Our culture is loaded with preset ideas about gender and sports. This site, obviously, looks at fantasy football from a male and a female perspective. No doubt some prejudices will rear their ugly heads: I'm certainly aware that some people think gender has a role in determining who is qualified to play/talk about/enjoy sports. More specifically, some believe one sex is superior when it comes to fantasy sports.
I want to be upfront right now: I think men are just as good, even if their ideas on winning, losing and game enjoyment are sometimes skewed. So, if you are looking for a site that bashes men's abilities, look elsewhere. Our motivations and modus operandi might be different, but we can still all get along. At least Tuesday through Saturday. During the regular season. Except not on Thursdays some weeks. And Saturdays in December.
On to fantasy football. You've probably already figured out one of the main differences between my esteemed Mashup colleague and me: He gets into it way before I do. I have not been rolling around in the great, sticky vat of football information yet. Training camps are just beginning, players remain unsigned, I have not yet begun to sort through all the roster changes with due diligence. I will and soon. If you want to approach your draft with any kind of competence, you will too.
Here's a look at some early info gathering ideas ..
Understand the rules of fantasy play. You need to get a complete understanding of the rules of the league you will play in. Is it a keeper league? An auction league? Yardage or scoring? There is a good explanation of some fantasy basics on About.com. In fact, this site has all kinds of basic info for the true newbie. Get all the information you can on the scoring rules, roster requirements and weekly deadlines of your league. If you're almost a professional, ponder rule changes you can bring up at the draft that will give you a competitive advantage and, ideally, spoil things early for your arch-rival ... like getting rid of mandatory TE play in a league where you have none and he has Antonio Gates. Crunch some numbers to find out if it's better to play a running back or a wide receiver in that flex position based on your scoring rules.
Dig deeper. Fantasy football can be simple or as complex a CIA operation in
Baghdad. Think of it as tiers. The newbie level is simply learning the
NFL players, teams and how the teams stack up. This can be daunting and it's where men often have a decided advantage and the sports-minded-from-birth especially so: They grew up talking/playing/watching football.
They don't have to learn the lingo or find out who "Sweetness" was. Bright side: I started from scratch: I had no brothers and my dad was a baseball fan, so it can be done. Fantasy mags are good for this. General Web sites like team sites and the official NFL site will also help you get up to speed.
Past all that? Now you have to figure out how a particular player's specific situation will impact his fantasy performance. Is he a starter? What's his injury history? Is he the main guy or just part of a running-back-by-committee (RBBC) team that loves to hand the ball off to two or three players? Is his team primarily a running team or a passing team? You can scratch the surface or hit the molten core in this endeavor. This is what separates the men from the psychotic. These subtleties are why fantasy football is a multimillion-dollar industry and a Web search will pull up more player rankings than porn sites. I've heard, anyway.
Have a chat. Clearly, one of my strategic advantages is the ill-gotten knowledge I get from a far more obsessive player in my house. I highly recommend this form of information gathering, if at all possible. If you have friends, lovers or just a colleague at work who is a manic fan, chat him/her up. I'm not suggesting manipulative or creepy behavior, just sincere conversation. People who are die-hard fans of a team will know all kinds of detailed information that might take hours to find sifting through the mountains of printed material or surfing the Web. Two caveats: Take into account people's prejudices (the Browns are probably not this year's Super Bowl sleeper) and never take advice from someone playing against you. Don't do the opposite of what competitors say out of spite either. There's plenty of room for emotion (another post, for sure) but not when it comes to opponents' head games.
Don't be intimidated. The football gods are capricious. Chaos theory rules, which is why it's so fun to play. I don't know the history of the Bears franchise, I can't explain the West Coast offense, and I always have to look up the conference divisions. But I have a lot of fun, talk trash when possible and win more often than lose.
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