I can still remember back to 1992 when my friend Willie asked me if I wanted to be in his fantasy football league. He was my center in football when I quarterbacked the Minatare Indians, some 8-9 years earlier. I didn’t know what fantasy football was, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with dungeons and dragons (like he had been involved with in high school) so I was reluctant. I was relieved to learn it was nothing like that.

In fact, Fantasy Football isn’t like any card or board game where you have some control once the game starts. The skill is in drafting the best players, then being able to aptly select which of your players will likely perform the best that week by starting them in your lineup. Each week is a challenge with various bye weeks and injuries especially. If you don’t pay attention, you could end up with a lot of goose eggs (zeros) in your scoring column.

How does it work?

Thankfully, things are computerized nowadays. When Willie and I were playing, we relied on a league chosen commissioner to look in the paper each week and compile every statistic for every player on everyone’s team in the league. It was a lot of work, but we considered it fun.

Now, a computer assists with draft day, one of the most important aspect of fantasy football, as well as all the scoring!

Setting your lineup through trades and acquisitions from free agency each week is critical. Beyond controlling your lineup, once it’s kickoff, it’s locked at you are at the mercy of your player’s performance on the field that day. Injury reports are a key each week.

Now that you know a little bit about Fantasy Football and how it works, would you like to see how I did this year?

I had boycotted the NFL for awhile, so this was my first year back after my hiatus. In all, I drafted a dozen teams in 12 different 10 team leagues through ESPN’s fantasy football app. The following reflects how this season went;

Total Teams Drafted : 12

League Overall Winners : 4 (combined record of 38-6)

All Teams Season Record : 99-36

Teams Making the Playoffs (top 4) : 11 out of 12

Teams Making the Super Bowl : 6

Teams Winning the Super Bowl : 3 (Prescott’s Bills, Rogers’ Patriots, Jalen’s Bears)

Teams Finishing Second : 3

Teams Finishing Third : 4

One team finished 4th (Murray’s Cards), while the only team not the make the top 4 (playoffs) was Random Dudes, which was a computer auto-drafted team, but they still won easily to secure 5th.

In the last year before my boycott, 2018 I believe, I had 25 teams and ended up winning 8 Super Bowls.

Let me know in the comments how you did this year!