Basic rules and how to get started with ESPN Fantasy Football

okay there's a lot of resources out there on how to play Fantasy Football but I figured I would try to um condense it down in a very comprehensive way for people who have never played before and make it specific to the ESPN app that we're using okay so so some basic facts about fantasy football um it's called fantasy football because you are picking players usually from different teams um as a league view so it doesn't really matter like what team they're on on your team will have players from different teams um I'm using the desktop app and interface right now but the phone app is really uh intuitive and very easy to use as well it looks like this um you have your different tabs roster matchup players league but for the purpose of being able to actually show you the some functionality I'm going to stick to the desktop app so for the desktop app at the top you'll see those same important tabs that I just showed you on the phone app view my team the league View and also available players so right now I'm in the main page for the amazy fantasy football league um here when after we start and after we've drafted and everything once the teams start playing it'll show matchups of the week so every week you're going to go against somebody else in our league it's a really fun opportunity to be able to talk some smack with your co-workers make some bets whatever you want to do um or just have fun of course uh and you will see you can see the different members of The League you can also look at different people's rosters and then you can see the matchups of that week now in terms of your own team you're going to be monitoring your team if if you're playing correctly you should be checking week after week um every week you want to set you'll hear the term set your lineup um it means making sure that you have starters all in position if there's an empty position that line will score zero and that could influence your team to lose that week um so you'll want to set your lineup and check that everybody who's starting is actually playing that week an important area for this is the status area right here it will show for each of your players if they're playing or not um and there will be two reasons why they wouldn't be playing that I can think of first and foremost is if they're injured that week or if they're be resting that week because of an injury it'll say might be out or it'll say definitely out if it has an o here that means they're out for that week that means you should Swap this person out for someone on your bench so that's what it means to set your lineup for that week um in American football teams will have by weeks so let's say my quarterback is on the Patriots um and they have a bye a bye is essentially an off week they Ed tend to have one a season I think each team will so when the Patriots have a byee I need to make sure that I switch out my quarterback that week for someone on the bench or someone from the available list of players the two other most important areas that you'll want to focus on are the projected score um tab here section here it'll show based on who that player is actually playing against that week and how tough of a matchup they have in the real NFL it'll show what they what ESPN using its logarithms and such projects that player to score this is helpful because for example let's say your starting quarterback tends to be really great um but let's say they're against the best team in the league that week they might be projected to be lower than the quarterback that you have on your bench who might be playing a very easy team that week so when you're setting your lineup for that week these are some things that you want to pay attention to and look at um and I'll show you the phone view so once we get everything situated you'll have your matchup for the week this is going to be this middle graphic here so let's say on the left will be my team and let's say I'm playing Rolando that week it'll show Rolando's team on the right the blue numbers here are going to be your projected score so that's the projected number based on those logarithms um and then as soon as a player actually plays that can be Thursday night game by the way Thursday night is going to be the first game of the week so you want to make sure if you have a player on Thursday uh that they're either in or out but that's a little more complicated but anyway back to this match up here here once the scores once you have a bold white score that means that they've played and this bold white score is what they actually ended up scoring so even though uh the app will provide you know a projection of what the score and the outcome will be um the actual outcome is never actually that way so you could be projected to win and end up losing and uh vice versa now once we draft you can also change your team name I did not choose the team name Laura's lucrative team that was just assigned as soon as I joined but you can change all of these settings um oftentimes what people do is after they pick and draft their team they'll make their team name something fun around you know a play with words based off of a player name on their team but you can make it whatever you want of course um and then the next category is drafting so right now my roster is empty how do we draft so drafting is going to be a time where the commissioner Rolando will set a draft time and you can either participate or you can set to autodraft um which means the computer will draft for you um it is usually suggested to be present and do your draft manually as part of the draft everybody will get a different um draft position you know 1st through 10th and it's usually a snake draft so what that means is the first person will go all the way to the 10th person and then that would be the first round