Fantasy Sports 101
Ever hear someone talking about their fantasy football or baseball team but didn’t know what they were talking about? Or maybe you have a general idea but not knowledgeable of the ins and outs of it? Welcome to Fantasy Sports 101.
What is Fantasy Sports?
Fantasy sports is where a group of people, usually family and friends will gather together and create their own football teams using real NFL players. They will draft players and fill up their rosters and bench players. Then each week, whatever the players do in real life, the teams who owns that player will get points. For instance a standard format is that Running Backs will get one point for ever ten yards they rush and six points for each touchdown. So if my team has Reggie Bush, and in one week he runs for 113 yards and two touchdowns, my team would receive 11 points for his rushing yardage and 12 points for his two touchdowns. A total of 23 points! At the end of a week, each team will add up all of the points their starting players got them and the team with the most points will get a win. This format is commonly known as Head to Head.
There is another format that is more common in Baseball. For the most part it is the same as the previous explanation but in this case two teams do not go head to head and there is not a team who gets a win or a loss each week. This format is based on categories. In Baseball, the standard set is called 5 x 5. Five offensive categories and five pitching categories. For instance offensively there will be RBI’s, Homeruns, Runs, Stolen Bases and Average. As the season continues, every run a starting player on your team scores, your team will get one point. If there are ten teams then the team with the most points will have a ranking of ten. The team with the least runs will have a ranking of one. Each team’s rankings from every category will be added up and the team with the most points will be the leader. Who ever ends the season with the most points, wins.
Do you have to know a lot about the sport to play fantasy sports?
Actually you can play fantasy sports and do well with only a very basic knowledge of that particular sport. Simple terms need to be learned, like what a touchdown is or what a homerun is and such. One also needs to know the difference between positions. What a quarterback is compared to a wide receiver and such. After that it is more about looking up statistics and news clippings about the players than anything else. This part is actually very easy too, for there are plenty of sites on-line that offer free help, advice and drafting lists. There are plenty of websites with articles about players and who to draft and who not to. Many sites will offer lists of their “Player rankings”. This list consists of approximately 200 players from all positions ranked from best to worst. One can actually draft their team using nothing but one of these lists and have a chance of doing well. The only problem with these lists is that they are usually one expert’s opinion on which players are better to have than others. You can look at the list from one site and compare it to another site and find some great differences.
In my experience of over ten years of fantasy sports, I have found ESPN.com as the most accurate and up to date. Unfortunately ESPN is now forcing people to purchase a certain membership call “Insiders” to get much of their information. Yahoo sports, Fox sports, and such, offer most or all of their information free. For the most part, most of the work is done for you and even free. The hardest part is deciding which expert has the right opinion of players. Now you could always compare several lists to get a consensus but this can be a lot of work. Yet there is even a site out there that does this for you.
Fantasy sports is a good way to be competitive and not have to be a know it all. Women who do not follow sports very close can join their husband’s leagues and if they find the right lists can laugh at their husband’s team when it loses to them. Believe me, I have seen many novice sports fans beat the experience owners.
Kenjas Fantasy Sports gathers the lists of several different experts and gets the average of each players ranking to find the consensus. They even go so far as to eliminate radical rankings from the equation in hopes of eliminating an expert’s biased opinion. For instance, if one expert thinks a particular player should be drafted at 67th while the others all pick that same player somewhere between 100 and 120th, the one experts rank will be eliminated. That way a players ranking won’t be twisted just because an expert personally likes or dislikes the player.
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Kenjas Fantasy Player rankingsArticle Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kenneth_Schonmeier