How to Make a Fantasy Football Draft

Gene Wang explains how to play fantasy football and discusses drafting a fantasy football team.

monkeysee.com See how the experts do it. Hi I’m Gene Wang Fantasy Football Writer for the Washington Post and washingtonpost.com welcome to my video on how to play fantasy football. In this segment I’m going to show you how to draft a team. Now to draft a team first you got to do a couple of things. First of you got to have to determine the draft order now this could be done in a couple of ways. You could a website of your choosing or randomly select it or you could just pick out the names out of the hat. Now once you determined what the draft order is going to be, the next thing you got to want to do is to figure out how many players at which position you’re going to want for each team. Generally, most leagues are set up with 1 quarterback, 2 running backs 2 wide receivers a tight end, a kicker and a defense/special teams. So that’s 8 starting positions. So drafts can be anywhere from 14 to 16 rounds generally depending on how many back ups you want to have. If you have 6 back ups you’re going to have a 14 round draft. If you’re going to have eight backups and 8 starters you’re going to want to have a 16 round draft. Now the next piece of information you’re going to need is the best strategy when drafting a team. Now this is a fantasy debate you could have forever depending on who you ask. Some people choose a draft running backs first because you got to start two running backs and you got to have two, you want to ideally have two very, very good running backs at that there so you can count on every week. But some people think, you know what I can get a running back later in the draft so I’m going to draft the highest rate of quarterback over a running back. Now others simply pick the best player available at that position regardless of the position so you know there’s no set strategy that works my preference is drafting the running backs first because I think that’s the most important position of fantasy football. Now the trend these days is to draft you know wide receiver or quarterback instead of a running back but I’m what you would call an old school fantasy football guy and I’ve always stuck to my guns about drafting running backs first and it has helped me win a lot of league so If you want my advise that’s the direction I would go. Now once you’ve drafted your team, you’re all set and ready to play. This is the most fun part about fantasy football setting your line up each week and now you are going to determine which players are going to help you win against your opponent and that’s going to be based on obviously he’s individual performance, he’s trends and also largely on match ups. That’s one of the most important things of fantasy football choosing which player to start against a defense that he’s going to have success against. That’s when we’re showing my next video segment.