HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Sept 3, 2003 Ah, the joy and pain of managing your fantasy football team all the way to the super bowl, only to lose! This was my experience last year in one of my leagues, and in the other I was the leading scorer but got knocked out at the beginning of the playoffs. Nevertheless, I had fun each week setting my lineup against my opponent and schedule. In this, my fourth year of fantasy football, I am sharing some advice for beginners. TO PAY OR NOT TO PAY: You can certainly play fantasy games for free. I have a team at SPORTINGNEWS.COM that costs nothing. You simply are given $35,500,000.00 to spend and all players are listed by salary and position. You will not be able to afford a team of all-stars here. You will need to choose players like Kelly Holcomb and Trung Canidate to stay within your salary range. Each week you can revamp your roster, but that means you make changes to the roster you first selected. Some players will go up and some down in value from the day you first picked them. You will get to compete with others within your league and of course it is possible for you and some friends to start and compete in your own league within the system. I am in a private league in this one with some of the guys left over from fantasy baseball! NFLPLAYERS.COM has a similar style of freebie league. You are given 300 points and each eligible player has an assigned value. Each week you can make a new roster and you get to start from scratch. Again, you can’t have a team of all-stars but you can have a pretty nice one. I entered a random public league in this one. By the way, you can probably get Kelly Holcomb (him again?) at a bargain price in most leagues and the guy just might put up big numbers! I think Curtis Martin and Troy Brown are a good value as well. YAHOO.COM, if you investigate their sports site, has a very nice freebie game that looks much like the for-pay games. You get public or private leagues to choose from. You can participate in either live or automated drafts and you will go head-to-head with other teams rather than accumulate points each week like the above sites. I chose a public league of goofs similar to myself and the automated draft. I ranked players to my specifications prior to the draft and my team looks killer! Never let the site’s default list rule your draft, because they will often miss out on a pre-season injury (Chad Pennington, anyone?) and you will likely wind up with a team that disappoints you. The big advantage to the live draft is obvious in that you may spot a bargain you did not expect sitting there (Gee, I was going to go for a wide receiver but no one picked Priest Holmes yet!). The disadvantage is that you have to set aside a period of four or more hours to go through the draft. It may go quicker than that, but you need to figure on that much. You get a 15 player roster with a starting lineup of 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR and one each of TE, K and Defense. COUGH IT UP! The fantasy sites that require payment have extra bells and whistles that make it worthwhile to the fantasy fan to investigate. I sign up each year with NFL.COM and love the tools that a pay league brings to the table. There are live scoring updates during the games for your team and your opponent and the other teams in your league. There is a site with fantasy helps. There are trades and waiver transactions and free agent opportunities and you really do feel a great deal like you are managing an actual team. The particular site costs $14.95. There is a fantasy extra add-on for a few bucks a month for the fanatical fan. Not really necessary to enjoy all the features of the game. I suspect I will be bragging in a few months about winning the super bowl in this game, ha ha! So watch out for the rambears! You will likely have a roster of two quarterbacks, three running backs, three wide receivers, two tight ends, two kickers and two defenses. By the end of the season last year I only carried one each of the kickers and defenses (bye week was no longer an issue) so that I had better choices on receivers and running backs and tight end. You must start 2 each of running backs and receivers each week and one of each other position out of a roster of 14 players. Always keep in mind the bye weeks when you choose your roster. Having two quarterbacks that both have week 5 off will be a problem! My other league is run more like an old classic league with help from the internet but being administered by a human being. It is a bunch of guys putting in money and trying to win it back, and especially getting bragging rights! You will still find that kind at work or a club, etc. ADVICE FROM THE PRO: Well, after four years I am far from a pro, but there are some ideas for starters. Keep an eye out for injuries every week. Don’t just go after the names you recognize, look for depth charts on the sports sites and make sure that your guy is still going strong. (Jerome Bettis, for instance, is not likely going to be a big scorer this year.). Your biggest scorers are usually and hopefully the running back and quarterbacks and the top few runners are the cream of the crop. Go for tight ends and the rest farther down the line. Keep in mind, when drafting kickers, whether you think that their team will be giving them as many scoring opportunities as they did the year before. It is easy to get a decent kicker at the end of the draft. Watch for the bye weeks with your players and think about matchups. A good running back against the Buccaneers might not do as well as a mediocre one against, say, the Chiefs. Does having a fantasy team make football less enjoyable? Are you kidding? This year I will be hungry to find out the score of the Redskins game just to find out how well Rod Gardner did. With Miami as my top defensive team, their score will certainly matter. And since I have Kelly Holcomb in at least two leagues and Marshall Faulk and Kurt Warner in at least two leagues you can be sure that Ram and Brown games will be interesting no matter what the bearing on the NFL playoffs. A New England at Houston game in week 12 might make or break my playoff hopes. You never know! Enjoy! ------------ About the author: Kimbal Ross Binder is a husband of one wife and parent of six child units of various sizes. He is a tennis bum, karaoke singer, punster and a reformed liberal who now admires Rush Limbaugh and hates to miss Fox News in the evening. You can pass along plaudits and invectives to: radar@eternalisp.com Comment on this column in the forum. ------------ |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
