Anyway, I kept seeing ads for fantasy football online and in other places wondered what it was, so I did some research. Apparently, fantasy football is a sports game for those who want to be involved with football all year round. And not just involved as in watching games, but actually owning, managing and running a “fantasy” football team. When the real football season starts – and it can be the NFL or a division of the NCAA or some other league – scores in the fantasy football leagues are determined by using statistics compiled by actual players.

Who started fantasy football, and when? It all goes back almost 50 years when a limited partner in the Oakland Raiders and some of his sports writer and editor friends cooked up the idea during a long road trip. When they got back, they started the first fantasy football league. Initially, it was hard to form leagues and keep the information flowing, but then came personal computers and finally the Web. Today, fantasy football is big business and fantasy football team fanatics are being courted by television networks and advertisers because they watch more games, buy more tickets, and spend more on their sport than average fans.

But how does it all work? The big attraction of fantasy football is that it’s not just watching games. Fantasy football is living the game and actively participating in it. You pick a team, you draft players, you follow rules, you observe salary caps and negotiate contracts. Franchise owners may have to pay (fictional) taxes, trade players, and, of course, try to win games and championships, establish dynasties or make to a coveted Hall of Fame. Things can get quite competitive, but you make friends in the process and many of the same teams play each other season after season.

Fantasy football games have as many rules as the real thing. Scoring can be complex as it depends on the stats of actual players on actual teams. And since fantasy league teams have players from a number of teams, a fantasy franchise owner often doesn’t know which real-world team he should root for! What’s important here is that the real performance and stats of real players in real games decides how well your fantasy team does. So picking and drafting the right players is very important.

How do you get started with this fascinating and addictive pastime? Fantasy football information is easy to come by on the web. Look around, check some of the many leagues, and then sign up with one and become a team owner. There are any number of leagues with different flavors and rules (the commissioner usually determines the scoring system). Some leagues cost a lot, but others are affordable and suit the novice as well as the expert fantasy football player. Give it a shot!

The way fantasy football works is like this, every participant or owner as we are called in the Fantasy Sports World, drafts or buys through an auction a team of players. For the purposes of this introduction we are going to assume the fantasy football league is NFL, but it could also be based on college players. The way the actual completion plays out depends upon the individual fantasy football league you happen to belong to. In some fantasy football leagues the winner is determined by total points at the end of a season, while others actually play against each other weekly with the team having the best record at the end of the fantasy season being declared winner of that fantasy football league.

The internet has been responsible for taking fantasy football from a hobby played out in sports bars and individual homes to a multi-billion dollar industry now according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. According to the FSTA, nearly twenty million players participate in fantasy sports and the industry has a growth rate of around ten percent. Fantasy Football is the most popular of all the fantasy sports available and continues to grow even faster with the explosion of websites and software to help with the game as well as the proliferation of fantasy football magazines available today.

Most fantasy football leagues will be made up of around ten or twelve individual teams which will have their own mock drafts before the season starts. Because you are drafting real players and their performance really matters it pays to stay in touch with what is going on with them during the off season and pre-season. For example if you draft a Ricky Williams and he decides to go off and smoke dope, too bad, you are screwed out of a running back! In some fantasy football leagues each owner must draft a new team every year, while in others you may be allowed to keep a handful of players which will not be entered in the draft. Some leagues have even gone as far as to create so-called dynasty leagues where an owner may maintain his team from the previous season and only draft incoming rookies. This is very similar to how a real football league works.

Players that are not drafted are designated as “free agents” and may be chosen during the season by trading players that an owner may currently have and making them free agents. The rules that govern this practice vary from league to league.