Martin A. Schulman - Fantasy Football For Dummies

Before the NFL season begins, every fantasy league must conduct a draft to fill the teams’ rosters. Because there are 32 NFL teams and often only 8 to 14 fantasy teams in any given league, a fantasy team should have the cream of the NFL crop. I’m talking All-Pros, Pro-Bowlers, and other valuable commodities. This section gives you the highlights of a draft. Chapter 4gives you the complete lowdown on preparing for and understanding a fantasy draft. Part 4covers constructing lineups for Daily Fantasy Sports, which is slightly different.

A fantasy draft is where you build your fantasy team in preparation for the season and its weekly management. In a public league, the draft occurs at a preset time determined by the league provider. In a private league, your league commissioner chooses a draft type and a draft date for your league and notifies the coaches, usually by email. ( Chapter 4explains the different draft formats.) Here are the three most common ways that a draft can be run:

Live offline draft: In a live offline draft, all the coaches decide on a place and a time to meet and select their players. This old-fashioned way to start a season is the most fun, in my opinion, even though it isn’t always practical if your league members are spread across the country. Even so, many coaches plan an annual road trip to be at the draft in person, no matter where it’s being held.

Live online draft: A live online draft is the most popular and the easiest way to gather your league to draft players. Your fantasy league website provider uses real-time technology to run the draft online. Each coach logs into the site at the specified draft time and uses the draft interface to select the available players they want to draft.

Autopick draft: An autopick draft occurs online, but your league provider drafts each team for the league. Coaches don’t have to log in at a specific time or place, but no one has control over the actual draft. Public leagues often use this format because it’s hard to get 12 coaches to agree on a draft time when they don’t know each other.

Most fantasy football leagues have drafts that use one of the following formats: the snake draft or the salary cap draft (a format previously known as auction-style). The following sections cover these drafts and briefly explain how they work. ( Chapter 4dives deep into the differences between these two draft types and what you need to do to prepare for each one.)

If you’re new to fantasy football or don’t want to make a huge time commitment, I recommend playing in a snake draft league. If you’re an experienced player or just a rabid football fan, read up on the salary cap draft; you may welcome the challenge.

The standard draft is in a snake draft format. The snake draft is divided into rounds — one round for every available roster spot on each team. For example, if your league has 15-man rosters, your draft will have 15 rounds.

In a snake draft, each fantasy coach has one pick in each round. Each team makes its first-round pick based on a predetermined order (see Chapter 4for deciding draft order). When the first round is over, the team that picked last in the first round picks first in the second round — in other words, the draft snakes back on itself. The team that had the first pick in the first round now has the last pick in the second round and the first pick in the third round. The process continues through all the rounds of the draft. If you can picture a snake moving back and forth in an “S” pattern, you’ll get the idea.

The key to building a good team in a snake draft is preparing based on your draft position. If you get an earlier pick, you get the chance to draft one of the biggest stars in the NFL. If you have a later pick, you’ll land two top-15 overall players rather than just the one elite player. Either way, you can win a fantasy league by drafting well, regardless of your draft position. (For more on draft prep and strategy, see Chapters 4, 8, and 9.)

A fantasy salary cap draft works much like eBay, except that you offer on NFL players rather than antiques or gadgets. In a salary cap draft, each NFL player is assigned a unit value normally in dollars, and every fantasy team has a unit budget; each team must fill its roster requirements without going over budget. You can offer as much as you want for a player, as long as you still have enough units left to complete the rest of your roster. Often, but not always, these units are described as dollars.

For example, if you have a 20-player roster to fill and a budget of 200 dollars, the maximum you could offer for your first player would be 181 dollars, which would leave you with 1 dollar per player for the remaining 19 slots. However, this would be absurd and doing so would leave your fantasy team in lots of trouble!

A salary cap draft still has rounds — the number of rounds mirrors the number of roster spots — but instead of drafting a player when it’s your turn in a round, you nominate a player and start the offering at an amount of your choice. If no other team outoffers you, the player is yours. If another team makes a offer, the offering continues until no team surpasses the highest current offer; the player is awarded to the highest offerer. Each coach can nominate one player per round; this process continues until all the rosters are filled. ( Chapter 4has more info on preparing for a salary cap draft, and Chapter 8gives you some strategies.)

Daily Fantasy Football almost exclusively uses a salary cap based format (which isn’t the same as salary cap drafts). DFS usually have a salary cap of $50-60K per contest, rather than the $200 commonly used in traditional fantasy leagues that use salary cap drafts to put together their rosters prior to the season. (For more on Daily Fantasy, see Part 4.)

An NFL team has 53 players total, with 11 starters on offense and 11 starters on defense. Luckily, your fantasy roster won’t be as extensive or complex (unless you play in an extreme league, which is beyond this book’s scope). When you research your league and find out how many roster spots you have, you can turn your attention to preparing for your draft based on those requirements.

The roster for your fantasy football team will be quite specific, depending on your league. The following list presents the default roster for a Yahoo! public league.This team has 9 starting slots and 6 bench slots (6 players [any position], and 2 IR slots), for a total of 15 fantasy players. In this league, the draft would last for 15 rounds:

Quarterback (QB)

Wide receiver 1 (WR1)

Wide receiver 2 (WR2)

Running back 1 (RB1)

Running back 2 (RB2)

Tight end (TE)

FLEX (WR, RB or TE)

Kicker (K)

Team defense/Special teams (Team DEF/ST)

Six bench players

The major positions on your fantasy roster are the same as the major positions on offense in football. RBs take center stage in fantasy football, not QBs, and in Chapter 5, I explain why. WRs are the unsung heroes of fantasy football because they can score plenty of fantasy points, but they’re often overshadowed by RBs and QBs. However, with the introduction of Points Per Reception or PPR leagues, the WR has regained its pre-eminent position as a fantasy points machine. Only a few TEs are major parts of their teams’ offensive gameplans; thus, a TE’s impact on your fantasy team is often limited. As for the Ks, most of them get the job done, so you only need to draft one.