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By John Siskos
So, you’re thinking about joining a fantasy football league…or maybe even starting up a whole league of your own? And why shouldn't you. Half the reason fantasy baseball does so well is in large part to all the addicts who play fantasy football with too much time on their hands during the offseason. No, a real man plays fantasy fooball.
At any rate, all I can say is kiss your life goodbye.
About a year from now, you’ll be standing up in a dark room in your local community centre saying out loud to the group, “Hello, my name is [your name here], and I am a fantasy football addict.”
Not that that’s a bad thing mind you. I just want you to be prepared before I help to lead you astray. I guess if you’re here, you have already made the decision to plunge into the murky waters of fantasy football. And before I forget, I am much too lazy to keep typing out “fantasy football” so from here on in I will refer to it simply as FF.
Starting a FF (see how easy that was?) league:
At a minimum, if you want to do this right, you are going to need 9 other addicts, err, friends, to set this up. My preference is a ten or even a twelve team league for starters. If you go with an 8 team league, it’s not a BAD thing, but even the 8th best team can have a good team just by accident. So then there’s almost no need for any skill or to do any research, and there’s no fun in that. If you go into a 14 or more league, and they can be huge fun, you have to really commit yourself to the fact that the worst team in the league could quite literally need two seasons to climb into contention. It’s really more for seasoned vets of FF. No, if you are starting your first league, keep it simple but not too easy. 10 or 12 teams is the way to go.
Okay, so you found 9 more suckers…how do you set up the rules. Well, the very best rules cover everything, because ANYTHING can happen. I mean anything. And there is always that ONE guy in your league who will take every chance he can to either (a) bitch about a loophole or (b) take advantage of it. So having a well written, but NOT overly complex rules system will go a long way to having a smooth running league. More work up front, less work, and headaches later on. But that doesn’t sound like a selling point does it? It’s not supposed to be. Running your own league can only be a chore if you let it get away from you. Covering all the bases from the get go let’s you focus on league management (scoring and transactions) rather than wasting your time trying to make everyone happy and put out fires when a loophole is uncovered. Don’t get me wrong my leagues aren’t perfect, but I didn’t have a lot of help at the beginning of the one league I started, and I left a LOT of things uncovered. Over time, you learn from your mistakes and make the league better. My hope is that you heed my advice and hit the ground running.
“Alright, Siskos, so what do I need to do to cover all my bases? How does scoring work? How do I do a schedule? Where can I get my stats from?”
I am going with the easiest choice here, and help you with scoring. Everyone who watches football knows that a touchdown is 6 points, a field goal is 3 points, and the gimme extra points are 1. But how many points does a guy who rushes for 87 yards get? Or if your QB tosses 263 yards, what is he worth? I am going to cut through all the babble and just give you a “Standard Basic Scoring System”. The best reason to use an acceptable standard system for your scoring is, quite simply, it will be easier to sort through the incredible amounts of information available to you for making your projections, because most the best sites understand that the best value for their readers is to be able to compare what they are reading.
So here is probably the most common scoring system you will find:
Now that we know how many points every player can get and for what, you need to know who can get these points. Typically, a basic league will only have offensive players in the mix, which includes Quarterbacks, Running Backs, Wide Receivers and Kickers. Depending on how you want to set your starting lineups, you can designate Tight Ends as Wide Receivers, which means only a handful will be worth much in your league, or you can make it a separate starting spot, which adds another element to your league with adding complexity.
My mistake, when creating my first league, was NOT including the Tight end as its own position. I vaguely recall some lame excuse like it was too complicated, but I can’t say for sure. I can tell you that I do regret not doing so, as this will finally be the first year that the league is instituting the Tight End position. At any rate, I strongly advise you to include it now, because it will be much harder to do so later.
So that we know the who, we need to figure out how many. How many players will each team draft? How many starters do we need? Again, to keep things simple, let’s go with the following:
1 QB + 2 RB + 3 WR + 1 TE + 1 PK = 8 Starters
So if you have eight starters, you will want another eight (8) backups. And there you have the roster sizes of sixteen (16) per team, and the draft size (16 x 10 teams or 16 x 12 teams). You have a scoring system and you have your starters.
Next…we’ll finish with setting up your league rules, and continue on with how to run your draft, followed with how to run the in-season stuff.
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