Lessons from my First Fantasy Football Experience

This football season I decided it was finally time to see what all the hype was about and join a fantasy football league. Because I never believe in doing anything halfway, I joined two leagues. I had a team in a work league and one is a blogger league hosted by Sarah. Now that football season is over I'm ready to share my thoughts on the experience.

The first lesson I learned was that having two teams was a little ambitious. Luckily some of my players overlapped, but for the most part they did not. That meant having to pay a lot more attention to all the games every week. I needed to keep better track of bye weeks and injuries across the league vs being able to focus on just a few professional teams. Having two teams you'd think my odds of winning would increase, but that wasn't the case. It seemed I had the exact opposite result. At the beginning of the season my two quarterbacks were Drew Brees and Ben Roethlisberger; if you remember these two men both went out with injuries in the same week.

The next lesson I learned is that sometimes you just have to go with the flow. When it was draft day nothing went like expected. I'd spent all this time researching best strategies for people drafting in my position but when it was my turn the players left standing looked nothing like expected. People were drafting from all over the place, selecting personal favorites over high ranks. It made the whole process very stressful, especially for someone with a limited NFL knowledge/favorites.

The final lesson I learned is that you have to remember it's all just a game. As I mentioned above I had one week when both my starting quarterbacks went out. I had another week where the league's high scoring player was sitting on my bench. Another when my opponent had no quarterback or defense on their starting roster and still lost. Obviously I would have preferred to avoid all these situations, at the end of the day none of it really mattered because it was just a game for fun.

Playing fantasy football was an item from my 100 in 1001 list that was I glad to mark off. Overall I'd say my first fantasy experience was positive and I plan to pay again next year!