Where to Join an Online Fantasy Football League

If you’ve never played online fantasy football before, or if you have but haven’t done a lot of it, you might not know about all your options. Right now there are several great league hosting sites that you can play on for free and get a lot of cool features to play with. If you’ve already got a group of friends playing fantasy together, you can use the website to host your league and do all the math and other work for you. Or if you’re on your own, you can join a league in need of owners and play with them. Most online leagues are just groups of strangers who have joined in a league together.So let’s go through the options currently available for fantasy footballers and what each one offers you.#1. ESPN.com – Let’s start with the group that’s probably the best. In the last few years...

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Choosing a Great Fantasy Team Name

One of the greatest traditions of fantasy sports, besides the further proliferation of acceptable meta-gambling, is the practice of giving your team a funny name. And yet look around your online leagues and check out the names. Probably nothing more than a lot of lame half-attempts amounting to handles like “SuperXMiami” and “SoUThSidE THugS” and “Beantown whatever” because everyone from Boston or from within 100 mile radius of Boston are legally required use the word Beantown in their fantasy names. Do you want this to be you? No, of course not, those team names make their owners sound like uncreative dweebs. So what should you name your team? Well, I think a fear of not knowing what to do when naming their team makes most people not bother to try. You sign up for a league online and...

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Designing Your Own Auction Draft Strategy

The great thing about auction drafts is you can plan out your team in advance. As a fantasy owner you can create a strategy for your purchasing that’ll give you the players you want and maximize your chances of taking advantage of a good deal. So how do you design a draft strategy? There’s no one right way to do, it’s an exercise in managerial creativity. Just think about what you want in a team. Do you want the #1 quarterback in the draft? And maybe an elite group of wide-outs to go with him? And then you figure you’ll just skimp a little on running backs and buy some unproven guys with potential? Right there is your plan. Here’s how to organize...

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Should You Try an Auction Draft?

The auction draft. You know fantasy veterans swear by it, and that the first fantasy league ever used an auction draft to start their inaugural season. But is it right for you? I’m here to tell you it is! Snake drafts, where each owner picks a player one after the other, are the default draft for most online leagues. At one time it was too complicated to hold an auction draft online, given the restrictions of 100 MB processors and telephone modems. However, times have changed, but the snake draft remains popular. This is unfortunate as an auction draft is far more rewarding and fun to take part in. For those who have never tried it, auction drafts allot each owner a set amount of money with which they can bid on available players. You can bid whatever you want for a player, but all of them...

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How to Prepare for a Fantasy Football Auction Draft

The biggest day of your fantasy year is draft day. Or if you’re like the Fantasy Coach, the biggest 15 to 20 days of your fantasy year is draft day. Let’s face it, after any fantasy draft it’s easy to look over everybody’s roster and pick out the ones who have no chance to earn to the title. Sure, luck can pick up the lowliest of rosters and owning the waiver wire might turn an underdog into a contender, but do you really want to be the guy digging himself out of a hole from week one onward? Of course you don’t. So what you gotta do is plan. You gotta get to know the players you’re going to be drafting. Don’t just rely on those lousy player ranking lists they include in the online draft room. Those lists were probably worked out in April by some committee of professional nerds. They aren’t...

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How to Prepare for Your Fantasy Football Snake Draft

So you’ve signed up for a fantasy football league. Perhaps with your friends or online at ESPN, Yahoo!, or NFL.com. You want to win your league of course, but how do you get started? Well assuming you have already signed up for a league, picked out a great team name like Favre From Over or I Dream of Mangini, and learned all the rules and scoring settings that will apply to your team, then it’s time to start doing your research. The interwebs make it almost too easy. Head over to ESPN’s fantasy football page to get started. They’ve got several regular columnists and plenty of player rankings. Then spread out and look over the draft kits at Yahoo!, CBS, Fox Sports, and NFL.com. The ranking lists give you the quick and dirty about how players stack up, however, lists will differ. Notice...

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