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Nov. 17th, 2004 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickWhat the hell is Fantasy Football and how does it work?
Last night, while I was driving home from work, the radio DJ mentioned how his fantasy football team was doing... and I epiphanied that I didn't know a damn thing about this. To fix that, I found a nice explanation from the folks at FoxSports.com, but that's probably more detail than you really need to understand the essential dorkitude of fantasy football.
Basically, people pick out real football players in a draft at the start of the season, taking turns and picking the guys they think will do the best. (The whole reason for the draft is so that not everyone gets to have, say, Emmitt Smith for a running back. It makes people take turns and involves some strategy.) Each person involved in the Fantasy Football league gets to assemble a full roster of players via the draft.
During the fantasy football season, the assembled teams "play" each other, the winner determined by comparing the stats generated by the players in real NFL season games that they actually play in real life. This is possible because of the huge amount of data amassed on any player during an average NFL game. The aforementioned Mr. Smith's stats are a reasonable sample of the available data, if you'd like to see what kinds of numbers folks have to work with. Anyway, if your wide receiver, in real life, caught two touchdown passes, that would generate fantasy points for your fantasy football team. Apparently mathematical adjustments are also made for more arcane stats so that the people you pick for defense (who don't usually score points) are as important as the offensive lineup... but, again, that's a level of detail more involved than what we really need, here. There appear to be a variety of internet web sites that will, for a nominal fee, help you host your Fantasy Football league and track stats and so forth, should you have a burning desire to do this without thegraph paper and 20-sided die spreadsheets.
So. Fantasy Football is a thing where normal people generate pretend team rosters made up of real football players and use the actual game stats of those players to ... make their pretend teams "play" each other weekly and "win" based on whose pretend team has the better set of weekly statistics. Why do I get the feeling that people who do Fantasy Football are the same people who used to beat up people who did Dungeons and Dragons back in high school?
Last night, while I was driving home from work, the radio DJ mentioned how his fantasy football team was doing... and I epiphanied that I didn't know a damn thing about this. To fix that, I found a nice explanation from the folks at FoxSports.com, but that's probably more detail than you really need to understand the essential dorkitude of fantasy football.
Basically, people pick out real football players in a draft at the start of the season, taking turns and picking the guys they think will do the best. (The whole reason for the draft is so that not everyone gets to have, say, Emmitt Smith for a running back. It makes people take turns and involves some strategy.) Each person involved in the Fantasy Football league gets to assemble a full roster of players via the draft.
During the fantasy football season, the assembled teams "play" each other, the winner determined by comparing the stats generated by the players in real NFL season games that they actually play in real life. This is possible because of the huge amount of data amassed on any player during an average NFL game. The aforementioned Mr. Smith's stats are a reasonable sample of the available data, if you'd like to see what kinds of numbers folks have to work with. Anyway, if your wide receiver, in real life, caught two touchdown passes, that would generate fantasy points for your fantasy football team. Apparently mathematical adjustments are also made for more arcane stats so that the people you pick for defense (who don't usually score points) are as important as the offensive lineup... but, again, that's a level of detail more involved than what we really need, here. There appear to be a variety of internet web sites that will, for a nominal fee, help you host your Fantasy Football league and track stats and so forth, should you have a burning desire to do this without the
So. Fantasy Football is a thing where normal people generate pretend team rosters made up of real football players and use the actual game stats of those players to ... make their pretend teams "play" each other weekly and "win" based on whose pretend team has the better set of weekly statistics. Why do I get the feeling that people who do Fantasy Football are the same people who used to beat up people who did Dungeons and Dragons back in high school?
