What is Fantasy Football?

Over the years, Fantasy Sports have become more and more popular. Fantasy Sports are also known as rotisserie, roto or owner simulation. A Fantasy owner builds a team that competes against other fantasy owners based on the statistics generated by individual players or teams of a professional sport; they will employ players from a single league like the NFL or the NCAA division. The these Fantasy Leagues are arranged in which the winner is the team with the most total points at the end of the season, or in a head-to-head format that mirrors the actual NFL in which each team plays against a single opponent each week; these point systems are typically simple enough to be manually calculated by a "league commissioner".

According to some statistics, there were over 29.9 million people age 12 and above in the U.S. and Canada playing fantasy sports in 2007, this number has of course grown a lot since then, however the entire concept of Fantasy Sports has been around since shortly after World War II, yet the official Fantasy Football game originated in 1962 from an idea of Bill Winkenbach, then a limited partner in the Oakland Raiders, with assistance from Bill Tunnell, the Raiders' public relations man.

The Fantasy Football Leagues can consist of anywhere from 6 to as many as 20 teams. Each Fantasy Football team owner must designate which fantasy league players from the team roster will be starters each week and there are three major types of Fantasy Leagues:

Redraft: Each owner starts with no players at the beginning of each NFL season and drafts an entire fantasy team every season.

"Keeper" leagues: Each owner is allowed to retain a small number of players they owned during the previous season, eliminating these players from the draft.

Dynasty leagues: Owners are allowed to retain as many players as desired from the previous season, with the draft encompassing only rookies and other un-owned.

To keep scores the rules are that fantasy football players earn their team points based on their performance in their weekly games, say for instance each touchdown counts as 6 points, a certain number of yards gained counts for points, and so on. There are several magazines, websites and groups dedicated to Fantasy Football and other fantasy sports all over the world.