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Fantasy Football 52: Finding A League

Story Created: Aug 5, 2010 at 10:03 AM CDT

Story Updated: Aug 20, 2010 at 3:23 PM CDT

I get asked all of the time how fantasy football works. Everyone’s heard of it, but not everyone understands how everything happens. So I’ll try here to explain a little about different league types and scoring systems. It is kind of a tough question to answer fully. The rules of fantasy football change depending on where you play and who you play with, a lot like beer pong or baseball. But all leagues generally revolve around the same idea, stats = fantasy points. Let’s start from the beginning.

The Fantasy Draft: First things first, you have to draft your team. Typically, drafts are either done one of two ways. There’s the standard draft format, and the auction draft. In a standard draft, draft position is usually decided randomly, and each player makes his pick when his turn rolls around. Standard drafts are most often conducted in a serpentine manner. For example, in a ten man league the first round would go one through ten, then round two would go from ten back to one. In an auction draft, each player starts the draft with a set amount of money to spend on his team. Kind of like a salary cap. Then the commissioner announces each eligible NFL player, and owners are allowed to bid whatever they like on the players they want. Drafts can be done easily enough online, but they’re way more fun when you get ten or twelve of your buddies together for an afternoon of beer swilling, and doling out inappropriate insults.

League Types: There are literally way too many types of fantasy football leagues to ever cover in this space. We’ll just touch on a few. Standard Scoring leagues give out points for the basics, yards and touchdowns. In Point per Reception (PPR) leagues, players are given a bonus for each catch they pull in. In Individual Defensive Player (IDP) leagues, owners draft a defensive lineup to go along with their offense. Of course each league has to be either keeper, or non-keeper. In a keeper league, owners are allowed to keep a certain number of players on their roster from one season to the next.

Check out my show Wednesdays at 9 pm on EricPedigo.com .

Questions or comments? Email me at thecommish52@live.com

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