The NFL season was coming up as the school year started, so I decided to make a fantasy football league with friends and build my own team to compete until the end of the season — a glorious total of 17 weeks of regular season, the playoffs and the Super Bowl.
Fantasy football is a math-based game. Competitors choose team rosters by participating in a pre-season draft. Each week my friends and I fill out the “match acquisitions” roster and start players at the various positions, doing our best to outsmart each other. To make it more fun, each of us threw in $5 each to contribute to the prize for the winner of the league.
My league included one quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, one tight end, one kicker, one defense and one FLEX, a player who can be any number of multiple positions.
The stats of my starting players on the field contribute to their individual point totals for the week, and the point totals of all players in my starting lineup are combined as a weekly score; if I have a higher score than my opponent, I win the game of that week.
Opponents can trade players, which is also really fun but always leads to controversy. Everytime my friends and I try to propose a trade, it takes a long time because we have to agree on who to give away and who to acquire. None of us players want to lose the trade and end up with a bad team that won’t make its way to the playoffs.
However, with an increased workload at the beginning of school, I wasn’t sure if I could manage to continue playing fantasy football because it required me to constantly follow my players’ stats and status. For example, I had to add or drop players if they were not cleared to play — usually due to injury, illness or personal issues.
As the school year progressed, I decided to set the lineups every morning while I ate breakfast, so I didn’t have to follow the news; this way, I could focus on school and still manage to regulate my roster well.
In the beginning, I didn’t really know anything about fantasy football and football rules, but as my friends explained the rules to me and we watched the games together by participating in multiple league competitions, fantasy football has become a bonding factor for me and my friends through even the busiest times in junior year.
So far, even though I started my record as 0-2, I won three consecutive weekly matches because I traded running Christian McCaffrey for Saquon Barkley, who was ranked No. 16 on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2019 after a successful season as a rookie. It was a good move.
Now I’m in third place in my four-team division. To win make the playoffs, I need to be in the top two. As my future plan, I’m in process with the great deal with trading Aaron Jones for Lamar Jackson. Getting Jackson on my team will definitely boost my QB scores on my overall weekly matches, and I’m betting I will be able to move up to the top teams in the division.