Imagine Cadillac Williams, Jason Campbell and Ronnie Brown all on the same team again. Or how about Peyton Manning from the Colts, Carson Palmer from the Bengals and Jamal Lewis from the Browns on the same NFL team? It sounds like a football fans dream come true. Of course, this will never happen. But there is one place it exists: fantasy football.
Fantasy football is a fantasy sports game in which players start leagues and draft their own players full of actual football players and are scored based on those players’ performances on the field that week.
Leagues are separated as they actually are, with the NFL, NCAA and college having their own separate teams.
NFL.com, Yahoo!, and ESPN.com are just a few of the Web sites that host fantasy football.
All of the sites score similarly, based on what the commissioner, or the person that started the league, decides. The league points are based on everything from yards to touchdowns, but differ slightly. Some sites give one point for every 10 yards, while some give one point for every 20. Players can also lose points for interceptions or missing a field goal. Some sites cost to play and offer prizes to the winners, while some are free and players play just for the sport of it.
Will Moon and Art Watson are two of the latter players.
Will Moon, a 22-year-old Auburn graduate, is playing fantasy football this year for the third year in a row. His roommates started a league in college and he was intrigued.
“I’ve always been a fan of football,” Moon said. “Until I started playing, I really wasn’t a huge supporter of fantasy football. Even now I’m not as extreme about it as many people are, but I really like the competition.”
Moon started playing first on Yahoo!’s fantasy football site, but also plays on NFL.com. His teams have done predominately well over the last few years, which is definitely due to the players on his teams. This year Moon has Carson Palmer from the Bengals, Cadillac Williams from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Jamal Lewis from the Browns playing on his team, which have done well.
“I don’t know if I have an aptitude towards it or if I’m just lucky,” he laughed.
According to Wikipedia, the game originated in 1962 from Oakland Raiders partner Bill Winkenbach. His friend Philip Carmona, Bill Tunell of the Raider’s public relations, “Oakland Tribune” writer Scotty Stirling, and “Oakland Tribune” Sports Editor George Ross also helped come up with the idea while they were all on a three-week road trip the Raiders took to the East Coast.
When they returned, the formed the first fantasy football league, the GOPPPL (Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League), and since then the idea has grown immensely.
Leagues usually consist of 8 to 14 teams, and there are three types of leagues: redraft, “keeper” leagues, and dynasty leagues.
In the redraft, each player drafts the entire team. In a “keeper” league, each player can keep some of the players they had in a previous season. In a dynasty league, players can keep any player that had the previous season, and the draft has only rookies or un-retained players.
A lot of sites offer players on a first come, first serve basis. But all players don’t get to pick their desired team. On some sites, players are drafted, but some sites only offer auto-draft, attempting to make it fairer.
There are also a lot of made-up rules players follow. Hard-core followers usually advise drafting running backs first, because they offer the most points. Even Web sites, like NFL.com, offer advice that players can choose to follow. Moon said he usually ignores most of those tips and picks his quaterback first.
“I guess there’s a science that goes into it,” he said. “It’s just not a science I care to engage in.”
But sites such as NFL.com also offer advice such as who was injured that week and more. Art Watson plays on NFL.com too. The 34-year-old Auburn graduate said he loves to play, but also isn’t into it as much as a lot of people. He and some friends from Auburn started playing just for fun. They started a league at NFL.com. called “AU In Your Face” and are playing for the second year. Watson said the group does it mainly to have an excuse to hang out and pick on each other.
“It’s an excuse to have a little trash talkin’ back and forth,” he said. “It’s kind of a way for everybody to stay in touch.”
Watson added that one thing fantasy football does for him is make the actual games more interesting.
“Games that I will not care one thing about watching on Sunday, I get into because I might have a player involved,” he said.
The players that are part of Watson’s team are mostly former Auburn players such as Jason Campbell as quaterback, and Ronnie Brown and Cadillac Williams as running backs.
There are certain sites that only offer rankings, projections, stats, player history, news, advice and more like fftoday.com, sofantasyfootball.com and more.
But football isn’t the only fantasy sport available. Sites also offer fantasy baseball, fantasy hockey and even fantasy Congress - to name a few.
Some sports writers criticize fantasy sports, especially those involving team sports, of focusing too much on statistics.
Fantasy sports have a huge following. According to Wikepedia,  it’s estimated by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association that 16 million U.S. adults played fantasy sports in 2006 and 22 percent of U.S. adult males 18 to 49 years old, with Internet access, play fantasy sports. Sixteen million U.S. adults is estimated to have a $3 to $4 Billion annual economic impact across the sports industry.