All I know is
- Pick players
- Profit
There are all sorts of rules and league types. Can someone help me sort through all of it?
Step 2 there is really the meat and potatoes of it. First of all, what kind of fantasy football are you interested in? Season long leagues where you compete with your buddies or daily contests like Draftkings?
Season long.
After you’ve picked your team you need to decide who are your starters. Then monitor each player’s performance and availability throughout the season. If one guys is out with injury or on a bye, you need to make sure replace his spot in the lineup with a replacement player on your bench.
If someone turns out to completely suck or suffers a long term injury, you can drop him and replace him with someone from the waiver wire, which all the guys who didn’t get drafted or got dropped by another team.
That’s about it for the mechanics of it. For the strategy, you need to understand your league’s scoring system. TDs are always valuable so if you’ve got a RB that racks up 100 yards a game but doesn’t get touches inside the 5 yard line, that’s something to think about.
There are a few kinds of leagues:
Draft: A pick order is randomly decided and people take turns choosing players to add to their team. It usually snakes, so for an 8 person league, the draft order would be 1234567887654321, with the manager in the 8th position drafting two players in a row. Then the pattern repeats.
Some draft leagues are called dynasty or keeper, where you get to keep some (keeper) or all (dynasty) of your players from year to year and build a long term team.
Auction: Each manager gets a budget of fake dollars, and managers take turns nominating players and bidding on them.
There are a lot of different scoring systems, some simple, some massively detailed. Generally speaking, players get points for touchdowns and yards gained and lose points for turnovers. Kickers get points for making kicks. Defenses get points for scoring, holding teams to low scores, and turnovers.
Some leagues also give points for receivers for merely catching the ball, regardless of gain. These are called PPR leagues, and a different enough animal to warrant their own mention.
Most leagues have weekly matchups where you are competeing against another manager heads up for most points, and trying to earn wins that way. Some leagues only care about overall points scored in total.
There’s obviously much much more, but that’s the overhead view. It’s tremendous fun
, and adds a lot to watching games, imho. Especially if you have money on the line.
It’s the scoring systems that I know the least about. Like on the radio the guy is talking about picking these three player in the first three rounds because it is a 6 point passing touchdown league. What are all (or most common) of the different scoring systems?
That’s a link to Yahoo’s default scoring scheme. Many, many leagues use those numbers while some tweak them slightly (again, many leagues use 0.5 points per reception).
To bounce off these, the most common variations are 6 pt vs. 4 pt passing touchdowns and 0/.5/1PPR (points per reception)
Going 6 pts gives a big boost to QBs (for example, if you had gone with Andrew Luck last year in a 6 pt league it would have given you and extra 80 points over the season)
PPR obviously gives a big boost to receivers, but even more so to pass-catching RBs. Someone like Matt Forte gets bumped up vs. a running back who doesn’t catch. He scored an extra 100pts last year in a PPR league. (I like .5 PPR for the best balance)
There are several steps before Step #1 there.
- Find other people to play with
- Decide what type of league you’re going to be in
- Decide on the scoring system, roster size, and roster type
You can’t do those after you draft, for obvious reasons (if it’s not so obvious, it’s because it would a) be nearly impossible to add teams after you’ve already drafted, b) mess with the rankings/reasons why people drafted certain players if you switch kinds of leagues and c) also screw with the rankings/reasons for drafting if you switch the scoring system.