I have never played fantasy football, and don't really have a clue how to get started. Am I welcome?
Yes, join Conference 3. 115622 and jimrob are the login details.
All you do is draft players, then drop them if they suck and replace them with ones that don't suck. You can also try to put players in if they are facing a favorable matchup or bench them if they don't-- but that's a lot of effort and isn't required. Mostly, you'll end up doing well if the players you draft do well. It's that simple.
Yahoo! has a pre-draft ranking you can set up to make drafting easier. They already have all the players ranked according to their experts, but you can decide yourself how some players are ranked in your personal ranking for your team (you also might want to choose players just because they are on your favorite team or whatever). You can rank up to 150 players I think.The way Fantasy Football works is that you try to choose a team of offensive all-stars (to whatever extent you can) and then you choose one team to represent your defense. Then you cut players who suck as the season goes along and replace them with better players. You make trades to upgrade, too. And you take players off the bench if they have a more favorable matchup than your starter and thus send your starter to the bench (so if your starting RB is playing the best rushing defensive team and your bench RB is playing the worst, you might opt to move your starter to the bench). You set your match-ups before the games.
In the live draft, Yahoo! will set the draft order randomly. Then you draft one player each round as your turn comes up. It doubles back on itself each round-- so the first person to pick in Round 1, chooses last in Round 2 and first in Round 3. I think you have like 3-5 minutes or so to choose your player for that round, then you just wait until it's your turn again. The draft room has a chat feature so you can talk with the other owners about their picks. If you don't manually choose a player to draft, Yahoo! will auto-pick for you based on your pre-draft rankings and then based on its own rankings-- all confined by your needs (if you have all your RB spots, no other RBs will be chosen until you are populating your bench). The hard part is drafting the final few rounds where it's a crapshoot. There's no real strategy there. You might just pick guys you like personally because they are on your favorite team and you hope your team and they do well this season.
You'll draft 15 players. You have 9 required slots and 6 bench slots. The 9 required slots have to be of a certain position (QB, RB, WR, DEF, K, TE) and the bench slots can be anything you want. One thing to keep an eye on are the "By-week" displays for the players you draft. Of course, when your player (or team in the case of DEF) is on vacation for a week, you don't get fantasy points. You don't want to draft two TEs for example who have a by-week the same week because you are just forfeiting that stat for that week-- unless the players are both just so dominant and you think it's beneficial to have both on your team because you expect one to miss time due to an injury and you want the best possible back-up. If you look up, you'll see that you have 6 positions and 6 bench slots. You'll want to either draft one position for each slot (making sure the by-week is covered) or draft best available and trade for what you need when you need it-- so if you have a by week late in the season, maybe it makes sense to draft two great players with the same position and same by-week (as insurance and to give you more lineup options week to week) and then just cross that by-week bridge later after you've gotten benefit of your quality bench player.