Tag Archives: watching sports

Girl, What’s Your Fan-ta-ta-sy? An Introduction to Fantasy Football

January 13, 2014 Alyssa Kurtzman 1 Comment

In November, the refresh button on my iPhone never sees more action than it does on Sundays, which can only mean one thing: I have a fantasy football team, and it’s almost playoff time, bitches.

I grew up watching (and enjoying) football in a Giants-loyal family. Even when I was living abroad, I would stay up until 2:30 am to watch the Sunday afternoon games—although I drew the line at the 8 pm games. In college, I agreed to join a friend’s fantasy football team, but I mostly forgot about it, and by mid-season, I had conceded the bottom position for my team, the New York Sandwiches.

Let’s briefly pause and try and define the complex she-beast of a hobby that is Fantasy Football. And by that I mean let’s all visit its Wikipedia page, which concisely defines FF as “an interactive competition in which users compete against each other as general managers of virtual teams built from real [NFL] players.” Essentially, in a private league of usually 10-14ish people, each participant, or “owner,” builds a team of NFL players, whose real-life performances on a given Football Sunday (or Thursday night, or Monday night) are converted using a standardized scoring system into Fantasy points for the Fantasy Team that that player inhabits. Players from your FF “team” can be from any real NFL team—say, a wide receiver from the Buffalo Bills, another from the New England Patriots, a tight end from the New York Jets, and the quarterback of the Oakland Raiders. Each league’s draft takes place right before the NFL’s regular season commences, and the season goes until Week 16 of the NFL season. Every weekend, the scores of all the football players in a FF team add up to that owner’s total for the week. These made-up Fantasy teams exist only in their designated league, which could be comprised of friends, coworkers, acquaintances who were looking for extra members, or complete randos. More explanation below—please stick with me on this; I swear it’s fun.

After that losing Fantasy season in college, I kind of gave it up on the grounds that it was too time-consuming and that I would never remember to set my team every week. But earlier this fall, my cousin emailed me to ask if I would be interested in joining her friend’s league. The buy-in was $10, she said, and the draft was that night. After some deliberation, mostly about what clever team name I would choose, I agreed; the buy-in was low, and it would give me something to do while my boyfriend was meticulously honing his own Fantasy team. If you’ve had the good fortune of never sitting through a Fantasy draft, I’ll explain: like the NFL draft (minus the zillions of dollars, minus the suits and yammering commentators, plus a congealing Lean Cuisine on your kitchen table), each participant (AKA owner) takes turns selecting a football player for sixteen rounds, eventually filling each teams’ sixteen slots.

Offensive players are the only ones who count individually in most Fantasy Football leagues (sorry, Clay Matthews). Running backs (who run the ball down the field), wide receivers (who catch the ball, often in spectacular fashion), tight ends (who double as blocker/smashers and ball catchers), quarterbacks (who throw the ball) and kickers (the white guys) earn Fantasy points by either gaining yards or scoring points. Additionally, each NFL team’s entire defense fills one slot, losing Fantasy points for touchdowns scored by the other team and gaining them for scoring points in plays like a “pick-six,” which is that thing you do when you’re really hungry and a full tray of hors d’oeuvres passes by.

Every week, you play one quarterback, three wide receivers (WR), two running backs (RB), one tight end (TE), one kicker, one defense, and one “flex” slot, which you can fill with either a WR, RB, or a TE. Before that week’s football starts, you shift around those slots with your sixteen players depending on who’s hot, who has a bye-week, who’s injured, who’s on a sucking streak, etc. Then you go head-to-head with another owner and their team. To be clear, unless some of your players happen to be playing some of the other team’s players that weekend, your teams will have no direct interaction with each other, à la some kind of Mortal Kombat-esque duel arena. In real life, these football players do not care about your Fantasy team. Another factor to consider is whom each player is going up against; for example, if you have a WR like Antonio Brown who typically puts up high numbers but this Sunday is going up against formidable dreamboat Joe Haden of the Cleveland Browns, you can expect that his numbers will probably be lower than average, and you might swap him out for a less reliable receiver—say, Alshon Jeffrey, who plays for the Chicago Bears and, omg, was born in the nineties. Throughout the season, you can also trade players with other teams and “sign” unsigned players by dropping one of your own. After a season’s worth of matches, you stand to win whatever pot has been determined by the league, usually ranging from a hundred dollars to a few thousand.

Here’s how a typical Sunday goes for an active Fantasy Football participant: around noon, you do one last check of your players on your FF app or on the league’s host site (typically ESPN, CBS Sports or Yahoo!), making sure the injury statuses haven’t changed, taking into account that some of your players may have played on Thursday and their positions (either benched or active to score Fantasy points) are unchangeable. Then before you can say “pass the nachos,” the 1 o’clock games begin, then the 4 o’clocks, then the 8 o’clocks, and suddenly it’s nighttime and you wonder what kind of contribution you could have made to society if football Sunday didn’t exist.

How frequently you check your Fantasy scores depends weekly on the company you keep. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for the universe, I generally watch football with other Fantasy-ers, so we all spend the day continually shifting our gaze between the wall-mounted TV screens and the live-updating Fantasy phone apps in our hands until our necks are sore and our thumbs are bleeding.

For the record, my team name is Nerds (I gave up on the clever thing), I stand to win about $100, and at the time this article is being written, I am in second place, having been recently knocked out of the top spot by a Wes Welker ankle injury and an unforeseen 30+point performance by the normally ‘meh’ Tayvon Austin. My quarterback Robert Griffin III (RG3) is prone to injury, but his numbers have been mostly good. While pretending not to care about competitive hobbies like these is generally my M.O., secretly I really, really want to win.

