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 fantasy hosts have been trying to step their games up and get more users, and ESPN is leading the pack. They’ve got lots of customizing options for making your own league, a group of dedicated columnists and podcasters, and pretty nice online drafting room. This year they’ve even got “free agent acquisition budgets,” a system where owners place blind bids on free agents and the highest bidder wins. This eliminates the first come first serve waiver system that website leagues normally have to use and is a nice addition that shows online leagues are really getting to the point where they can duplicate all of the things off-line pen and paper leagues can do.

The bottom line is if you’re new to fantasy football join a standard league at ESPN. Don’t feel that you have to stop there, I’d suggest having a few teams, but definitely have one there.

#2. Yahoo! – The old fantasy sports bull, Yahoo.com. I started playing fantasy football there a decade ago. Then they had to go and start charging $30 just to own a team and I dropped them like a bad habit. But times have changed and Yahoo! is back to being completely free. They have most of the options you can get with ESPN, but their fantasy sports site isn’t nearly as nice as ESPN’s or really as helpful. Overall, still a good place to make or join a league at, nice draft room, cute little helmet logos for your team, don’t shy away if you’re interested. I have several teams there myself.

#3. CBS – Here we start to see a bit of a drop-off in quality. Home of AFC broadcasts, CBS provides a serviceable, if very basic, fantasy football experience. If you’re playing there for free (and really why would you pay?) the options are limited to a standard scoring, 12-team, snake draft league. I have a team here, but I’m the Fantasy Coach, and a lot of the people who use CBS are going to be less in the loop than those at Yahoo! or ESPN. Which can translate well for you on draft day, but serious fantasy owners are always more fun to play with. Oh, and the draft room program here is not my favorite.

#4. Fox Sports – CBS’s TV counterpart, Fox has their own fantasy football site too. They basically offer the same thing that CBS offers, but with a nicer website. A fine place to play, but again not really the full experience offered by ESPN or Yahoo!.

#5. NFL.com – The NFL’s own website offers free fantasy football, and how wrong can you go by going straight to the source? I like NFL.com a little more than Fox or CBS; it features at least basic customization for leagues, in terms of teams, playoff options and point scoring. Not top of the line, but pretty decent, with plenty of NFL news and fantasy help.

#6. Fleaflicker – The sort of odd-man out in popular league hosts. This is a smaller operation clearly, geared toward people who want to hold their league in a smaller, less jazzy space. The advantage of fleaflicker is that they offer more point scoring customization than anybody else. The downside is they don’t offer online auction drafts. And they don’t have nearly the amount of people buzzing around joining leagues. But if you are starting an online league with friends already in tow, this can be a good site for you.

Those are all your best options for online fantasy football. If you’re interested in one of them, click on their name and go check them out. If you plan on running multiple teams, feel free to spread them around and get a firsthand experience with a couple websites. Fantasy football teams are pretty easy to run, much easier than fantasy baseball teams(!), so it’s not like you’re going to get in over your head. Now get out there, and good luck!

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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 immediately have this team form thrust into your face to fill out. Assuming someone has even told you about the naming traditions of fantasy sports, you probably haven’t thought of any good names yet. And fear of failure and an inability to suddenly improvise something funny on the spot means you just fill in whatever and then forget it.

Well enough of that. You’re about to get a quick and easy primer to coming up with your own fantasy team names, worthy of bragging about. It’s not all a bunch of bad puns and sexual inneundos either. Your team name doesn’t have to be a silly joke. It just shouldn’t suck.

#1. Punny Team Name – The classic name is based on punning a player’s last name. You want to take the name and put it into a recognizable phrase. Examples include : Flacco Seagulls, Forgetting Brandon Marshall, Romosexual Tendencies, Favre Dollar Footlong, or Ted Ginn and Juice. Just look over famous player names and see if anything pops to mind. It’s okay to think of a phrase and see if anyone matches. ESPN has every player’s name listed for you in their fantasy football section. Sometimes it’s even better when you can incorporate two players names, as in Peyton Makes It Wayne or Feely My Breaston.

Oh, don’t forget about the coaches too. A lot of them have interesting names you can work into something, like I Dream of Mangini, Singletary and Loving It, Dungyons and Dragons, or (a personal favorite) The Sparanos. And you pretty much can’t go wrong with anything combining Ditka and Butkis.

