Football Fantasy

“Footbal isn’t a contact sport, it’s a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.”

So said Hugh “Duffy” Daugherty, head coach of the Michigan State University Spartans football team from 1954 to 1972. Daugherty made a good point, which could be one reason legions of fans eschew direct participation in the game in favor of a more technological, fanciful approach called Fantasy Football.

1. The Uber Site
ESPN is the fantasy football arena, and with good reason: It’s slick and presents plenty of information, including news, videos, message board topics, columns by experts, and tools, from which you can get draft info, rules, charts, player projections, and details for managing your team, should you decide to sign up. If you’re a newbie, get your feet wet by joining one of the free existing leagues; prize-eligible leagues (you pay) are also available. If you’re an advanced player, well, you already know what to do, so have fun. Free or not, if you’re not diligent about keeping up with the game, you probably won’t win, and you’re not likely to have fun either. http://games.espn.go.com/frontpage

2. DETAILS, DETAILS
The “we try harder” site for fantasy fans is from the NFL. It has fewer bells and whistles than ESPN, but its presentation is straightforward and easy to navigate, and the site is chock full of information—player news, links to expert articles, stats, scores, and rosters, plus NFL-oriented content like news, history, and videos. As with other sites, you can become a league manager and create/rule your own league of teams, or, if you’re just starting out in fantasyland, sign up for free NFL fantasy. Then you can get down to ranking NFL players for your upcoming draft. That may sound daunting, but you’ll have lots of help from links to player stats, projections, auction values, draft averages, a draft analyzer, advice, a cheat sheet, and player ratings. And I thought The Daily Racing Form was challenging. http://www.nfl.com/fantasy

3. FOR WALLFLOWERS
If you prefer indirect involvement with your fantasy sport, there’s http://www.fantasydope.com, a news-based site about various fantasy sports in which site members (it’s free!) comment and vote on a story’s relevance to the sport in question. It also offers team news, mock drafts, cheat sheets, projections, rankings, advice, and strategies. Links to blogs are included too, if you’re into content overload. Also check out http://www.fantasyguru.com and http://www.fantasysports.com, which have similar fare wrapped up in different packages. For functionality and presentation, the guru gets my vote.