of the draft and in each round each team gets one pick and then the second round of the draft would actually start at the 10th person and work its way back down to the first person and then it'll go first person to 10th and then 10th to first and that's how the snake draft works now drafting strategy um is important based on the amount of points different positions get and how much influence that can have on whether you win or not um this is where it can get a little bit complicated and it's nice to use different tools to figure out what order to draft in uh so for example you'll want to draft a running back or a wide receiver first because they could be the most influential and then you want to save things like your quarterback and your tight end for like the middle of the draft and then this is defense and kicker these are usually the least influential so those aren't really too important to pick in the beginning of the draft now some third party tools that you can use first and foremost very basic chat GPT if you want to figure out you know what position order should I draft in fantasy football um this is a very comprehensive way to understand which way to go otherwise there are and I'll send you guys all of these links there are other strategies you know fantasy blogs for example this is a strategy table um these are you know analysis and like conditional tables because people will pick the best players already and you don't know who's going to be available but what they suggest is for Rounds 1 two three focus on a running back and a wide receiver you can do one running back two wide receivers you can do two running back one R receiver if you want to use other strategies these are also other options but I would say these first two are the most common ones to use for rounds four to six you're going to want to pick your Flex position the flex can be a tight end a wide receiver or a running back so it just kind of gives you a flexible offensive spot there then you also want to pick a tight end or a quarterback and then for round seven and nine it's always good to have some backup ones so it suggests that you still pick a wide receiver running back tight Ender quarterback because again defense kickers you can just add that in later and it they're really hard to predict um for example the bills can have can score 45 points which is a lot one week and then they could score negative3 the next week because they didn't stop the ball at all and um yeah allowed to points to be scored now now that you know what order positions you should pick how do you know which players to pick um to be honest I've been playing fantasy football for years and I still don't know the players well so I use tools like this here um which I will also link to you guys each pick each um pick that you get in the draft gives you around like a minute and a half so you can easily go look at these charts so let's say for example this table suggests that I pick a a running back first I can go to this table click on running back the relative position here and it will automatically sort them based on rank so let's say you're picking fifth in the draft but you want to pick a running back first but let's say the top five are already picked you can cross check that with the draft that you're looking at on your phone or in another window and you can pick the next available um running back based on this chart um on ESPN it will also in the draft view I can't show you that right now but in the draft view it will show you the uh a live Dynamic ranking of the next available the players that are still available that haven't been picked in your draft yet um and you can see that at any time anyway so let's say it's not a draft and it's the middle of the week and you need to add a different wide receiver or your quarterback got hurt and you need to add another quarterback in addition to what's on your bench you can at any point go to the players tab on your app or the desktop app you can sort you can pick based on the position you can sort based on what the projected score is which would generally show you you know the best at the top and it'll show you if it's available or if they're already on someone's team if they're already on someone else's team you can offer a trade um but otherwise you can't pick them so you can only pick players that are available so you can use those tools you can use this tool um and then at the end they even have a category for Flex oh Flex includes the quarterbacks too I forgot about that now whatever you're drafting you want to make sure that you don't just fill your starters you want to make sure that you fill your bench too and that be reflective of the same positions of your starters so for example um obviously I have a quarterback on my starting lineup I want to also have a quarterback on my bench because if it's that quarterback's you know bye or if they get hurt I need to have somebody to still put in the slot otherwise they will score zero points here's the players view from the app and when you're setting your lineup if you need a different player you go to the players view you see who's available you can sort by projected and pick up that player and then once our team gets going here is the league view on the app um this is where you'll see the league standings for everybody you can see who's winning you can see the scoreboard and see who's winning that current week um you can see the schedule so you can see uh you know when you're playing whoever and it'll probably match us up to play each other probably a couple of times throughout the season um and yeah that's the most important basics of using the app and fantasy football in general um after the regular season there's playoffs and then then finals and we can either pick you know a reward or a consequence for the loser or we can just play for fun