Fantasy Football 101

... or, Introduction to Fantasy Football.  (Whichever is more acceptable to our new search engine overloards.)

With the Premier League season set to kick off tomorrow, Spurs/Everton notwithstanding, a lot of us are head down, surfing the web for news, chopping and changing our team line-ups, and basically doing everything we can to be ready.  Those of us who have been playing the game for a while sometimes forget about someone who is new to fantasy football or who are asking themselves, "How do I play fantasy football?"  I think with ESPN and Fox Soccer covering the sport and raising its profile here in the United States, there are a lot of Americans asking that question.

So for you, the newbie fantasy manager, I present our two-part introduction to fantasy Premier League.  This is especially relevant to the Yahoo! Fantasy Football game, but the measures and guidelines are relevant across all competitions.

• The Rules. Here is the latest incarnation of this post, written two years ago so forgive some of the outdated references.  If you are interested, here is the original incarnation.  This post will give you my fantasy football strategy advice.  This is pretty big-picture stuff, and especially relevant to the Yahoo! Fantasy Football game's unique scoring system. 
• Mo Rules. This post is Neal's breakdown of a top-10 fantasy team over the course of yet another successful seasaon.  The analysis is a little more detailed, and I think adds some nuance to the broader advice given above.

Some other quick resources would include:

• Complete, club-by-club season previews
• Focused look at the Premier League's opening weekend, in two parts,
  • Part 1, a look at the schedules and a big announcement, and
  • Part 2, player picks
• "Who is K2?", our (hopefully) handy guide to the nicknames and jargon we've established on the blog after writing about fantasy and the Premier League for seven years.

Whatever your level, good luck this season. Don't hesitate to post questions in the comments, or over in the Facebook group (of which you should become a fan).

Mo Rules

I'm sure you have all read Jeremy's seminal post on the set of rules that we here at the blog tend to adhere to in guiding our picks throughout the season (and seasons).  [If you haven't, here's the link]  The problem is that for season after season Jeremy and I have both been very good at the Yahoo! game but neither of us have ever really reached the highest of heights - finishing in the single digits.  In an effort to do what Arsene Wenger seems unwilling to do, learn from past mistakes, I embarked on a bit of a research project as the season came to a close. 

With a Saturday morning available without matches to focus on, I compiled the week-to-week activities of our favorite blog ringer Mo [Team Name = Egypt] who finished 7th overall in an effort to figure out what he is doing differently than I am doing (and recommending).  The answers certainly challenged a few of the preconceived notions I had about how to succeed in the game.  They also convinced me that I have not gone far enough in exploiting some of the tendencies that I DO try to exploit (and pass along) as part of building my team. 

With that introduction, and apologies to Mo who doesn't know that I've been working on this, here are the things I've learned from going over how he assembled his team over the past season.  I'm not saying that this is the ONLY way to win and it may be that it isn't always a winning strategy.  Mo has consistently been very good at the game though so we should all learn the lessons that he has to teach.