Now that’s all out of the way, let’s go over what you can expect over a season of fantasy football! A fantasy season consists of three main parts: the draft, the regular season, and the playoffs.

The draft

Before the draft starts, make sure you’ve paid any league fees or buy-ins to your commissioner (the person in charge of the league). Don’t be the jackass who has to be hounded for weeks before you cough up the dough, or even worse, doesn’t ever pay.

The fantasy season begins with a draft, where each member of the league picks the NFL players that their team will start with that year. Your team’s roster consists of specific positions you’ll fill with players from the draft. This is usually a quarterback, some number of wide receivers, some number of running backs, a tight end, a kicker, and a defense (you’ll draft an entire team’s defense as one, so while you might take Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback or Le’Veon Bell at running back, you’d take The Steelers in their entirety as a defense). Some leagues have a “flex” position, which can be filled with one of several different positions (say, a running back, a wide receiver, or a tight end). Your roster will also have several bench spots, where you’ll carry “backup” players to fill in for your starters where necessary.

The draft is broken up into “rounds,” in which each team gets a chance to pick a player. The order of picks alternates round to round (so if you picked last in round 1 you’d pick first in round 2, and then last again in round 3, etc). As you’d predict, the big-name players who are expected to score the most fantasy points are drafted in the earlier rounds. If you’re new to watching football and have no idea who any of the players are, don’t worry! Whatever platform your league uses will have a default order in which players should be drafted, and you’ll do fine following that.

There are a million different strategies for how to draft, and there’s no one single perfect approach, but here are a few general tips to avoid some common mistakes:

Don’t take a quarterback in the first round

You might see that quarterbacks tend to score more points than other positions in fantasy, and think that means you should get the best quarterback as soon as you can. While it’s true that quarterbacks score more points than anyone else, the difference between the best quarterback and a middle-of-the-road quarterback is much less significant than the difference between a top wide receiver or running back and their average counterpart. This means that running backs and wide receivers are the players to go after in the first couple rounds, since there’s a much more significant drop-off after the best few are gone. If you‘re skeptical of this, just Google “positional scarcity” and a bunch of fantasy nerds will be happy to explain it in much greater depth.

Don’t take a kicker or defense until the last couple rounds

Similar to the above principle, it’s not worth taking a kicker or defense until the draft is almost over. This is because there isn’t a huge difference between the best defense and an average defense, and also because the defenses that are going to be good in any given year are notoriously hard to predict. Kickers, meanwhile, are almost entirely random.

Don’t avoid a player just because they’re on a bad NFL team

There are plenty of players who, for a number of possible reasons, will score a lot of fantasy points over the course of a season despite their team not winning many games. They might be the only bright spot on an otherwise dismal roster, and therefore get the ball a ton. They might be on a team with a good offense and a bad defense, which means they’ll still have plenty of opportunities to make plays. It’s a mistake to say “well, I can’t draft {player} because he’s on the {team you don’t like}!”

The regular season

Most leagues use head-to-head scoring, which means each week you’ll go up against one other player in a league, and whoever’s lineup scores more points over the course of the week will get a win on their record. The teams with the best record at the end of the season make the playoffs.

Scoring

Nearly everything the players on your team do over the course of an NFL game earns them points for the week. Scores update in real time, so you’re able to watch live NFL games and track the scores of the players involved using whatever platform your league runs on. Scoring systems vary from league to league, but the most common method breaks down like this (these are the default rules for leagues that run on Yahoo, which is my platform of choice; your league will likely be at least similar):

Passing: 1 point for every 25 yards thrown, 4 points for every touchdown thrown

1 point for every 25 yards thrown, 4 points for every touchdown thrown Receiving: 1 point for every 10 yards receiving, 6 points for every touchdown caught

1 point for every 10 yards receiving, 6 points for every touchdown caught Running the ball: 1 point for every 10 yards gained, 6 points for every touchdown scored

1 point for every 10 yards gained, 6 points for every touchdown scored Kicking: 3 points for every field goal under 40 yards, 4 points for every field goal between 40 and 50 yards, 5 points for every field goal over 50 yards, 1 point for every extra point

There are also some oopsies players can commit that will cause them to lose points, which include -1 point for throwing an interception and -2 points for losing a fumble.

Defensive scoring is a little more complicated. This is the default (again, these are the Yahoo standard points):

Sack: 1 point

1 point Interception, fumble recovery, safety, or blocked kick: 2 points

2 points Touchdown scored by the defense: 6 points

Defenses also earn points based on how many points they allow their real-life opponent to score, ranging from 10 points for a shutout to -4 points for giving up 35 or more real-life points.

Some leagues also play with what’s called PPR or Points Per Reception, meaning that a player earns one point whenever they catch the ball, in addition to any points for the yards gained by the catch. This rule became popular because in normal scoring, running backs tend to score more points than wide receivers, and are therefore more valuable. PPR serves to even the playing field between the two positions, but also makes specific players that tend to catch more passes more valuable. It also results in more fantasy points being scored overall, which makes games and matchups more exciting.

Setting your lineup

A typical week in the NFL has a game played Thursday night, all but one of the remaining games over the course of the day on Sunday, and the final game Monday night. Each week you’ll need to decide which of the players on your team you’re “starting”, which means the points they earn will go toward your total for the week, and which players you’re leaving on your bench, which means their points will not count. In some leagues, your entire lineup needs to be set before the Thursday game starts, while others will let you move players around until their individual games starts, at which point they will be locked for the week.