#2. A Topical Name – A name that uses recent events to make its point. You don’t have to focus on just football players here, any sports related personality or angle is good. Just think of some infamous recent news stories and spitball a few out. Here are some of the best recent examples : Erin Andrews’ Favorite Peephole, Kibbles and Vick, Gary Glitter’s U-16s, the BP Oilers, Big Ben’s Ineligible Receiver, and (horribly) Steve McNair’s Shotgun Offense.

I like these types of names as they present the greatest opportunity for laugh out loud funniness. Clearly most of these skew a little dark. But hey, you and your team don’t gotta worry about PR, so what do you care?

#3. An Inventive Regular Name – Like I said, you don’t have to name all your teams with bad puns. One good type of non-pun is naming your team like a real team but with a twist. Take the name of a city you like, or perhaps even live in, and then make their mascot something witty. For example, The Raleigh Cheeseburgers, the Philadelphia D-Batteries, or the Las Vegas Call Girls. The Cleveland Steamers has been pretty well used, but fantasy team names don’t have to be original. Certainly you can use a city nickname like Beantown here, but it makes you about as interesting as those people who rave about being Irish on their myspace pages.

#4. Funny Sports Phrases – Perhaps a purer way to make crude sexual jokes than using player names. This type of team name takes words and phrases from the sport and makes jokes out of them. The only problem here is that there isn’t that much room for innovation. With so few actual football specific phrases most of the worthwhile ones are overused. But then again, any of these is better than some regular bland internet name featuring repeated 69s and poor spelling. Some examples here include : Touchdown My Pants, Show Me Your TDs!, Backfield Penetration, or Multiple Scorgasms. Funny stuff. Funny is good.

So ends the lesson. Now get out there and name your teams something worth annoying usenet over! Remember, given the state of team names on the internet, you cannot fail. And you can make it a name appropriate to your personality. Joking about a recent murder may be too much for you, but a little pun like Pacman Jonesing For Cherries is adorable. Suit it to yourself. Get out there, and good luck!

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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 it. Make a small chart like the one pictured to the right here. You see all the starting positions of your roster are listed. Then next to them are columns for tier ranking, projected point production, and finally expected cost (I always assume a starting amount of $200). Use your cheatsheet to fill it out.

If you don’t know, tier ranking is where a player fits in within his particular position. It’s useful when you make your cheatsheet to mark it off by tiers, so you can make sense of the list quickly and easily. For example, if I’m listing running backs, I might say the first four are in tier 1 because they are all projected to make between 260 to 290 points this year. Any player after that is projected to see a significant drop off in production compared to one of these top four guys. And you just rank them by tier on down the list. That way when I’m planning my team, if I decide I want a running back who will score around 200 points I can look at my list and see that would be a tier 3 guy like Rashard Mendenhall or Ryan Grant.

Now start filling out your team chart. You can build it however you want. Let’s say to start with you want an elite running back. So under that first running back slot you fill in the columns, for example here, tier #1, 275 points, and $60. You know that means you’ll probably be drafting Chris Johnson or Adrian Peterson but you aren’t committing specifically to any particular player yet, just a level of player.

From there you decide maybe you’ll take a third tier quarterback like Matt Schaub or Philip Rivers. So next to quarterback you fill in tier #3, 250 points and $20. Continue filling out the roster like this. You might decide to change some things as you go, figuring that you’re spending too much at one position and not enough at another.

Once you’ve got the roster filled out, you’re all done! Don’t forget to save a remainder of your money to spend on your bench. I’d recommend $20 to $35. The lionshare can go to your starting roster to build a good solid team on known producers. And once you have the whole chart filled out you can add up the projected point productions to get a figure for your whole team. Divide the team total by 16 and that will tell you how many points a game they might get. Remember to take projections with a grain of salt, they are there just to give you a rough feel for how well you’d be spending your money. I can’t honestly say that a team with a projected per game points total of 105 is really going to do better than a team with a projected total of 100, but it might help guide your decisions to more efficient spending.

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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 will have a generally agreed upon value. As such there’s no reason to worry about not knowing how much to bid for players. Websites like ESPN and Yahoo! list a players worth according to their fantasy analysts and their average auction price in drafts that have already happened.

