Fantasy Football for Spartans

By carolinianweb on September 6, 2017 • ( 0 )

Sports_AntreStephenson_Fantasy_MatthewRothFlickr

Flickr / Matthew Roth

Antre Stephenson
Staff Writer

The NFL (National Football League) is a professional American football league that consists of 32 teams divided equally between the National Football Conference (NFC) and the American Football Conference (AFC). The NFL was founded Aug. 20, 1920. It consists of four preseason games, 17 regular season games and one bye week for every team (a team does not play one week). A large part of its popularity in recent years have been thanks to the explosion of fantasy football. In 1997, CBS launched it’s first publicly available free fantasy football website. Later on, the NFL released their own official game in 2010. It became very popular, as it continued its success from then even until now.

Arguably the most important marketing tool for the NFL today, fantasy football has an estimated over 19 million people who compete in public and private leagues online nationally. Fantasy football is where you select from a list of the best players in the NFL and they compete on a weekly basis for your team. Their on field performance drives your fantasy point total and overall success. You decide what type of league you want to participate in, acquire a roster of players either through the draft or through autopick, then set your lineup each week during the season and watch touchdowns, field goals, yards gained, sacks, interceptions and other stats as you generate fantasy points for or against your team. Whether you win or lose it all depends on how well you maximize the talent on your roster each week. While playing you have chances to win trips to the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl, and other exclusive items including cash if you win specific leagues.

There are many different league types that go in Fantasy football which contains head to head leagues, total points league, and all play leagues to name a few. Head to head leagues is when a fantasy team matches up against a different fantasy team from the league each week. The teams that gets the most points of the two receives a win for that week. Points are calculated by the scoring system that is custom or set by the specific website. Points are totaled up on the overall performances for the players you have decided to start that week. The teams with the best win-loss record advance to the playoffs. The way the total points league works is whichever team accumulates points on a consistent basis and who has the most total points when it comes to the standings. All play leagues are leagues in which all teams play each other each week. For an example, if there are 14 teams in the league, the top scoring team that week would be a 13-0 record, and the second highest would be a 12-1 record. Another league that is very popular is the salary cap league, in which adds a new dynamic to the league and makes building a team more realistic. Like salary cap sports, these leagues say you have to build a team using only a certain amount of money that can not be exceeded, instead of more traditional leagues that just say pick the best players without considering the extra limitation.

Each player has an associated salary and the total spent on all the players on a team has a maximum salary cap.

I asked Quadre Thomas, a freshman here at UNCG, if he roots for his favorite team or his fantasy team when he’s watching football games and his response was “Hmmm… That’s a tough question… I would probably root for my favorite team right now since I just started, but who knows, that may change in a few weeks from now when the NFL regular season starts.”

I asked another person here at UNCG the exact same question. John Rivers, a sophomore, and his response was “I’m going to root for my fantasy team hands down! I’m trying to win some money!” Fantasy Football is something that will be around for awhile because there’s so much interest in it.