Playing fantasy football for the first time is exciting and new, but you should be prepared for the challenges that await you. Fantasy sports, of any sort, can be difficult. It doesn’t matter if you are playing with a bunch of friends, or in an ultra competitive league, fantasy sports, and especially fantasy football, are unpredictable and tough to master. But, that’s part of the fun of it all. If it was easy, then it wouldn’t be worthwhile. Fantasy football’s appeal is that only a small number of people can be profitable playing it. Our goal is to help you make that cut so that you can enjoy the fun, while still making money playing.
Importance of Being a Fan
Being a fan is a huge part of your success in fantasy football. This isn’t something that you can just try once and be great at. It’s something that can take years and year of practice to master, and even then, there will be plenty of flukes along the way that sidetrack you. That’s when being a true football fan will help you. It gives you an incentive to keep going when things are not going your way. This will happen once in a while. When you love the sport, you have a reason to keep playing fantasy games until you get through the rough patches.
These can be very educational periods of time. You can cross off a whole lot of strategies that won’t work for you during this time. You can also use it to study more and play less. Reading publications, both in print and online, that deal with fantasy drafts can help you to become more adept at looking past what you see on the field, and looking at who is producing the numbers that will actually help you.
Importance of Stats
Statistics are what drive your fantasy points upward. If you don’t understand how to decipher them, you will never be able to maximize your potential. By looking at stats, taking the major principles away from them and then choosing the players that will help you the most, you can become a great fantasy manager. But, to be the best fantasy manager in your league, you want to go a step further. You want to be able to look at the situational statistics, see which players will be most successful on any given day, and put them into play. It doesn’t matter if you are playing in a season long league with a few different players to choose from on your roster, or if you are in a daily fantasy football league and you have everyone playing that weekend to draft from, you can apply this concept on some level. Statistics are just a bunch of numbers and they can be tough to understand at first in terms of results, but they are the best thing out there to help you win your contests.
Because really, stats do not lead to future results. Stats just show what a player did in the past. It’s when a player can apply those stats to current situations that the numbers begin to make sense. The only real way to see tangible results when it comes to your fantasy performance is to keep playing and apply your knowledge of statistics over a period of time. There will be ups and downs, but that’s why being a fan helps. You already love the game, and you want to get better. The drive to be great is in place, and now you get to implement it. That’s all part of the fun that fantasy football brings with it.