This is my third season of playing fantasy football. For several years, I had been in a Pick 'em league at work where there were an unlimited number of people in a pool picking the winners of each game every week. In this kind of league, you have to pick the winners of each game and get points for the week and the season based on number of correct predictions. When the payout was at the end of the year, I never got paid. Eventually, we got enough people to have weekly payouts too, but once we went to weekly payouts, I never got paid. So I stopped because I was also in a fantasy football league which was more interactive and also because I never won the Pick 'em. Oh yeah, it was a more expensive buy in too.
Here is a quick explanation of a standard fantasy football league:
- Even number of teams (usually 10 or 12), one team per person
- Each person selects football players from different positions throughout the NFL
- Each player scores individual points based on how he performs in the NFL game he is playing that day
- All of your player's scores are added up against the person you are playing against that week
- The person with the most points gets a win for that week; points are cumulative and used as tie-breakers for positioning
- The season is 12 weeks long though the NFL season is 17 weeks, which allows five more weeks of NFL football for fantasy football playoffs (remember fantasy players come from all teams so that is why there is no standard fantasy football during the real NFL playoffs, also no fantasy football during the last regular season game when playoff teams are resting players since winning won't affect positioning in playoffs).
- The waiver wire: the pool of unclaimed players used to replace players on your team; these are the unknown breakout stars who emerge every season or are used as an emergency replacement of your injured, suspended, or vacationing player.
The first season I played was in a 10 team league and I placed third. Last season we expanded to a 12 team league and I was in first place almost all of the season. Then I went to the playoffs. I got a first round bye and lost both of my playoff games so I came in fourth and didn't get my money back. The guys who finished the season on a hot streak won first and second place. So this year I am hoping for better luck. It is a 12 team league again so I'm going to have to scour the waiver-wire like usual for any sort of breakout talent to emerge or to replace injured players.
So I'm writing this today because the draft (where each person selects their players) was last night. My draft went better than the previous two. My first time was all auto-draft (computer automatically selects the highest rated player based on ESPN's analysis). My second time drafting last year had me screaming at my computer. My computer battery died in the third round (of 15). No, it was plugged in. My battery was completely dead and I had to buy a new one. The computer auto-draft ended up drafting three running backs from the New Orleans Saints for my team. The computer apparently has no logarithm for diversification. This year was probably my best draft. At least the previous years of bad drafting taught me how important it was to check the weekly waiver wire.
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| Me working the draft. I had to use the work table to fit two laptops to use different logins simultaneously. |
