Yards Per Fantasy University: The Basics
If you’re here then chances are you’re new to fantasy football – congratulations, you’ve made a wonderful choice and you’ll be very happy here.
A friend or colleague has convinced you to fork out your hard-earned cash to fill an empty spot in their league, they’re already planning to fleece you, and you don’t know your Flex from your Free Agent. That’s ok, we’ve got you covered and with Yards Per Fantasy at your side you’ll be in with a shot from day one.
Platform and Positions
First up, find out what platform you’re going to be playing on and download their app. There’s a number of platforms out there now such as Yahoo, ESPN, NFL Fantasy, CBS sports, Sleeper and more.
Then you’ll need to understand your settings. What does your roster construction look like (how many Quarterbacks (QB), Running Backs (RB), Wide Receivers (WR), Tight Ends (TE)). You’ll also see ‘flex’ positions, often designated as ‘W/R/T’ or something similar, and you may have Kickers (K) and Defense/Special Teams (DST). There will also be ‘bench spots’ where you can put any player of any position to save them for when you want to use them. They don’t score points unless you put them in your lineup but they’re yours and no-one can touch them.
Let’s break these down.
Every player that you can select for your team will have a position designation. For the positions with set designations on your roster, you can only pick a player with that designation. For example, Patrick Mahomes is a QB and can only be played in the QB spot, not a WR spot.
For the Flex positions (W/R/T) you can select any player with those three designations, so either a Wide Receiver, a Running Back, or a Tight End.
For leagues with Defense/Special Teams (DST) spots, you select a team’s DST and you get their team performance. So for example, you could select the Pittsburgh Steelers DST and you’ll get whatever DST points they get based on your league’s scoring settings (usually a combination of turnovers, sacks, kick-off return touchdowns, etc).
Draft
Now you can’t just pick whatever players you like the look of and start building your team, you have to draft against your league mates. This will be a set date and time, and either be at a location where you all gather together or (as is more common these days) it will be online. Most platforms let you do it from their app or from a desktop site.
We’ll cover different types of drafts and strategies later but for now, we’ll hit on the most common type of draft – a snake draft with a timer. With these drafts, there will be a draft order (which may be determined by previous season results, randomised pre-draft, or some other extravagant method of picking the order) and a time limit for each pick (could be as little as 30 seconds or 60 seconds). When the draft starts, the manager with the first pick takes the player they want, then the second manager takes the player they want, and so on. Once a player is selected, they’re off the ‘draft board’ and no-one else can take that player.
When you hit the last manager and they take their pick, the next round of the draft starts and you go again. However this time, you ‘snake’ back around through the teams so whoever picked last in the first round will pick first in the next round. If you picture a grid with 12 columns, the snake goes left to right, then right to left, then left to right, then right to left, etc. This is designed to provide balance and not give manager one an unfair advantage.
Side Note: you may hear ‘the turn’ which refers to the ends of the draft order where the snake ‘turns’ and comes back the other way.
Scoring
The most important part of understanding your settings is the way in which your players will score points.
There are many different variants and the settings section in your league should list these out for you.
Some basics:
- Rushing yard (standard is 0.1 so you get 1 point for every 10 yards)
- Receiving yard (ditto)
- Passing yards by QB (standard is 0.4 so 1 point for every 25 passing yards)
- Touchdowns (standard is 6 points for every rushing or receiving touchdown, passing touchdowns may be 4 or 6 points)
A key thing to understand is Points Per Reception, or PPR for short. You’ll hear this term thrown about a lot “it’s a PPR league” or “is it non-PPR”, there are even half-PPR settings. What this means is that, in a PPR league, a player gets an additional point for every catch they make, on top of whatever other points they score. So players who catch the ball more, get more points. In half-PPR it’s half a point for every catch, and in non-PPR (also referred to as ‘standard scoring’) they don’t get any additional points for catching the ball, just the yards and touchdowns.
How do you win?
So you have your team drafted and you know how to score points, but how do you actually win? Well, again, there are different variations but the most common is that you play in weekly head-to-head matchups. Manager 1 plays against manager 2, manager 3 plays against manager 4, and so on. The next week, manager 1 may play manager 7, etc, and you cycle through opponents each week.
You set your lineup, making sure you have your starting roster full of the players who you think will score you the most points, and you watch as players accumulate their yards and touchdowns for your team and for your opponent’s team. Whoever has the most points at the end of the round, wins that head-to-head matchup and gets a 1 in the win column. The loser gets a 0 in the win column and the standings update each week with accumulated wins and losses.
At the end of the ‘regular season’ (sometime around week 14 or 15), the teams in the playoff positions (check your league-settings – it may say the top four go to playoffs, or top six, etc) will go on to a knockout playoff competition through the final weeks of the season, to crown a winner.
That’s it
That’s it in a nutshell. There’s lots of nuances but if you pick the best players each week and score the most points, you win – simple really!
The next step is to get a bit deeper in to the impact of your different settings, roster construction, scoring and draft strategies.
And of course, you can always ask the Yards Per Fantasy team for help and advice any time with our Ask The Expert feature.
