Daily Fantasy NFL Football

Fantasy NFL Football is a Fantasy Sport Favorite

Fantasy football is one of the games in fantasy sports which came about largely because of the Internet. This game is played not on a football field but in “league sites” in which participants (called "owners") are arranged into a league. The new Internet fantasy football sites are even making possible the playing of the game as a virtual event, but many still crave the excitement of being all together during a football season draft. So, likely league locations usually involve a restaurant, casino, or large meeting space where some fantasy football leagues conduct large, extravagant drafts that last a number of days.

The person who creates the league is called the fantasy football commissioner, and that person invites other owners of teams into his/her league. Each team drafts or acquires via auction a team of real-life American football players (as is true with other fantasy sports games) and then scores points based on those players' statistical on-the-field performances. A typical fantasy league will employ players from the famous football leagues, such as the NFL or from an NCAA football division. These actual football games have been previously recorded, statistics-wise, on the performances of the individual players, especially those who are outstanding performers in the game. The stats of these players are what the fantasy football team owners are interested in so they could form their own fantasy teams.
Leagues can be arranged in which the winner is the team with the most total points at the end of the fantasy football season (normally following immediately the regular football season). Or a league can have a head-to-head format (which mirrors the actual NFL) in which each team plays against a single opponent each week. Win-loss records determine league rankings at the end of the year.

History of Fantasy Football

The fantasy football game’s concept was originated in 1962 on the initiative of Bill Winkenbach, then a limited partner in the famed Oakland Raiders, with assistance from Bill Tunnell, the Raiders' public relations man, Scotty Stirling, the football beat writer from the Oakland Tribune, and George Ross, the Tribune's sports editor. The “fantasy” idea was born during a three-week road trip the Raiders took to the East Coast. Winkenbach and the others formed the idea during the trip, and upon their return home, formed the first fantasy football league. With the rise in the use of personal computers and especially with the coming of the Internet in the 1990s, the participation in and the popularity of fantasy football increased to the level of prominence that it holds today.

After Bill Winkenbach two people, Michael Rand and Joshua Schnell, are mostly responsible in spreading the fantasy football fever to many more Americans from the select few who started it in the 1960’s.

Fantasy Football Competition Formant:

The two main types of competition formats in fantasy football are: 1) Head-to-head, with weekly games played against specific opponents (much like in the NFL); and 2) the total points format, in which cumulative points during the season determine the winning team.
League Types:

Fantasy football leagues can consist of 4 to as many as 20 competing teams. There are three major league types – the redraft, "keeper" leagues, and dynasty leagues. In a redraft league, each owner starts with no players at the beginning of each season and he drafts an entire fantasy team only during that season. An owner in a keeper league retains a small number of players he owned during the previous season, eliminating these players from the new draft; while each owner in a dynasty league is allowed to retain as many players as desired from the previous season, with the draft encompassing only rookies and other players not already previously owned.
Other types of fantasy football leagues have surfaced recently giving entrepreneurs in the sport entertainment industry more opportunities to make money.

A new style of fantasy football leagues is modeled following the popular "survivor pool" or "knock out pool" style of weekly wagering in the NFL that allows each member of the pool of team owners to pick one NFL team to win each week, but he can only pick that team once during the year.

There are also the survivor fantasy leagues in which owners can draft a fresh team of seven players each week, with each player only available to each owner one week per year. This kind of fantasy football league places an emphasis on weekly match-ups.

A new type of league that allows for year-round fantasy football is called Simulation Football. Simulation Football is done on a computer to simulate the games with simulated players, instead of relying on the NFL for its players and stats. The most basic type is a GM league, where the player has to put together a team, and the computer does most of the work. Another version of simulation football is called a "Create-a-Player" or CAP league. In a CAP league, the top players compete for the chance to be a GM and they assemble together a team using players that are created by other people. There are different types of scoring in determining who is a "top player" but the owners are charged with making their player as good as possible using the league's scoring system.

Another recent development in fantasy football is the coming of the RotoHog-style budget-based high-roster-turnover game. The new RotoHog game provides traditional points-based competition, while providing at the same time a fantasy sports stock simulation-type market for trading players. In RotoHog, managers are required to field a roster of players that will score the most points in any given week, but they also have the ability to trade any player at any time in a market with continuously moving player prices.

The popularity of fantasy football has spread into the campuses where Fantasy College Football is gaining in popularity as diehard fantasy players among the non-athletic students, and college football fanatics, combine two of their favorite passions into one. With the Internet now, fantasy football has made game of football very much a part of American culture, much more than what it was before.