extreme. Every week is like a hand of poker. Anyone can sit down with Daniel Negreanu and win a single hand. Some might even be able to take him for a whole night. But if they played him night after night, month after month, year after year, most people would eventually be signing over the deed to their house and the title to their car.
In fantasy football, the same principle is at work. Your job is to put yourself in the most optimal position to win. Some weeks you come out on top, some weeks you watch the Monday night game through the bottom of a whiskey glass. But if you repeatedly make good decisions that give you the best odds, you should have more good Mondays than bad. Your mission is not specifically to win any individual game; your mission is to win the season.
What Do I Need to Do to Get Started?
If Brad from sales doesn’t ask you to play this year, you’ll need to find a league. The three blue-chip fantasy football sites are Yahoo, ESPN, and Sleeper. They all have public leagues people can join for free.
A public league might not be an awful origin point for a beginner; you can hone your skills against strangers, minimizing embarrassment. When the season is over, it’s gone forever. The people you played against are spread out in places like Seattle, Orlando, and Saskatchewan. You can disappear under cover of night and never think about any of those dummies again.
What’s the Number One Most Important Thing I Need to Know?
Something paramount when you join a new league is that you have a cool name. You might not win, but you should come correct. Several fantasy managers go for football puns based on player names (e.g. Davante’s Inferno, Hurts So Good); if you like this approach, go for it. It’s not really my style though.
The coolest kids in the league? The ones that wear a middle part and have the crisp line work on their hands? They’re going to make a pop culture reference. Think of a cool TV show, song lyric, movie quote, TikTok reel, or current event, and land on a timely reference for maximum effect. If you’re playing with close friends, an inside joke will also do.
Personally, I go for comedy. I’ve seen some try to instill fearsomeness. You can go your own way. Just remember that this will be the name that represents you for the next four months. You absolutely cannot swing and miss on this.
Dude, Just Tell Me What Positions I Need
Every league can be set up differently, so there is ostensibly no answer to this, however, the most common fantasy football lineup format requires you to play the following numbers of each of these positions:
- Quarterbacks – 1
- Wide Receivers – 2
- Running Backs – 2
- Tight Ends – 1
- Flex (WR, RB, or TE) – 1
- Kicker – 1
- Defense – 1
Unless otherwise stated, most fantasy football publications, magazines, websites, podcasts, etc. use something close to this as their default. But be warned, a change to the format can be highly significant. Fantasy managers, new or otherwise, should know their positional format before they draft. Differing position requirements cause the value of certain positions to change.
The good news? If you’re in an unusual type of league with a strange format and different positional requirements, you’re on a site where you can find information pertinent to several league variants. Make sure you check out the Ultimate Draft Kit (UDK) at the top of the page so you are well-armed for all the quirks of any unique format.
As mentioned earlier, the lineup is a smaller selection from a larger pool of players that comprise the overall roster. The players you don’t use are called your bench, and the size of the bench is usually between five to seven players. For example, if the lineup has nine players, and the bench is six, your total roster size is 15. A six-man bench is the most common standard for most fantasy football leagues.
You can fill your bench with whatever type of players you wish. In other words, there are no restrictions whatsoever. Your whole bench can be made up of kickers. However, it should be noted that this would not be a recommended strategy.
What Players Should I Pick to Put on My Bench?
With few exceptions, you need not carry a backup kicker or defense. Many experienced fantasy football managers also won’t take a backup at quarterback or tight end in a boilerplate league like this. There is a reason for this, but it’s a more advanced lesson. For now, just take my word for it.
Generally speaking, running backs and wide receivers are the most valuable players in fantasy leagues. Beyond that, top-end quarterbacks and tight ends are useful, but these positions get flat pretty quickly. Most experienced fantasy players wait until the last two rounds to take kicker and defense. The best kickers usually don’t score much more than the replacements off the waiver wire so, even if they are good, they simply don’t offer much value over a replacement. Defenses can fluctuate wildly depending on matchups; many good fantasy players stick to streaming their defense each week. Streaming is when a fantasy manager doesn’t commit to a single defense (this can be any position, for that matter; it doesn’t have to be defense), choosing instead to play the matchups each week off the waiver wire.
