—
Playing fantasy football is highly addictive. Some people feel passionate about it, and they spend most of the year preparing for the draft, competing head-to-head, and researching.
If you haven’t played before or you’re somewhat new to it, that might leave you wondering whether fantasy football is a game of luck or skill.
It’s really about both.
Below is a guide to everything you need to know about why people love fantasy football and what you need to be good at it.
The Concept of Fantasy Football
When you play fantasy football, the idea is that you can delve into your love of the NFL and create your own team of players.
The team you create is based on the players from the actual NFL, and you compete against the other owners who are part of your league, scoring points based on your players’ performance during the actual games throughout the NFL season.
Fantasy football is seemingly a simple hobby, but it’s very complex in its application and implementation.
That’s why people love it and play year after year.
You can start out with the basics, like learning more about league settings and scoring. Then, as you gain experience, you can get into the advanced concepts, like the fantasy formats and draft strategies.
There are two main categories of fantasy football you can play. There’s season-long and daily. Then, within these larger categories are other subcategories.
Season-Long vs. Daily Fantasy
Season-long fantasy football pretty closely replicates the NFL. You get together with a group of people like friends, family, or coworkers, and you create a league. Your league will usually have 10-12 players, who are called managers.
You get together for a draft right before the start of the NFL season. During your draft, you choose the players you want, and you can choose any player in the NFL from any team.
After you choose your teams, the managers operate like an NFL team throughout the duration of the season.
Managers go head-to-head to play each other in matchups and see who scores the most points each week. That’s the winner for the week. In daily fantasy, as the season progresses, you can trade players, waive them, and sometimes, depending on the league, you might be able to put them on injured reserve if they’re hurt.
Managers play a schedule that’s 12 to 14 weeks. Then, there’s a playoff structure for the top teams.
At the end of the playoffs, there’s a champion.
Daily fantasy is different, and this type of fantasy sports model is relatively new. Daily fantasy sports are also incredibly fast-growing.
In daily fantasy, the scoring and roster structures are similar to season-long fantasy, but rather than drafting a team for the entire season, you assemble teams weekly.
There’s no draft, but you have a standard budget, known as a salary cap. Every player has a dollar value assigned to them.
You use your budget as wisely as you can to build out the best possible team.
Since you’re not committing to a season, with daily fantasy, you can change your team from week to week. You can also make money.
Daily fantasy sports are designed in a way that mirrors season-long sports but condenses everything. The contests in daily fantasy take place in hours or potentially a few days, and it’s similar to traditional fantasy sports betting.
You can place bets through online platforms and then potentially earn money when you compete against other players.
While daily fantasy sports have a lot in common with betting, skill is still required.
Daily fantasy sports are a multi-billion-dollar industry. Until recently, daily fantasy had a murky legal standing. Until 2018, traditional sports betting wasn’t allowed in the United States. Now though, most states have explicitly made playing daily sports legal, and the online platforms are growing, as are the awarded winnings.
Dynasty Football Leagues
Fantasy players who truly understand the skill and strategy of the game often move from season-long leagues to dynasty leagues.
When you’re in a dynasty league, you can manage your franchise in a way where you’re going to keep all of your players from year to year. You are building and managing a team in a very realistic way instead of just building a team for a season.
When you excel as a dynasty owner, you build a team that can perform for years.
Since there’s so much riding on how you build your team, the environment when playing fantasy is a lot different than it is in a redraft league.
Keeper leagues have some similarities to dynasty leagues, except in a keeper league, you keep a smaller amount of your players. You can retain a few of your key players in a keeper league rather than all or most as you do in a dynasty league.
Dynasty football never ends. The season goes from September to January in fantasy typically, and after Week 17, a champion is crowned, ending the season. With dynasty football, you’re still in your role as a manager, even when it’s Week 18.
You’re not necessarily actively managing your team all year, but you can make trades. Some leagues will allow for roster moves every day of the year. There are periods in the offseason where there’s not a lot of action, but you can execute trades and negotiate if you prefer.
Dynasty is for those people who have a true love for fantasy. A lot of people who like dynasty leagues also love looking at the data in the pre-draft process, which takes place in August. As you might imagine, dynasty is a big commitment.
How Can You Excel at Fantasy Football?
There are a lot of things you can do to get better at season-long football. Tips include:
- Let go of your existing team allegiances. You might have your favorite team, but if you load up on one team too heavily in fantasy, it can become a problem for you.
- Make sure that you have a plan. Most experienced fantasy players will tell you that the worst thing they see is someone coming in without any plan at all. You need to know how fantasy works in general, and you need to be ready with a strategy.
- Study depth charts. A depth chart lists players at their positions on a roster and indicates if they’re a starter, or second- or third string. The starter is the player appearing at the position at the beginning of a game. The second-and third-string players are backups. Starters tend to spend the most time on the field. If a player isn’t starting, his value drops. You have to track how much your players are actually playing. As part of this, you have to monitor the depth chart, and for some players and teams, it fluctuates quite a bit. Someone who starts one week can very easily be a backup the next. When you monitor the player and his backups, you’re going to keep yourself ahead.
- Wait to draft your quarterback.
- You might also wait to draft a tight end.
- Don’t rely too heavily on mainstream advice and consensus rankings.
- Have a backup plan for everything you do.
- When it comes to fantasy, you have to remember that the most popular players don’t always end up being performers.
- Check players’ average draft position or ADP. This will help you make sure you aren’t wasting one of your valuable picks on someone you could have gotten for cheaper two rounds later.
Is it Luck or Skill?
So, back to our original question—is coming out on top in fantasy football about luck or skill?
Luck is involved in fantasy football. That’s true within the sport itself. For example, luck can come in when players avoid injuries.
At the same time, if you say it’s all luck, you’re negating the fact that when you play fantasy, you have a lot of control.
If you have the depth and strength in your team, even an injury that comes about because of bad luck might not have as big an impact as it could if you weren’t skilled at fantasy.
If you have the skill to look ahead and think strategically, then you’ll know how to build a successful team.
The championships in any fantasy league are won when you prepare. Most players find the more they put into fantasy, the better they do and the more they get out of it.
To do well in fantasy, you have to do your homework. You have to look at schedules later in the year to determine the players you want to target.
Fantasy football, whether you do daily fantasy, you have a season-long league, or you’re involved in dynasty, can become addictive for the people who participate. There’s a lot of crunching of numbers that are needed, and you have to comb through data and strategize, which is why yes, there is a bit of luck but much more skill involved.
—