Dr. Dan: Hello fellow fantasy sports fans. Welcome to MFSN, the Hub. I am your host, Dr. Dan Ratner. I am joined today by Kasey Shienvold and Ross, the Boss.
Ross: Hey everybody, I’m Ross, the Boss. I’m going to talk fantasy football with you cowboy.
Dr. Dan: Now listen, if you haven’t already click subscribe, ring the bell for notifications to keep up with our strategy information and keep yourself on top of your fantasy league and put your comments below and we’ll get back to you personally. Okay guys, fantasy football, the most popular of the fantasy sports, but it can be a little intimidating if you’ve never done it before. In fact, it can be intimidating if you’ve done it for many seasons, but fear not friends, we are here to teach you how to play fantasy football. On this show, we will teach you the basics of fantasy football and prepare you to look like a professional in your upcoming season and maybe even be one. From the draft to setting your line-ups, to managing the waiver wire, we will demystify the whole process. So we’re going to start right at the top, what is fantasy football because for some of you out there, you’ve never played it before, maybe you’ve never played a fantasy sport at all.
So fantasy sports are all about this, the real players on the field, in the real game, whatever they do leads to scoring on your team if you have that player on your team. We’re going to talk about drafts in a little bit and how to get the players on your team but once you have your team, whichever players you have is going to determine what scoring you get, it all depends on what happens in that week. There are two types of football leagues, head-to-head leagues, where you square off against one other opponent and whatever team they drafted. Those players are matched up against your players. Whichever players do better, that team is going to win. There’s also something called a points league, which is more rare, but people do play it and that is determined by whatever the players do, leads to certain points. If they score a touchdown, if they get 10 yards, if they fumble, sometimes it can even have tackles in it or field goals. Anything that happens in the game is potentially up for grabs in terms of points and the team that has the most points by the end of the year, wins that league. That’s the main gist you need to know, what the real players are doing, if you’ve got them on your team, it’s good for you.
At the end of the season, the teams that won the most during the regular season make the playoffs. So in a head to head league, you’ve got a record and if you win in a given week, you’re going to win. If you lose, you get a loss. It’s the same as in real sports, you’re going to compete to get the best record you can. There’s going to be a certain number of playoff teams that is determined by the commissioner of your league. The commissioner is the one who runs the league, and that will determine if you make the playoffs. At that point, it’s a win or go home scenario. You don’t get a second chance, it’s just like the playoffs in real football, you’ll be matched up based on seating and you will play them just like you would in a regular season game. The players that play on the field determine what happens. Now, this is an important point, the real playoffs in football have nothing to do with fantasy football. Those stats don’t count for anything because so many of the teams are sitting at home that a drafted team would become meaningless. Your season is done usually by week 16 in the NFL, now we have 18 weeks coming up. So it may be week 17, but it’s all the regular season.
Real playoffs have nothing to do with fantasy sports, you’ll win or go home in the playoffs. Whoever wins the remaining games in the playoffs is the overall champion and it’s as simple as that. Now, one last thing I’m going to mention, there are also different types of leagues in terms of the settings and the basics of them. One is called a redraft league. What that means is you draft your team at the beginning of the year and once the year’s over that team’s done. You’ll redraft again next year, you’ll have a whole new team. Then there something called keeper leagues and keeper leagues you keep a set number of players and you get to hold onto them for as many years as you want to. It depends on how the setting’s in the league are, but it’s usually a limited number that you get to keep. Then there are dynasty leagues, dynasty leagues mean that you keep your entire roster. So there is continuity year to year all the time.
Redraft leagues are by far the most common, I would say probably 85 to 90% of leagues are redraft leagues. Keeper leagues are actually, they might be the least of them because people have gotten really into dynasty leagues of late. But those are the three main types of leagues. All right, guys, how did I do, am I getting people on the right page? If you didn’t know fantasy football, did that sound good to you?
Kasey: That sounded great to me. I mean, it does explain the basics. There’s obviously a lot of nuance that becomes more important as you become a more seasoned professional or a seasoned player, I should say. But for the basics, those are the basics, that’s the structure of fantasy football.
Dr. Dan: All right, Ross, did I miss anything?
Ross: You didn’t miss much, I mean, I’ll ask you guys a question. How many people play fantasy sports, fantasy sports in the United States and Canada? How many people you think play?
Dr. Dan: I don’t know, but I know what you’re getting at.