A lot of things could contribute to why you would want to start one player over another: maybe one of your best players gets injured and you need a player who isn’t as good to fill in, maybe you have two players who are around the same level of talent, but one is going up against a bad defense that has been giving up a lot of points to their position, or maybe one of your players is on “bye” (the one week every NFL team gets at some point between weeks 4 and 12 where they do not play a game) and won’t be scoring any points that week. There are always a million writers churning out new advice every week about why you should play this player over that player, but it’s ultimately up to you to decide who you think will score the most points.

Trades

The reality of fantasy is that you won’t end up with a team of excellent players at every single position. You might have a great wide receiver and a quarterback who lights it up every week, but one of your running backs can’t find the endzone; or you might have a tight end who scores a touchdown once a game, but your quarterback got hurt and his replacement won’t stop throwing interceptions. In these instances, there’s a good chance there’s someone in your league who has the opposite problem, and both of you can improve your teams by swapping some players.

Trades can happen at almost any time, up until a “trade deadline,” after which no further trading is allowed. Most leagues have some system of review wherein either the league votes to approve the trade, or the commissioner OK’s it to go through. There isn’t any perfect system for determining which player you should offer in a trade, or if a trade proposed to you is worth it, but a general rule of thumb is that the trade should, to some degree, improve both teams.

Also don’t be the person who constantly proposes ludicrously one-sided trades. Nobody likes that person.

Picking up players

There are 1696 players on NFL rosters at any given time during the regular season, and even in the biggest fantasy leagues fewer than 300 of those players will be drafted onto teams. The rest are “free agents,” which means any team in the league can pick them up by dropping an already-owned player. As the season progresses, there will inevitably be free agents you want to add to your roster. This could be because that free agent has been scoring tons of points and one of your own players has been blowing it, or because one of your players is out for the season with an injury and you need to replace them with the best available option, or because you traded more players than you got in return and you don’t want to leave a bench spot empty.

If your team is full, you’ll need to drop a player when you pick up a free agent. When players are dropped, they go on “waivers,” which means there is a period in which nobody can pick them up. This is so that everyone in the league has an opportunity to see who was dropped, and decide if they want to claim that player. There are a number of different methods leagues use to determine who gets a dropped player in the event that more than one team wants them, and it should be pretty clear which method your league is using. If nobody attempts to claim the player, they “clear” waivers and become a free agent, at which point any team can pick them up at any time.

Just like the choice of who to start or who to trade, there will be a million people constantly churning out advice about who you should pick up and who you should drop, and it’s ultimately your decision which players you want to switch out.

A note about injuries: American football is an absolutely brutal sport. In any given play there is a chance that any player involved could get seriously hurt. Every year almost 40% of NFL players will miss at least one game due to being injured. You should expect players on your team to get hurt. It happens to everyone, and accounting for it and dealing with it is part of fantasy. Also, NFL players are real people, so please don’t be the fantasy owner who responds to one of your players getting hurt by angrily tweeting at them. Nobody, nobody, nobody likes that person.

Playoffs

The NFL regular season is 17 weeks long, in which all 32 teams play 16 games, with their aforementioned bye week coming sometime between weeks 4 and 12. The length of a fantasy league’s regular season varies, but it is usually around 13 or 14 weeks, with the playoffs happening over the last few weeks of the regular season. Fantasy playoffs happen during the NFL regular season because not all NFL teams make the NFL playoffs, and if fantasy playoffs were happening then, many players on fantasy rosters would not play at all. My personal preference is to have the league championship on week 16 of the regular season, because by week 17 some NFL teams have already cemented their playoff spot and will rest their best players for the week.

It’s a great feeling if you’re lucky enough to make the playoffs. Most leagues use a single-elimination tournament, which means you’ll need to win every game once playoffs start in order to win the league. Otherwise, playoff games are identical to regular season games. If you win your league, be sure to rub it in your league-mates faces that they got bested by a rookie.

Glossary

Here are a few terms that you’ll probably hear at some point while playing fantasy, that I wish someone had explained to me the first year I played.

Sleeper: A player not many people are talking about, who has a lot of potential to be successful in the upcoming season compared to where they are drafted.

Flier: A low-risk pick in one of the last rounds, used on a player that has some potential to blow up, especially later in the season.

Handcuff: A backup player who does not play a lot, but will immediately become valuable if the starter on their team is injured. Most often a running back, you might see this in the context of “{Player B} is {Player A’s} handcuff, so if you draft {Player A}, try to also get {Player B} as an insurance policy.”

Bellcow: Also usually a running back, this is a player that is almost always on the field for their team, as opposed to a team that has a “rotation” of players at that position.

Floor and ceiling: A measurement of what you can expect from a player in a given game. Players with high floors can dependably put up a fair number of points every week, while players with low floors have the potential to score little-to-no points at all. Players with low ceilings aren’t likely to have a game where they score more than an average number of points, while players with high ceilings will occasionally go off and win you your matchup single-handedly.

Garbage time: The time in an NFL game at which the outcome is effectively decided, but the two teams still have to play out the remaining minutes. This can lead to teams taking out their star players to prevent injury, or playing softer on defense because they can safely give up some points. However, fantasy points count the same whether they are scored during garbage time or not, and some players are valuable in fantasy because they tend to score most of their points during garbage time.

Collusion: Two fantasy players working together for the improvement of only one of their teams. Examples of this include sharing bench space between teams, and trades that only benefit one of the two owners. Collusion is widely considered a form of cheating.

Breakouts and busts: Measurements of how well a player does compared to where they were drafted. Breakout players were drafted in the later rounds and become one of the highest scoring players at their position, while busts were drafted early and do not live up to their expectations. It’s easier said than done, but while drafting one should try to pick breakouts and avoid busts.