FANTASY FOOTBALL PLAYOFFS UPDATE:

When my team entered the three-week Fantasy playoffs, I won the first two rounds handily, thanks to a well-timed pickup of hotshot Eagles quarterback Nick Foles. But, sadly, I was just barely beaten in Week 16, AKA Fantasy Super Bowl Week, by one stupid running back in the very last football game of the weekend. And for those of you who still don’t think that Fantasy Football can be thrilling, consider that I was one (dropped) Josh Gordon touchdown pass away from taking the whole damn thing. My second-place winnings were $20, which makes a total condolence profit of $10. Alas.

Nevertheless, I am hooked. Despite way too many hours squandered on stat-crunching, this new convert will see you next year, Fantasy Football. And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go buy a book.

P.S. If you’re reading this in late-summer 2014, you’re just in time to sign up for a league! (Also: Did American Hustle win the Best Picture Oscar? Are Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un still friends? Who’s the President?) Here are some links for creating a FF league or joining an existing one:

ESPN Fantasy Football
CBS Sports Fantasy Football
Yahoo! Fantasy Football

See you on the field!! And by that I mean the Internet.

Photo by Alyssa Kurtzman

Sports

How Not to Sound like an Idiot: Watching Sports

May 15, 2013 Kelly Danver 1 Comment

Sports and sports fandoms have existed since ancient times. We, as a society, love to gather with like-minded people and talk about what we love and, for a lot of us that includes “The Game.”

So what do you do if you know someone who loves to watch and talk about sports, but you have no clue what they are talking about? Well, fear not: here are the basics of three popular sports to help you navigate your way through the top major U.S. sporting events of the year: the Super Bowl, the World Series, and March Madness.

Football: the Super Bowl

American football spawned from the game rugby (if you ever watch the two, they look pretty similar). The basic idea of football is to get the ball down the field to the end zone to score a touchdown. Play is divided into four quarters, each 15 minutes long. There is an offensive side (the one who has the ball) and a defensive side (the one who is trying to get the ball).

The offensive side has four attempts (called downs) to move the ball ten yards down the field (the field is 120 yards), or else they have to give the ball to the defensive side. The offensive side can do this a number of ways by running or throwing the ball to another player further down the field. The plays are counted by calling them the 1^st down, 2^nd down, 3^rd down, and 4^th down. Often, if the offensive team has not been able to reach a new “1^st down” (by moving the ball ten yards in their four attempts) they will punt the ball (by kicking it down field) to the other team on their 4^th down. This avoids a turnover (where the other team gets the ball). Turnovers can also happen if an offensive player fumbles (drops the ball and it is retrieved by a defensive player) or if a defensive player intercepts (catches the ball during a pass intended for an offensive player).

A touchdown (when the ball crosses into the end zone during a down) is worth six points. The scoring team then has an opportunity to score an extra point via a field goal (a kick in between the U-shaped posts) or a two-point conversion (another touchdown, but starting really close to the end zone). The offensive team can also choose to kick a field goal during the 4^th down, instead of punting back to the defense or running a touchdown. If successful, this play will earn them three points.

Professional teams usually score around 15 to 20 points per game, but it can range anywhere from zero to 50 points each.

Basketball: March Madness

The basic idea of basketball is to get the ball down the court to score a basket in the net. Basketball is a fairly fast-moving game and the rules are different between an NBA (National Basketball Association) game or an NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) game. Since March Madness is, in my opinion, a bigger deal than the NBA Finals, let’s focus on NCAA regulation rules.

An NCAA game is divided into two halves, each 20 minutes long. Much like football, the offense has the ball and the defense is trying to get the ball. The offense is given 35 seconds to shoot a basket or 10 seconds to move the ball past the half-court line—or else the ball is returned to the defense. This countdown begins at the beginning of each half and is restarted automatically after each basket is scored, (you can see this countdown timer on the scoreboard, usually above the score count). Each basket is worth two points unless the shooter gets a basket at or behind the three-point line, which earns them three points.

Professional teams usually score between 80 to 100 points a game.

Baseball: the World Series

Baseball is a slower-paced sport, and can sometimes seem boring if there isn’t a lot of action. The field is called a baseball diamond and has four bases: home plate, first base, second base, and third base. (Hello, middle school make out rules!) The point of baseball is to score as many runs as possible. A run is when the batter runs around all four bases and back to home plate without getting tagged by an opposing player who has the ball. One batter reaching home plate counts as one run or one point.

A game of baseball is divided into nine innings. An inning is when both the home team and the visiting team have played offense and defense (meaning, both have gotten a chance to bat). When an inning starts, the team on defense sends nine players out to the field: three in the outfield, four in the infield, a pitcher, and a catcher. The pitcher throws the ball to the batter, who tries to hit it out into the field using a baseball bat. Then, it’s basically a race: the batter runs to get to the base before the defense can throw the ball to the base. As long as the batter gets to the bases before the ball, he is safe; but, if he doesn’t, then he is out. Also, if the batter hits the ball in the air and a defensive player catches it before it hits the ground, that player is out—this is called a fly ball.

Usually, professional teams score around 2 to 5 runs per game; it is possible, though rare, for the score to get into double-digits.

I hope this helps you to understand the basics of these sports! If all else fails, just sit back, relax with a cold beverage of your choosing, and yell when everyone else yells. But don’t be afraid to ask questions! These games sometimes have rules so obscure that even pros can get confused, so as long as you’ve got the basics, you’ll be fine. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!

Photo by Meaghan Morrison