Ross: 59 million people play fantasy sports in the United States, 78% play fantasy football. So fantasy football is the most popular sport in fantasy sports. So you watching this show is important so you know how to play the game and the crazy stat about this is listen to this, I read this today. 20 million people in India play fantasy sports, by 2022, 100 million people in India will be playing fantasy sports. I don’t know if that’s a true fact, but I read it in two different areas and they say it’s going to happen. So I don’t know what’s happening in India, but India, we’re here to help you.
Dr. Dan: Good. Now, listen, we’re going to keep this really organized. We are literally going to teach you how to play and we’re going to take you through step by step by step. This is just the basics, just the beginning. So now we’re going to turn to what are league settings. Kasey take it away.
Kasey: Well, there’s a basic structure to fantasy football and the league settings kind of establish the structure for your league. The commissioner is the person who tends to set up the league and invite all the other players, they set up what can be the construction of your roster and the scoring of your teams and how the playoffs end up being settled with regards to the amount of teams who make the playoffs and the seating and so forth. And so the basic structure is your roster consists of the basic offensive specialist positions and what I mean by that are quarterbacks, running backs, tight ends, wide receivers are on almost all leagues. Some leagues have kickers and defense as well and then many leagues have what we call a flex position. A flex position is an additional player you can start who plays at either tight end, running back or wide receiver so that you can add an additional player to your starting lineup each week, week to week.
Now there are some leagues that have what is called a super flex position, a super flex position, which is gaining in popularity, includes having an additional quarterback start and so knowing the league settings and the roster settings become very, very important in how you construct your roster. The other piece of that is obviously the scoring, many leagues score based on simple metrics for yards gained, touchdowns and then it can be per reception when wide receivers, halfbacks, running backs, I’m sorry, or tight ends catch a pass they may get an additional point or half point depending on the setup of the league. You can lose points for turnovers on offense if your offensive player turns the ball over either via an interception or a fumble, and some teams will lose points even on missed extra points or defensive points allowed if your league has defensive teams as part of it. So it becomes really important to understand what the settings of the league are and so before you prepare for the draft, and I believe Ross is going to talk about the draft here in a minute, it’s important to understand what your starting roster particularly is going to look like so that you can appropriately value the players who are going to be available in the draft. So that’s the basic structure of league settings. Is there anything that you guys wanted to add before we move on to the draft?
Dr. Dan: I just wanted to say understanding your league settings is an underrated part of the game. It changes the value of things. I mean, let’s say you’re playing in a super flex league, that means you’re going to play probably two quarterbacks, because quarterbacks get the most points generally speaking, we’re going to get into that more in a later episode, but then you know you’ve got a value quarterbacks in the draft better in a Superflex league than you do in one that doesn’t have them in the flex position. So that’s just the thing I would say is make sure you know your league settings, make sure you know them cold, make sure you know whether the players are on waivers all the time, that means you can’t pick them up unless you put in a waiver claim, I’ll get into that when we talk about managing the season. League settings are so important. Ross, do you have anything to add?
Ross: No, I agree. I mean, the number one thing I do when I join a league is to look at the settings. I mean, that’s what you have to get accustomed to, that’s who got to do every time he join a new league, look at the settings. If it’s a settings that you like, accept it, play in the league. If it’s something you don’t like, if they’re playing like all these crazy points for defense or for field goals and stuff, and you don’t want to do that, I don’t blame you. I don’t want to do that either, but you should just look at the settings like you said, that’s the most important thing. That’s number one on Ross’s rule is league settings.
Dr. Dan: Okay. Now we’re going to talk about the draft, Ross you’re in charge of the draft; go.
Ross: So the draft, usually 90% of the drafts are snake drafts and you’re saying Ross, what’s the snake draft. A snake draft is let’s say there are 10 teams, I got the first pick I’m picking first, I pick Kasey Shienvold as my first pick. So I don’t pick until all the way till the 20th pick. all the guys from two to nine pick, then they go all the way back down and then I don’t pick till like the 20th pick and then I have two picks in a row. So I get 20 and 21 and that being said, so you got to pick when you draft and the other draft is this, the other way you can draft this auction draft and the auction draft isn’t that popular? It’s like, I would say it’s between 10 or five to 10% of people do auction draft, but again, you have a budget, you bid on players and you get them on your team, it’s that easy, it’s not that hard. But with the snake draft, you want to draft the best player available. You don’t go by position. Let’s say your first two picks you pick a running back and wide receiver. Don’t think you have to go pick a quarterback as your third pick. The quarterbacks will be there, especially in a 10 or 12 team league.
