Monday, August 31, 2015

ESPN Fantasy Football

Since third grade, kids my age have been playing fantasy football. Occasionally someone would invite me to join their fantasy league, but I would say no since I didn’t have the vast knowledge of football that you need to play, and I wasn’t going to invest the time to do the research on good players and bad players. For a while no one asked me, but then this summer I was invited to play in a fantasy league and I decided to give it a try.

When I got the game on my phone it surprised me, since it didn’t have a game like interface. It had lists, data, and a menu, but not what I had expected. When I was talking with my friends I was really nervous, since they knew the top 100 players of each position by heart, and I didn’t know the top 10. I guess I wasn’t nervous — I didn’t care enough to be nervous — but I just had serious doubts of any success. I made not coming in last my goal and waited for draft day.

In the beginning of the fantasy football season there’s a draft. Although some trades occur, your team is pretty much settled at the end of the draft. So the draft is a big deal. Which means that when I drafted Eli Manning, but meant to chose Peyton Manning, I had messed up my team. I wasted my first pick on Eli Manning, who was only the 15th best QB in the league, which is not good for a first pick. I quickly recovered and drafted Adrian Peterson, the number 3 running back. I set up the players on queue to be who I wanted, and then waited. Unfortunately, some of the players I put on queue were selected by other teams, and although I had backups, there was one too few backups. Fortunately, if you aren’t present during the draft and there are no players left during the draft, then ESPN automatically picks players for your team. Unfortunately, auto pick sucks. Joique Bell was drafted. Auto pick predicts him to score high, but it overlooks the fact that Joique is out for the season and will score 0 points. Bad choice auto pick. But my team was pretty good and I was excited.

After the draft you can trade players to refine your roster. I traded Adrian Peterson (RB), for Matt Ryan (QB) and Amari Cooper (WR). This was an interesting trade since my friend had an almost perfect roster, and was just missing a good running back, so he could afford to give his second QB and second wide receiver for the player that would complete his perfect roster. On the other hand, I would take two great players over one outstanding player. Recently though, people have been trying to get me to make stupid trades, such as two of my good players for one of their bad players. This was really annoying, however I picked up some good players and feel set for the season.

Now all that is left is to wait until September, when the regular season and playoffs start. I know that at the end of season I won’t be in first, but I hope to be in the first half.

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