Planning for an auction draft is really almost no different than planning for a snake draft. Except instead of knowing what draft position a player is in, you learn how much each player is worth in fantasy dollars. But the opportunities for strategy in auction drafts are far greater. Auction drafts give each player an opportunity to get any player, meaning you can preplan your roster and utilize personally designed tactics for building your fantasy team.

For example if you decide you want a top tier RB, looking at an auction draft cheatsheet lets you know that’ll cost you around $60 of your $200. And then maybe you want a second tier QB for $25. And two top five WRs for $30 each. If you buy all that you can see you’ll have spent $145, leaving $65 for the rest of your team. In this way you can build your team in advance and make sure you can afford it. And since it’s an auction draft, you really can get those players come draft day.

If any of this sounds complicated, it isn’t. Just go to ESPN and join one of their mock auction drafts. Try it out once or twice and things will immediately become clear. Since it’s a mock draft you can do anything you want and it won’t actually matter. The first time you try it you might overspend, buying four top players only to realize that doesn’t leave you with enough money to fill out a roster. Or then you might underspend and end up with more money left to buy a bench than you need. You’ll quickly get the hang of it and see it’s potential.

And once you have the experience of actually planning a team out and picking the players you want in advance, instead of just having them handed to you by fate and draft position in a snake draft, you’ll be hooked.

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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 looking out for you, you are looking out for you.

The first step is to read up on this year’s fantasy season. Check out ESPN’s fantasy football home to start. They’ve got more fantasy columnists than anybody else, which means more analysis, more projections, more updates coming out of preseason camp. Also ESPN has regular football coverage right there on the site as well.

Also be sure to check out Yahoo! and their fantasy football draft kit. It includes player rankings and draft strategies. CBS, Fox Sports, and NFL.com have draft kits too. Reading several allows you to see a variety of strategies and opinions for when you’re selecting your own, plus one or two of their experts might be reporting some inside information that the rest miss.

The easiest information these sources will give you is their pre-season player rankings, where they project who will do what this upcoming year. Obviously guessing the future is necessarily tricky business, which is why it’s so important to compare all these lists together. Note the discrepancies they have ranking certain players and then Google the punk to get the whole story of why.

Oh and before I forget, Sports Illustrated puts out a special fantasy football edition you can pick up in about any bookstore for $8. Just in case you also want to have a solid book of information you can read on the train and the like. I’m a fan of Sports Illustrated because their regular sports coverage can tip you off about players and team situations that the fantasy guys don’t.

Speaking of which, read regular NFL coverage too! Many fantasy players have said they went from chump to league champ when they started ignoring all the fantasy coverage and started paying a lot more attention to mainstream football coverage. I think part of that is because doing the lionshare of your research through mainstream coverage forces you to not be lazy. However, fantasy analysts tend to be number guys looking into the past so they can identify future trends, and they miss the boat on looking forward using only the information at hand right now to build their rankings. And you know how nobody has ever discovered a formula for figuring out what is going to happen next in the stock market? Well nobody has ever figured out a formula for figuring out what’s going to happen next in professional sports either. Be forward looking, let the information out of preseason camp, current player buzz, and up-to-date depth chart information have the final say on which players you want.

Once you’ve looked over the data and reacquainted yourself with all the important players, it’s time to make a cheatsheet you can have with you at your draft. A cheatsheet is just your own personal player rankings list. How you want to organize it is up to you, but consider splitting players up by position and include relevant information beside the names, such as average draft cost and expected point production this year.

Even if you’re playing through a website host who provides you a ready made list, make your own! Only you can make the right list for you, and you can never trust a single source of information. I mean over on CBS.com you can pick up Matt Forte in the 13th round of a snake draft because they have him listed so low! Don’t be the guy who lets Matt Forte, Jahvid Best, or Dez Bryant go for 2 or 3 bucks because you don’t know their actual value.

A cheatsheet is also helpful because you can use it before the draft to work on your draft strategy. One of the biggest advantages of an auction draft over a snake draft is you get to plan what kind of team you want. It’s entirely up to you. For example, do you want a top three guy for all of your QB, RB, and WR positions? Look it up on the cheatsheet, what’s that going to cost you? Then budget out the rest to your remaining positions. Who can you get for the money you have left and are they good enough? If not, move money around, see what you can build, find the good values.