Long story short, most experienced fantasy managers in these types of leagues will carry a lot more wide receivers and running backs on their bench than anything else, and in many cases, they will only carry wide receivers and running backs on their bench.
How Should I Approach the Draft?
For golfers, think of the draft like an approach shot. Anything could still happen once you’re on the green, but you’ll almost definitely never get a good score unless you nail that one crucial swing that comes before you yank out the ol’ putter. Free agency and trading are important, and a lot of times a champion gets the crucial final tuning necessary to win the whole shebang long after the season has begun, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t better to start with the chassis of a Ferrari than that of a Ford Focus.
You’ll need a list that puts the players in some semblance of value order. Value isn’t determined by how many points a player scores. Value is about how many points a player scores compared to the other players that play his position. The more value players you can assemble on one team, the better the overall product will be.
There are a lot of ways to acquire a list like this. One common way – especially for grandpas with stringy long eyebrows who have played since 1983 – is a fantasy football magazine. Before you buy one, you’ll need to go to a bank and apply for a small loan; they’re not cheap. Additionally, all the different publications race to get theirs out there first. I’m convinced that at the very moment the NFL draft announces pick number 224, six of them are on the rack at BooksaMillion. What this means is that when the season starts in September, the info found in one of these is outdated. Don’t waste your time.
Your best bet? Go to the top of the webpage and order the UDK. Here, you’ll find rankings and tiers, alternative formats like SuperFlex, risk and upside profiles, projections, analysis, videos, and consistency charts. It’s everything you’ll need to dominate your draft.
Mock Drafts Can Reveal So Many Things
Especially if you are new to the game, you should do something called a mock draft, which should be available on your chosen platform. A mock draft allows you to understand how the draft platform works and see where the players you like are being picked. I like to do a few mock drafts – maybe five or six. This gives me all I need; many people do 40, 50, or 60 mock drafts. You can do as many as you like. If you want to go the extra mile, you should do a few where you don’t take the players you like. Then you can get an idea of where they are going on draft day.
Something you’re going to want to know going into a draft is approximately when a player is likely to be drafted. This is called a player’s average draft position, more commonly known as ADP. Your platform will have this, the UDK will have this, and there are several websites that curate updated ADPs across different sites.
Knowing when a player is going to be picked is invaluable, because, even if you’ve identified a sure-fire sleeper people are overlooking, taking him in the fourth round when you could have easily had him in the ninth means you’ve lost a chance to add value and acquire both. Don’t be too eager with the players you’ve identified as sleepers. Be patient, and take them in the proper round. If you have to have a particular player, take him a round before he’s supposed to go. That should be plenty.
One last piece of advice: before you go into the draft, you should find the notable injuries and holdouts in the league. Nothing is worse than investing a high pick on someone only to find out he tore his ACL in practice last Tuesday and is now out for the season. Your four-month-old magazine didn’t have that in it, did it?
What Is a Fantasy Football Waiver Wire? What About Free Agency?
The roster is fluid. From week to week, you may release players into the free agent pool (meaning they will be available for any owner to claim) in favor of a player available in the free agent pool. Releasing a player into free agency is called dropping a player. Acquiring one from free agency is referred to as adding.
Throughout the season, you may end up with a totally different roster than you began with. It is important to know when to be aggressive and when to be conservative when adding or dropping players.
How Do I Know Which Players to Keep, Add, or Drop?
Who to keep and who to drop is generally a matter of taste – or at least how aggressive to be about it. The principle is typically pretty universal though. You want to have guys on your bench who either have a high ceiling or a high floor.
A ceiling is a slang term for a player’s maximum potential. It basically asks, if certain factors break right, how good could this player really end up being? A great example of a player with a high ceiling from the 2023 season is RB De’Von Achane. Achane demonstrated amazing potential whenever he had a chance with the football; in select games, he nuked opponents almost single-handedly, including a 49.5 half-PPR finish in Week 3. However, Achane didn’t always get a high amount of volume with the ball, so he sometimes lacked floor.
