By Kelly Bichkoff
Picking a Fantasy Team
When drafting a fantasy football team in an all-ladies league, one way to pick players is to pick them based on hotness (think Tony Romo or Tom Brady…sigh). Another way is to pick them by how cool or interesting their name sounds, such as T.J. Houshmandzadeh or Chad Ochocinco.
Side note: Chad Ochocinco used to be Chad Johnson until everyone started calling him “ochocinco”, which is 85, his number, in Spanish. Can you believe the man actually CHANGED his real last name to his football nickname?? Crazy!
In my last article I gave a general description of fantasy football and how it is played. So, if you’re in the dark on that, just go back to my “Tight Ends” article and give yourself a refresher. In this article, I’m going to talk about joining or starting a league and picking players, also called drafting, for your fantasy team.
First of all, how do you join a fantasy league?
Well, if you’re ambitious you can start one yourself. You just need to have 8, 10, or 12 people total (including yourself) that are willing to be in the league. You can choose for your league to be a points league (where the person with the most points at the end of the season wins), or a head-to-head league (where teams go against each other each week and accrue wins and losses). In my experience, head-to-head is more fun because you can get competitive with each other, smack talk the other team, and see your ranking each week among all the teams in the league. If you would rather just join a league and don’t know where to begin, you can start with Yahoo!, which offers public leagues that anyone can join. Just go to Yahoo! Fantasy Football and follow the links to join a public league.
Once you get yourself into a league you need to draft a team. If you’ve formed your own league you’ll need to set the league up on a website such as Yahoo!, CBS Sports, or NFL.com. You will also need to set a date for your draft. This can get tricky because every person (or manager) in your league needs to be present for the draft. You can around this by holding an online draft through the website. With this option all of the managers in your league just need to have internet access at the same pre-determined time instead of trying to get everyone in the same place at the same time for a draft.
Drafting your Team
Now for the fun part—drafting your very own team. Some of the women in my league drafted by hotness and names last season. At the time, I privately chuckled at their unconventional drafting methods, but I quickly changed my mind when the two who drafted this way wound up in 1st and 2nd place! I think luck had something to do with their success, but in general, the best way to draft is to use common sense and a good published list of players.
Where do you find a list of players?
The most common places are in a fantasy football magazine or on a fantasy football website. When I went to my draft this year, I used two lists:
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A rank-order list of players by position, and
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A rank-order list of the Top 200 Players overall.
In most leagues, you’ll need to draft a quarterback (QB), 2 running backs (RB), 3 wide receivers or tight ends (WR/TE), a place kicker (PK), and a defense (DEF). You DO NOT need to draft them in this order. Generally, it is a good idea to draft your RB’s and WR/TE’s first, then your QB, then leave your DEF and PK for last. Your starting roster will most likely consist of the above named positions, but your draft is not over yet. You need to draft back-ups, or bench players, to fill in when your stud starters have their bye weeks (the week that their team is off) or get injured/suspended/etc.
You will have a draft order, which is the order that you and the other team managers will draft your teams. A common way for the draft order to proceed is in a snaking fashion, starting with 1, going up to 8, then coming back to 1. For example, if your league has 8 teams, your draft order will go like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2…and so on. The people who are #1 and #8 have two picks in a row at the beginning and end of each round. You will have enough rounds in your draft to cover drafting all of your starters as well as 6 or so bench positions.
All leagues are different, but this is a basic example of what you can expect. This year I picked 4th in my league and I have a pretty solid team. There are strategies for drafting whether you draft at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the order. You can read about these strategies in fantasy football magazines or in online fantasy football articles. Stay tuned for my next article where I’ll discuss some drafting strategies you can use to draft yourself a solid team.
So…you may not wind up with an entire team of “hot” players, or players with cool names, but you will have a viable team that will score points for you and you’ll be able to impress your man with your drafting knowledge!
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Charles Sheen has become such fool. What i’m saying is, anybody truly surprised by his behavior? Nowadays, you’d probably think most of us might come to assume just as much.