Auction drafts let you target specific players, unlike snake drafts where you usually just get who you get. And that really lets you take advantage of the people you perceive as undervalued. For example if you think Shonn Greene is going to haul the rock for 250 points this season, then the going price of $30 is a steal, about $20 less than he’s worth. You can take that $20 and upgrade your WR corps from tier II guys to tier I guys.

Many fantasy owners don’t create player specific plans, preferring a more general approach and waiting for the good deals to pop up. This is a fine way to go, but I recommend you think as specifically as possible, no matter how general your plan. Know if you want two tier one WRs, or if you’re saving for a third tier QB. Knowing what you want and having a team plan lets you bid with confidence, which is crucial! Bidding with confidence keeps you from getting weak knees when Peyton Manning is going for two dollars over value, only to wait and overspend six dollars for Philip Rivers.

Finally, a little bit on bench strategy. If you’re buying a team in a standard $200 auction draft I recommend you save somewhere between $20 to $35 for your bench. Leaning more toward $20, with a greater willingness to overspend to get great starters than to underspend and pay good money for benched players who don’t score you points every week. Now, how the later bench rounds of the draft play out depends on the league you’re in and the kind of guys you’re playing with. Sometimes you’re playing with super aggressive owners who spend themselves so deep on big starters that they don’t have the money left to challenge for good bench guys. In which case having $20 left over pretty much gives you the pick of the litter. Other types of guys underspend on their starting lineup (often weak-kneed owners who didn’t bother to make a pre-draft plan) and go into the bench rounds with $50 just to spend on scrubs and sleepers. Those guys can spend $15 on people like Clinton Portis—let them. Ration your money out, nominate players already guaranteed to go too expensive for you, and wait for everyone to spend themselves down to your level.

Split your bench funds inequitably, spend $6 to $10 on a genuine backup starter for RB or WR, then let those sleepers come to you for $1 to $3 each. It’s acceptable to get a back-up QB if you think he might have a breakout year and you can trade him, but don’t get one just to have one. There will be plenty on waivers for your main guy’s bye week. Please don’t waste a bench spot for a backup TE, K, or D/ST. When you need one pick them up on waivers! Running backs and wide receivers are where the real value is. Look for guys with potential to overperform at either of those positions. You never know, scrubs turn into top guys all the time. And if one of your scrubs does break-out, you can start him or trade him for somebody else you can start.

So try out the strategies above and be confident that you’re well prepared for your upcoming draft day. Remember, a good draft is the first step toward the winning league championship. Good luck!

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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 where the disagreements are and look into it. Decide which rankings you agree with the most so you can use it as your central guide for building your own personal cheatsheet. Oh, also check out Sports Illustrated, fftoolbox.com and fftoday.com for further reading.

It’s good to read the regular football news too. Sometimes fantasy guys get a little lost in the projections and trends, and fail to update you about pre-season camp news or important comments made by coaches.

Although you get all these pre-made cheatsheets ranking out each player compared to the others, I suggest you also make your own. The professional analysts will play it safe, if you think Michael Turner is going to underperform this year, you can recognize this on your own list and rank him down. Feel free to organize players by position, and list out important information beside their names, such as average draft position and projected point production. The point of a cheatsheet is to have everything you need available at a glance, because when the draft does come, you’ll have no time to think it over.

It’s also important to develop a strategy. What players you get will largely be determined by where you draft from in the order, but it’s important to have a plan for what type of players you want. This year the Talented Mr. Roto over at ESPN recommends you grab two top wide receivers in the first four rounds because they are so much more reliable than running backs, who lately have been something of a crapshoot projection-wise. Make the plan that feels best to you. Perhaps you think it would be best to get two RBs with your first two picks, or you plan to pick up Drew Brees or Aaron Rodgers with your first pick if you can’t get a top four running back. Use an average draft position to get an idea of who might be available to you at what pick, here is ESPN’s, although the website hosting your league will be the most reliable source.

Snake drafts are hard to plan out in any detail, they are mostly about taking the best player available. However, using those draft rankings, imagine out scenarios where you go at the front, middle or back of the draft order. List out possible teams you would get, and list out how many points such a team is expected to produce each week to see how well such a line-up would do. During the draft you want to select players who will produce way more points than the next guy you could get at that position. For example if Aaron Rodgers is projected to get 330 points this season, and the next QB you could get would be Tony Romo at 260 points, then Rodgers would be a better pick than say running back DeAngelo Williams at 190 when next round you could get Shonn Greene at 180.