A floor is a slang term for the player’s minimum potential. If a player has a high floor, it means, no matter what happens (barring a serious injury, of course), this player is expected to score a useful amount of fantasy points. According to the consistency charts in the UDK, Jonathan Taylor has a good floor, hitting at RB2 or better in 81% of his games. Taylor lacked ceiling in 2023 though, scoring over 20 half-PPR points in a game only twice and maxing out at 26.5.
Ideally, you want players with a high floor and a high ceiling. But those players are usually taken early in the draft. When you’re scouring the free agent pool in Week 10, you’re not going to find those. So when you’re filling out your bench, you should probably be looking for a player with one or the other. I’m a huge advocate that we should prioritize ceiling far more than floor.
What Else Do I Need to Know?
Byes – every NFL team has one week off, but each team doesn’t have the same week off. That means all your players have one week off each year, and each player’s week off will vary from another. These weeks off are called byes. Some fantasy managers avoid having a high volume of players with the same bye week because this makes it difficult to fill out your lineup for that particular matchup. This could force you to drop players you may not want to or leave your starting lineup incomplete for the week.
Waivers – In most leagues, a newly dropped player will not immediately become a free agent but instead go on waivers. Usually, a player will be on waivers for two days, though league rules vary. A player on waivers cannot be picked up by anyone immediately. Instead, owners can put in competing bids for the right to claim the player at the end of the moratorium period. This is to prevent owners who are busy at the time of a player’s release from being penalized for going to work or washing their cars. Different leagues have different rules on what determines the waiver claim order. The most common are a rolling waiver wire priority or a fictional free agent acquisition budget (FAAB) that players will use in a silent auction either each week or each day.
GIFs and Memes – You should have a steady compliment of these handy to send to your opponents for trash talk. Recommended GIFs would be, for instance, one of your players dancing or spiking the ball. And, while you hate to think about it, you should also have some cued up for sadness or anger for your less exemplary days.
The Cardinal Sin – Never, never, never, never, never, never quit on your league midseason. If you are out of the running, you owe it to the other owners in your league to do your best until the season is over. Quitting on your league is the most surefire way to not be invited back, and to just be a stone-cold busta.
Information – Things change quickly in fantasy football. Make sure you listen to the Fantasy Footballers podcast each day throughout the season so you’re always in the know. They will guide you on players to pick up or drop, and league-wide trends you need to be aware of. They are also really fun guys with awesome personalities.
Comments
And also not quitting on the league, yes yes yes. Great article!!
Cool name and arsenal of gifs and memes = Super Winning Tips!!
Excellent insights, Aaron! I love it! It was hard to keep the word count on this article in the low-3000s, so I tried to stay pretty basic! But absolutely! And if you’re scoring the most points consistently, your ship will come in; in fact, I predict you’re about to go on a run of two or three championships in the next five years!
One factor I like to point out to new joiners is that you can apply game theory principles each year. This is a game of luck at base, but you can influence the outcome little by little through some nerd stuff.
Think of this game like flipping a coin 17 times. The odds are 50/50 at base. We all know this. But sometimes you will win 13; sometimes you will lose 13. That is just how odds work with a limited sample. In fantasy football though, you can weigh the coin down on one side or the other by your direct actions. You can never 100% fix the coin to show up one way or another, but you can certainly give yourself 1% here and 2% there.
The ballers cover some of this informally, but they get the point across. For example “Start your studs” or “don’t buy into hype until it is proven” is an allegory for “Avoid results oriented thinking”.
The same goes for a number of fallacies that are often covered but not oft explained. Gamblers fallacy and the sunk cost fallacy are the two most common that exist and recognizing them and their applications is the key to ensuring most optimal play (most is a key word).
I could go on with this forever since the science behind winning goes deep. The numbers do bear out too. I only have a single win in any of my leagues, but I am consistently the top scorer in most leagues I partake in.
Lol. I started in 1991. My youngest is 3. We are one, my friend. My FATHER started in the late 70s though. Can you believe that?
(his eyebrows can get pretty stringy sometimes – don’t tell him I said that)
Hold on there, sonny. I started playing in 1989 – I’m neither a grandpa nor have long whiskers. My youngest daughter is 10, so speaking for all of GenX, whatever man. LOL