Fantasy Island

I think by now you can tell that I have a certain affinity for TV, and sometimes not great TV. But everyone likes a little nostalgia from time to time, so I open this post with a nod to one of the first reality television gems, a show that truly lowered the bar for what reality TV has become. A trailblazer, you might call it: Temptation Island.



(I saw that fake-red-haired girl in a ladies room once in LA, and I think I was the only one who was starstruck. Not my finest moment.)

But on to fantasy football. What the hell is fantasy football? Let's begin with how it started.

According to Wikipedia, the game originated in 1962 from an Oakland Raiders part-owner and the team's PR person, with help from the beat sports writer of the Oakland Tribune. The idea emerged during a three-week road trip the Raiders took to the East Coast. Upon their return to the Bay Area, the men formed the first fantasy football league, the GOPPPL (Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League). That is a fantastic league name, by the way.

With the rise of personal computers and the Internet in the late 1990s, the participation in and popularity of fantasy football increased to the level of prominence it holds today. Most leagues are now hosted online through providers such as CBS, ESPN, NFL.com, and Yahoo!, typically at no charge, making the game extremely accessible.

Why is it called fantasy football? Because in a fantasy scenario, it would be cool if we could assemble the better NFL players, both on offense and defense, into a handful of teams that would then square off against each other. And with fantasy football, we can do just that.

There exist various ways to play Fantasy Football, but to ease those newbies into the rules of fantasy, I'm going to explain how Yahoo! Sports has its fantasy league set up. This is probably the most widespread way to play fantasy, too.

The two main types of competition formats for fantasy are 1) Head-to-head, with weekly games played against specific opponents (much like in the NFL), and 2) total points, in which cumulative points during the season determine winners (or playoff teams). I'm going to use Yahoo!'s rules for head-to-head games with ten teams.

The main overview is that each week, your team plays a different team in your league (each person "owns" a team). At the beginning of the season, everyone participates in a "draft" where each team picks players to fill the allotted positions on his or her team. Then, during the season, teams rotate opponent teams and play each other each week. Winning your matchup one week means that the players on your team have scored more points than the players on your opponent's team. At the end of the season, those teams that have the best records advance to the playoffs, where they compete. Whoever makes it to the finals and scores the most points wins their league.

Now you can see why they should have called it the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Procrastinators League.

Baby steps, here, so I'll elaborate more on the draft, Yahoo! rules, etc. in my next post. I am also going to go finish that Temptation Island episode - I forget how it all ends. Man, that show was good.