Get your game together: the definitive guide to starting an AFL fantasy football league
Sean Chaffin
Tuesday February 6, 2007
But how to get started? I have been there before and have some hints and tips to get that adrenaline pumping and trash talk underway. Some buddies and I have had an NFL fantasy league for seven years, complete with traveling trophy, full draft weekend, all-defense “side-bet” league, and even a league newsletter. Three years ago, I tried to coax some team owners into starting an AFL fantasy league. With only three or four takers, that idea went by the wayside. I tried again in 2006, and lo and behold we had a new six-man league.
Despite attending many Desperados games, our knowledge of all the AFL players and teams was sparse. “But I don’t know anything about the league or the players,” was the constant refrain. As commissioner, I was determined to change that. After our initial draft, team owners began to learn the rules and players, and the competitive juices began to flow. Now, here we are in Year 2 of our league and have increased to eight owners and bumped our league fee from $25 to $40. Below is a guide on how to get started and plan your league. A little planning and creativity can go a long way.
CHOOSING A FANTASY SITE
There are limited sites devoted to fantasy football, but there are some nice options out there. ArenaFan.com and GoalLineSoftware.com both offer nice fantasy football games. Our league uses Goal Line and all our owners have been very pleased. It is a great site with lots of customized features and customized scoring for your own league. The site allows free agency, keeps all-time team records, and can do just about anything you can do on any of the “major” fantasy football sites. The site, which charges $50 per league, has doubled its number of AFL leagues this year and also builds sites for arenafootball2, lacrosse, Canadian football, and college football.
ArenaFan.com offers two games for fantasy players. Quickplay, a free game, allows you to choose from any player in the league to fill your roster without the inconvenience and frustration of losing your favorite players in a draft. You also have the ability to establish your own mini-leagues to compete with friends and other Arenafan users. Arena Fan-tasy Football Deluxe League Play is a more traditional fantasy football game allowing users to form eight-team leagues, conduct a league draft, trades, waivers, and more. This game starts in the second week of the season, with playoffs in weeks 15 and 16. The deluxe game costs $6.99 per team.
With the AFL’s recent five-year multi-media agreement with ESPN, the network is also rumored to be offering some sort of fantasy product. However, those plans have not yet been announced.
DRAFT DAY
Pick a place and make an event out of it. We hold ours at a sports bar or a team owner’s place. We consume some adult beverages, spend an hour or two drafting our players, and them maybe play some poker for a few hours. The point is to make it a fun event that owners look forward to each year. For our NFL league, we go full-throttle and make a whole weekend out of it. Our defensive league draft is on Friday followed by a poker tournament, a golf best-ball tournament on Saturday, a dip in the pool to beat the Texas heat in the afternoon, and the big draft on Saturday night, followed by a Madden football tournament and some more poker. This has become such a big event some owners who have moved to other locales make the trip from Austin, Houston, and even fly in from Boston. While our AFL draft may be a little less gung ho, we plan to make it a fun night out.
LEAGUE DRAFT GUIDE
While the AFL continues to grow, most of your league owners will probably know little about the players and teams. To remedy the situation, I built each owner a draft guide, complete with statistics, AFL and fantasy league schedules, fantasy previews and rankings, fantasy league rules, and anything else I think might be of use. All this can be scoured from the Web. I also include a Helpful Hints letter as the first page in each guide, which details on helpful Internet resources (more on this below) and where to watch the games on TV. I have also created draft guides for Year 2.
RESOURCES
The number of sites catering to AFL fans and AFL fantasy football continues to grow. Here is what I put on our helpful hints page to help our league’s team owners:
ArenaFootball.com – Official league site. Lots of news and info. Updated more frequently during the season.
ArenaFan.com – Better news site than AFL.com. Offer lots of news, stats, columns, etc. Also offers an eight-player stat tracker I recommend everyone sign up and use. It is free and helps keep track of statistics during the season. Interesting message boards.
ArenaFootballOnline.com – Awesome arena fantasy football site! Sit and start, weekly reviews and previews, and more. This is a great site to see each week. Includes daily player moves and news and weekly injury reports. Will also provide player updates for GoalLineSoftware.com fantasy football and weekly fantasy football contributions to ArenaFootballNetwork.com.
OurSportsCentral.com – A very good site for AFL news and information. I just found this site this year. Not sure how long they have been around, but I have been very impressed.
ArenaFootballNetwork.com – Good news site. Fairly new, but with lots of good information.
RotoWorld.com – Provides some AFL information, previews, and some player updates.
CBSSportsline.com, FoxSports.com – Offer news and stats of AFL action.
ESPN.com – Should have a nice amount of AFL info when season gets closer.
ROSTER/LINEUPS, SCORING
You may want to include this information in your draft guides, so everyone will know what to expect. One of the differences in NFL and AFL fantasy football is the scoring systems usually used. It is a different challenge, with all the scoring usually focused on the WRs and QBs. Running games are virtually non-existent. How you choose to create your roster is up to you and you can tweak it each year.
Scoring will differ from league to league, but here is an example of how our league scores. This year, our owners will be able to start 10 players each week, from a total roster size of 16, including: 1 QB, 3 WRs, 1 FB, 1 PK, 2 OL/DL/TEs, and 2 DBS. We opted not to have a team defense and instead added an extra DB and OL/DL/TE to have a kind of mini-defense this year to get more scoring from those positions. Here is a basic idea for some of our scoring: Quarterbacks mostly score passing (50 yards = 1 point) and TDs (3 points). Receiving is 1 point for every 25 yards and TDs count 6 points receiving or rushing. Rushers earn 1 point for every 4 yards rushing. Interceptions and fumbles are a -2. Defensively, catching an interception, a safety, or fumble recovery are a +2. A sack is +3. There are more scoring stats, but I will spare you every detail. Email me if you wish for our complete rules and scoring, we modified another league’s rules to fit our own, and I suggest you do the same.
PLAYOFFS, SCHEDULE
This is up to you as commissioner and depends on your number of teams. Last season, we only had six teams, so the top four teams squared off in two weeks of standard playoffs for the championship. This year, with eight teams, we divided the league into Thunder and Lightning Divisions. Six teams make the playoffs (we will keep this format if we go to 10 teams next year) and the division winners get a first-round bye. With three weeks of playoffs, we end our regular season in Week 13, allowing our playoffs to end in Week 16, so no one has to worry about a team pulling starters late in the season.
Regular season schedules are pretty easy to devise. Our schedule this year has each team playing eight division games and five non-division. I made sure the last two games of the regular season are division games, hoping to ensure some late-season playoff jockeying.
Well there you have it – just about everything I can think of to get your arena fantasy league off and running. The more you put into it, the better your league will be. Have fun, and if one of my league’s owners is reading this – the Devastating Chicken Bears are ready to win the title again in ’07!
Sean Chaffin is a graduate of Texas A&M University and an AFL, NFL, and fantasy football fan living in Rockwall, Texas. He owned The Rockwall Express newspaper for five years and worked for several other newspapers in the Dallas area. He is now an English as a Second Language teacher in the Dallas area.