Okay, now that you know how to prepare, let’s break up a snake draft and discuss some principles that might help you at each point:

First Round : If you get one of the first four picks this year, I strongly recommend you pick one of the top four running backs. There’s no need to get clever, you’ve already lucked out by getting such a high pick.

If you get one of the mid-round picks you have some options. Most people would take a running back from the not-quite-top-tier guys (Frank Gore, Steven Jackson, and Michael Turner to be specific), however, don’t assume these guys are money in the bank. Fact is, running backs are hard to predict. And all three of those guys have a lot of question marks around them, which is why none of them are in the top tier.

Your second option is to instead take a top tier QB. Aaron Rodgers is scrambler, and the extra yards and TDs he’ll pick up as a result are expected to drive his point production north of 300. Drew Brees is a Super Bowl winning quarterback in a pass heavy system and the skill to throw for between 4,600 to 4,800 yards. Both are going in the first round this year, so if you want one you’ll have to get him now.

If you get stuck at the end of the order, don’t panic. Those almost-top-tier running backs may provide you a cushion allowing you to take Brees or Rodgers. Then since you start off the second round you have the chance to swipe a top WR, such as Andre Johnson, Randy Moss or Larry Fitzgerald.

Second Round : The second round is dependent on your draft strategy and your first pick. If your goal was to get one great RB, then a QB and 2 WRs, and you just picked up Ray Rice, then right now is a great time to snag Peyton Manning or Tom Brady. If you were denied a great RB, perhaps you decide to get the best QB and WRs you can before picking a decent RB out of this year’s fat middle of running talent. The more you thought about it in advance, the more likely it is you’ll make the best decision for you.

Third and Fourth Rounds : Continue to round things off. This is where research on mid-level starting talent can really pay off. Know which guys you think are most likely to break away from the pack and become a stud. I recommend you spend the first four rounds filling out QB, RB, and WR spots. Tight ends might start getting drafted at the end of the fourth round, which is okay, but make sure there isn’t an RB or WR who you wouldn’t like better before you start spending high picks on Dallas Clark or Antonio Gates.

Fifth through Eighth Rounds : You spend these rounds filling out your starting roster and maybe making your first bench pick. Wait on getting a kicker or a defense. When you’re picking mid-round guys I like to go for the ones with either the most potential to over-perform or the most likely to be a solid contributor who won’t underperform. Obviously knowing a lot about the players helps you figure out this sort of thing.

Ninth through Twelfth : The trend in online leagues seems to be headed toward getting a kicker and defense in these rounds. Older fantasy veterans laugh at this, the common wisdom being that both of these positions are hard to predict, and that generally no one in these fields significantly outperforms anybody else. The math doesn’t strictly bear this out, but that still doesn’t make spending your tenth pick on a kicker a good idea. Fact is, there are still going to be decent RBs and WRs available in these rounds, and you don’t want to miss out on them. One of them could explode this year and earn you a lot more points than you’ll lose by not getting a top 5 kicker. You can always trade some numbskull who doesn’t have a decent second RB for his great kicker anyway.

Thirteenth to End : Here’s where you find your sleepers, kicker and defense. Pick up the sleepers everybody knows about first, or else somebody else will. Now like I mentioned before, the old veterans of fantasy say draft your kicker in the last round, but feel free to ignore this advice. There’s nothing wrong with picking a kicker two or three rounds before the end of the draft. Especially if you’re playing in an online league filled with people who aren’t going to steal your last couple sleeper picks because they’re just following the list the draft room gives them. If you do get a “crappy” kicker or defense, don’t despair. The projected top ten for these positions isn’t going to be the actual top ten. Watch the waiver wire for a stud in the making once the season starts.

Once the draft is over take a minute and look over your new team. Appreciate how well balanced your squad is over the rest of your league. Once the season starts remember those sleeper picks aren’t just there to fill in on bye weeks. Use overperformers to trade and fill in your deficiencies. Odds are one of your great starting picks will have a bad season due to injury, cold streak, marital difficulties, and you’ll need to replace him.

Well that’s it, so get out there and start doing your research. When you’re ready head over to ESPN or Yahoo! and try out their mock drafts to practice. Good luck with your season!

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