I mean, you’ll have a long time to pick a quarterback, don’t worry about that. But in a draft, the most important thing is to just be organized, do your homework before you do a draft, and just make sure you know who you want to pick, because usually you have between 30 and 45 seconds, I would say, between picks and you don’t want to be that guy that waits to the last second. You want to know who you’re picking. You want to be organized. You want to be ready. You want to be like Ross, the boss. So do they doing all that stuff, you’ll have a great draft and Ross’s rule number two, pick the best player available. Don’t worry about the position. Pick the best player available. Let me hear what you guys have to say.
Dr. Dan: So I would just say that you hit lots of great points. I think the main thing is you want to understand how to value players and that’s going to take some getting used to it. We’re going to do that in future videos in fact, we’re not going to try to pack it into here. We’re just trying to get the basics of what is the draft. So everybody sits online, they pick their players and that’s your team. If somebody picks a player, you obviously can’t get them. So you need to know when to take a player. Kasey, do you have anything that, yeah,
Kasey: The only thing I would stress is it’s important to put the work in before the draft, with regards to evaluating who’s available, ranking your players, because the more prepared you are for the draft, the more confident you will feel in the draft and probably the better your outcome will be. I think that’s the key is to have trusted sources of information to help you prepare and the more prepared you are just like in anything, the better the result typically.
Dr. Dan: And we know one trusted source of information could be MFSN, come to us, we’ll help you. Now, we’re going to get into managing the season because once you’ve done the draft, once you understood the league settings, once you decided what kind of league to play in, you have to manage this team and that’s going to lead to changes. Usually it’s on a weekly basis in terms of football, but you need to remember there are games on Thursdays or sometimes games on Saturdays, there are games on Sundays and of course there’s games on Mondays. So there’s a lot of work involved and you need to know when to put in your waiver claims to get new players for each week. In fantasy football there’s a lot of turnover on the back end of your roster, because roles change and players emerge.
So each week you need to make sure you set your line-up. Always make sure you look and make sure which players are playing. You don’t want to be the guy who gets caught not playing your best player because they were out of your line-up on a Thursday game. You start at the beginning of the week and you look at which players you should play. Along the way you’re going to be looking for players to pick up off the waiver wire. The waiver wire means players that are not owned by any team, either they didn’t get drafted initially or they got released by a team who decided they didn’t want them anymore. You could scoop up those players, you’re going to have to drop a player to do it. Every time you add a player, you have a set number of roster spots. So you’re going to need to drop somebody, but you’re going to need to manage the waiver wire and manage a roster and know which players you want to own and what positions you want to own.
The other way that you manage things in season is trades. You can offer a trade to any team in the league. Once that trade is offered, they can either accept it, reject it, or they can leave it sitting there and you can get irritated with them because that’s not cool, I’m just going to say that right out. But the idea is you can look and say, I have a need, this person can give it to me. They have a need, I can give it to them. If you match up, well, you can make a trade. Those are the three things you need to do to be managing your team and you want to work hard at it because if you don’t the teams that don’t work hard at it, they don’t tend to win. You’ve got to keep up your roster. Guys, is there anything we want to add to the basics of how to play fantasy football?
Ross: Basically, I was going to say, during the season, you can watch MFSN. We have a waiver wire show every week. We’re very good at our job. We know what we’re doing and we’ll save you a lot of time to watch us. Instead of you doing all your homework, you can just watch us. We’ll tell you who to pick up, it’s that easy.
Dr. Dan: Good point, Kasey, how about you?
Kasey: I think we covered the basics. I think another thing that’s important, if we want to talk about how to get better at fantasy football is at some point you have to actually watch football watching the games themselves can help you better understand why different players are valued differently during the season and can help you manage your roster a lot better.
Dr. Dan: That’s a great point and actually, I will just put a plug in for that too, that especially in football, it’s important to watch the games. In the other sports, the stats are more understandable just by numbers, but in football you really got to see, okay, he picked up 22 yards, but why? If a guy just fell over that’s not an impressive run. If a guy has an impressive run, you could be like, that’s a guy I need to pick up. All right, guys, I think we’re off to a great start getting people ready for how to play fantasy football. Just wanted to remind everybody out there, if you haven’t already, click subscribe, ring the bell for notifications, hit like if you like what you’re hearing and put your comments below, we’ll get back to you, we’re going to have many more of these segments coming out, telling you how to play the game with tips, strategies, and advice on what to do. Thank you for watching everybody. We will see you soon.
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