Head-to-head leagues are fun to play with your friends, so you can have fun trash-talking during the week, leading up to an end-of-season playoff among the teams with the best records. Points leagues are good if you like watching the NFL games over the course of the weekend, giving you more stake in the action when your players are playing and keeping track of the individual players. It’s better if you have less time to commit to the season.
In terms of scoring, most leagues employ a “points for reception” scoring style, which gives points not just for points scored by individual players, but for stats like receptions, yardage gained, and sacks. The score-tallying won’t affect the way you “play” fantasy football, but it might affect the way you choose players to play week-to-week. IDP, Individual Defensive Players, options utilize defensive players on an individual basis, as well as using team defensive units. Other leagues simply use team defenses. The additional players and positions to fill require owners in an IDP league to do a lot more research to determine which defensive players to draft and when to draft them, and makes it more difficult to determine which players and positions are most important. However, these leagues can be rewarding to win for big football fans.
You can start new leagues, but try to get a little experience in different types of playing and play a few fantasy seasons before you try to start a league of your own.
In a serpentine draft, owners take turns drafting players in the interest of fairness. For instance, the owner who picks first in odd rounds picks last in even rounds, and so on. In an auction draft, each owner has a predetermined, imaginary budget to spend on players. Players are listed auction-style, going to the team of the owner who bids highest.
Draw up a draft-day cheat sheet. Your cheat sheet should list your ideal picks, as well as back-ups and long-shots. Cover it as well as you can during the draft and keep a running tally of picks you grab and how much money you have left, as well as your ideal picks that get snatched up by someone else. For instance, you could have a few highlighters on-hand to mark who gets what. Usually, Teams that win in Fantasy Football because of their top 5 players that are usually taken in the first 5 picks, so pick reliable veterans that produce points every week in the first 5 picks. If you can pick reliable veterans that are unpopular because of their team having a down year or injury in the first 7 to 9 rounds you will have an even stronger team. Pick up five RB and WRs in the first five picks because the quality drops off real fast and most NFL teams only have one top RB so in reality there are only 32 top RBs. If you look at 3 year averages, you can still take a top QB in round 6. If a top QB falls down to round 4, just take the top tier QB in round 4. Pick up the Kicker last in round 15th. Let everyone else pick the kicker and defense while you get strong backup RB and a strong backup WR. Some teams will even take backup Kickers and Defenses that will just make their team even weaker. Don’t take any rookies unless it is a RB taken in the first 5 of the draft. Rookies disappoint. Of players taken in the top round of the NFL draft, only 9% of rookie QBs, TEs and WRs do average the first year but 35% of RBs do well the first year. This is because a RB position is easier to learn, you just run through a hole in the front line. Don’t take aging players that are going downhill because they are more subject to injuries. RBs over 29 go downhill real fast.
RBs have the easiest position to learn and tend to break out in year 2, 3 or 4. QBs, TEs, WRs tend to have breakout in the 3rd, 4th or 5th season because their positions are harder to learn. Almost always avoid rookies unless they are taken in the first 5 picks of the NFL draft. You are better off taking WRs that are in their 4th or 5th season with the same team and same QB because they should be about to break out. Avoid injury prone players or players that just had surgery, because they might take longer to get back than you were expecting. Avoid players that have new QB throwing to them or were traded to a new team because they tend to lose points their first year with a new team. Don’t take a backup QB, a backup TE, a backup defense nor a backup kicker because there will be plenty left over after the draft because there is not enough room to stock these players (each team can only have a total of 6 backups and you need backup RBs and backup WRs the most). If you take the TE, K, Def and QB with different bye weeks, then you can waste only one position on the bench and save the bench for breakout RBs and Breakout WRs that can make your team stronger. Another strategy is to take all the players TE, K, Def, and QB with the same bye week and just lose that week. This is not a strategy that is practical because injuries can change your team so you are just throwing away 1 week and you will still have to juggle bye weeks because of injuries during other weeks. Save your hometown heroes until you’ve got the major choices figured out. If you’re a big Dallas Cowboys fan and you want to pick a bunch of their players, you might get into a kind of trap when they all have a bye-week at the same time. Be wary of picking too many players from the same team. Get the best players at the high-stat positions figured out. Remember, you’re not making a real football team, so you don’t really need role players. They help, but you want guys who are going to build lots of stats.
If more than one team wants to pick up a free agent, the player goes to the team with the highest waiver wire ranking. Waver wire ranking is determined by a variety of factors, including win-loss record and the number of free agents that team has already added. After adding a player to your team from free agency you go back to the bottom of the waiver wire list. Different leagues might have different methods for calculating these rankings. Pickup top players that were suspended the first 4 weeks and got thrown away by a novice. Pick him up and stash him, 4 weeks goes by fast. Pickup top players that were thrown away because the person had too many players on the same bye week. Many times you can pickup a top Defense, QB or TE because someone had too many of them and had to make room for their studs that are all on the bench for the same bye week. Pickup players that have an injury and are thrown away before the doctors reports come out. Many times these players come back in 1 to 3 weeks and were thrown away too soon because the news over-rated the injury. Pickup and play a defense that is going against a rookie QB where the QB is playing for the first time or the rookie QB is consistently playing bad. Pickup Defenses with a lot of tackles over a defense that scored high because they ran an interception in for a Touchdown. The TDs are unreliable, the tackles are more consistent. Pickup a top defense after 2 or 3 weeks because they are the strong ones. Throw away your current Defense if they are not playing well because you can always pickup another top defense later as players on a team get used to playing together and start to play better. If your kicker or defense suddenly starts to play weak for a few weeks in a row, take a waiver wire kicker or defense that has been playing strong the last 4 weeks. There are usually injuries that have caused the team to play poor that will soon come out in the news. Just simply substitute the strong defense for the weak defense. Look at who they are playing against the next 3 weeks and avoid the defenses that are going to play against strong offenses. If you have a backup WR that is going to play against strong defenses the next 3 to 4 weeks, throw him away and let someone else pick him up. But don’t throw away studs, keep them. Many opponents will be duped into playing these players and after they perform poor 3 to 4 weeks, they throw them away and you can pick them up again! It is amazing how many people do not look at the defenses over the next 3 to 4 weeks. After the first week of play, take a top RB on the waiver wire over a top WR because WRs are unreliable week to week and break out RBs are hard to find. After the first week of play, pickup breakout QBs and breakout RBs because they will be snatched up fast after the first week. The waiver wire is usually deep for QBs, TEs, Kickers and Defenses, so it is not necessary to keep backups the first couple of weeks. Stock up on RBs and WRs that are doing well. The ones that don’t perform, you can throw away and pickup backup QBs, TEs, and DEFs later. Don’t pickup a backup K because it wastes a roster spot.
Trades within fantasy leagues can be controversial, and may require the intervention of a fantasy trade referee. There are several trade referee websites where an objective third-party will rule on the validity and fairness of a certain trade.
Make sure the player is available. Usually, these players will be labeled with an “A” for active. If they’re injured or their team is on bye, they’ll be inactive and you’ll have to replace them with other players. One particularly helpful stat to take a look at when you’re trying to decide which of your QBs and which of your RBs to play, is the strength of the player’s opponent for the next week. If you’ve got the undeniably-great Peyton Manning on your roster, but also the equally-great Tom Brady, see who each of them are playing that week. If Manning’s playing the best team in the nation, but Brady’s got a team in the gutter, it would help to take that into account.
