Published: October 8, 2009

Have you ever heard an elated student in the cafeteria talking about how “Adrian Peterson nabbed me 20 points yesterday?” Or have you ever shared an elevator ride with a dejected student, wondering aloud, “What was I thinking when I took Jake Delhomme in the 5th round?”  No idea what any of that means? That is the purpose of this piece, a guide for the fantasy-illiterate.

There’s nothing wrong with not having a clue. In fact, any honest fantasy football player will admit that anyone can play, and, with the unpredictability of the NFL, almost anyone can become the champion of their league. Here’s how:

Fantasy football at its most basic is fairly straightforward. Your job as owner of a fantasy team is to fill your roster with NFL players from any and all teams. The object of fantasy football is to draft players at the beginning of the season who will score a lot of points game in and game out. You select players through a process called the draft. After the draft ends, players can pick up and drop players on a week-by-week basis. If a team drops a player he is put on “waivers” and the team with the worst record who “claims” him gets the player and may add him to their roster.

Each week, your team matches up against an opponent’s fantasy team. Various leagues use different configurations, but your roster is usually made up of a quarterback, one or two running backs, three wide receivers, a tight end, and a kicker. Another slot is usually reserved for a team defense, which earns fantasy points by recording fumbles, interceptions and tackles. A final spot is usually reserved for an additional offensive player. Each player on your roster earns points depending on his real-life game perfomance. How points are calculated varies from league to league, but all leagues count touchdowns, rushing yards, passing yards sacks and interceptions.

With the NFL becoming the country’s most popular sport, fantasy football has grown in popularity every year. This year Matt Hunt, a fantasy football expert for Howstuffworks.com, estimates that 30 million people will play online. With so many people in the game, you can bet that there is also a boatload of money to be made. According to Matthew Berry, ESPN’s resident fantasy expert, the fantasy sports industry is worth over a billion dollars.

The one key to fantasy football’s popularity is the fact that anyone can win. Sure, knowing more about the players is going to help any owner out, but no one can predict a knee injury in the first game taking out a player for the entire year, as was the fate of Tom Brady in 2008, or a wide receiver shooting himself in the leg, like former New York Giant and current Rikers Island prisoner Plaxico Burress. This leaves a lot of chance in the equation and can allow a fantasy know-nothing to win a league (much to the chagrin of those who follow the sport religiously, like me).

There are a multitude of reasons why playing fantasy football is entertaining and good for the sport. One reason is that it makes boring games more interesting if you know there are fantasy football implications involved. No one wants to watch two awful teams like the St. Louis Rams and the Detroit Lions play each other. But if you have the Rams defense on your fantasy roster and you have a chance to win if they hold the Lions under 20 points, suddenly you’re glued to the T.V.

Plus, it’s a great way to stay in contact with friends. Before going off to our respective universities, my friends got together and held a fantasy football draft so that we could still stay in contact with each other. Sure we could talk to each other via Facebook, but this way we have something more to share between us—like the 20 bucks we each put in riding on the results of our league.