Fantasy Football - How to Start or Join a Team

Gene Wang: Hi! I am Gene Wang, Fantasy Football Writer for the Washington Post and welcome to my video on how to play Fantasy football. In this segment, I am going to show you how to set up and join a league. There is not really much to do it. The first thing you need to do is find a bunch of buddies who love football as much as you. Now most leagues comprise 12-14 teams, so it would be you, maybe eleven of your friends, if you add more you can expand it to 14 teams, there are already been some leagues that have 16 teams. To me I found, it is a bit too much, 14 or 12 is an ideal number.

Now once you have your friends on board, you have to pick a Commissioner, that's a person that's going to be right in the league. He is a person that's going to settle any disputes that you have and he is probably the person that let's say you are in Las Vegas and you are playing for money, the one who is going to be holding the cash and awarding the prizes at the end of the year.

Now in leagues, most standard leagues there is an entry fee, $50, it can be $100, it all depends how much you are willing to spend. Now all that goes into a pot and at the end of the year you can have a winner-take-all League, where the winner is awarded all the money or you can have the top three spots and in some leagues the person who finishes last, gets his or her money back, I think that's a pretty good incentive too.

Now once you have all that established you have to figure out which website you want to use. There are many websites out there that can keep score and keep track of leagues, keep track of free agent moves. Yahoo was one of the best I found, CBS Sportsline is also very good, of course, ESPN has one. Now some of these websites ask you to pay money to keep track of your League and these websites generally will give you more insightful information, they will keep track of players that you have and give you Injury updates for them. Other free leagues may not give you as much information, but then again, they are free so that's a consideration.

So once you have your league set, all the teams, all your friends in, you've picked a Commissioner, you know what websites you are going to use, you have determined how much you are going spend or if you are just going to play for pride, then you are going to want to draft your team and that's going to be my next segment. So please stay tuned.