When it comes to being a sports fan, betting on games and outcomes is common, but some football fans bring it to another level with fantasy football. Fantasy football is a digital game that allows the fans to act as team coordinators/managers, select players from any team during the draft, and win by getting the most points in their league.
Fantasy football allows players of any age to join a league with friends, family, coworkers, or strangers and compete for first place. The league is a group of participants competing against one another, ranging from 4-20 participants per league (depending on the app used). On average, there are 29.2 million participants in the United States annually, gaining traction in younger populations in recent years.
Senior Ian Cersovski has played fantasy football for almost 6 years, playing with the same league of friends since middle school.
“You manage your team week by week, and you play against someone else in your league…Then, based on how the players do in the game, you get points. Then, whoever has the most points at the end of each week wins…There’s a playoff at the end, and whoever wins that wins,” Said Cersovski
Senior Ben Blunck has been playing in a league with friends throughout the entirety of his high school career. “Based on how they do in the game, if they throw touchdowns, you get points for it,” Blunck said. “Then if they lose yards, you get minus points.”
The draft is when each participant in the league chooses their team of players they get for the rest of the season, each participant getting up to 15 players each. Each participant creates a weekly line-up made from the players they drafted.
Cersovski and his league have a specific way of drafting.“We don’t really have a party. We kind of set a date.” Cersovski said. “Some people miss [the draft], and the app drafts a team for them. There’s a set time, and then there’s a draft order, and you get a couple minutes for each pick, and that goes on for the whole draft.”
Blunck drafts at the beginning of the season and each weekly line-up, saying, “I kind of just pick players that I think will do good and not get injured,” Blunck said. “I go through and change different players if they have [bye weeks] or not, and then whether or not I think they’ll do good against different teams.”
There are dozens of apps available to download and play fantasy football, the most popular being ESPN fantasy games, with an average of 12 million players annually. The season length depends on the size of the league and the app being used but the average timeline is 14 weeks long, and the playoffs start in week 15, ending in week 18.