Latest / Let's Talk Football - Married Edition / Starting a League: Fantasy Football 101 for the Girls
Transcript
- [Amanda Black] (0:00 - 1:43) What is up? And welcome to your very first episode of Let's Talk Football Sis. We are so freaking excited to dive in and talk all things fantasy football with you guys. This is fantasy football for the girls by the girls. So if you're a woman tuning in, what the fuck is up? We are so excited to bring you fantasy football in an accessible, digestible way. And let's be so fucking honest without goddamn mansplaining because it's so freaking annoying. We all know it. So we're going to dive into all things fantasy football. But before we do that, we've got to introduce ourselves. I'm Amanda. I'm so excited to meet you. I'm the host of Let's Talk Football Sis and she's my big sister. I'm really excited to introduce you to her as well. But I want to give you a little bit about me. I'm originally grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. I went to college in Columbus, Ohio and Columbus, Ohio stole my heart. So did a boy. I got married and we moved here to Canal Winchester and have been living here ever since. I love my small town vibe. It is absolutely my favorite. If I could literally transport myself into girl more girls, that would be like my ideal living situation. And this is as close as I can freaking get some other little fun facts about me. I have a lovely beagle. His name is Benny. He is the freaking cutest in the entire world. And I would argue that with anyone who comes across my table, he's also a stubborn little asshole. And I love that about him, right? He's so stubborn, but that's the best part about a beagle. Some other fun facts. I'm obsessed with dinosaurs. You might see some that pop up in my background here. I know I'm just a chronically fucking cold. So I usually have a space heater, even though it is like asshole hot in Ohio right now. I typically always have a space feeder on. And once it hits winter, just be warned. I'm a little more grumpy, but that is a little bit about me. I am so excited to dive into this episode with you, but without further ado, let me introduce my beautiful co-host Angela. [Angela Sims] (1:44 - 3:32) What is up? So I'm Ang and like Amanda said, she grew up in Youngstown. So did I. Sisters grew up in Youngstown, lived in Poland, Ohio, not the country. Many people get that mixed up. One of my best friends does that very odd. But anyways, I still live here in Youngstown, Ohio. My goal was get the heck out of here. And that kind of backfired. So I went to school here in Youngstown, Ohio, but it was the best decision I've ever made. I went to our local college, Youngstown State University. I had the amazing opportunity to play golf there and it's a division one school. So it's even better. And then I kind of just made my roots here, eventually settled down. I met my wonderful husband and we live here with our two dogs. And I would argue that my dogs might be just a little bit cuter, but they are also simply stubborn just like Benny. So there's that, but I love my nephew pup. Anyways, I am a teacher here in Youngstown and I teach in Lisbon fifth grade. And I love every single kid I've ever had in the past. And I cannot wait to keep teaching and to broaden my horizons here with this amazing podcast. So some really fun facts about me. I can wrap the entire ice ice baby verbatim. No lyrics. I go to a karaoke and do it. It's my favorite party trick. And I'm like, Amanda, I am always chronically warm. So I don't know where that came from. Maybe our parents think dad's probably a little bit warmer than mom is all at times, but I envy her for that. But I also don't because she's got to wear like a jacket in a restaurant when it's like 85 degrees outside and her lips get blue. So don't envy that at all. But we are so pumped to be here and so excited for this podcast to get started and let's get it going. [Amanda Black] (3:33 - 4:10) Absolutely. Whether you are brand new to fantasy football or you are a veteran player. This is the podcast for you in these early episodes being so freaking transparent. We're going to keep it basic because we want to go over and be really accessible for someone who's never started fantasy football before to be able to walk in and set up a very successful fantasy football league. So in this first episode, that's exactly what we're going to go over and cover in depth. Keep in mind in the future, we're going to do a lot more deep dives and really walk around how to strategize yourself through the season, but we're going to walk through the basics here together first and foremost. So we're just going to chat about what is fantasy football at its core. [Angela Sims] (4:10 - 4:31) Yeah. So basically fantasy football is just picking players who are earning points each week. So you're drafting a team basically of elite players. That's the goal. And then the ultimate goal is to compete each week with people in your league and then win. It's really, really it. Right. [Amanda Black] (4:32 - 4:44) You want to make run a rack up points. You want to obviously win each week or you won't win every week. Well, if you do like power to you, but you want to win as many weeks as possible goal, make the playoffs, win the fucking championship, right? [Angela Sims] (4:44 - 4:44) Oh yeah. [Amanda Black] (4:45 - 6:12) Yeah. Absolutely. It's competitive, right? So like we love competitive energy. I've been competitive since I think I opened my eyes. Um, I love competitive energy, but it's also fun. It's such a fun way to be in a group of others who just have similar interests. And I don't know about you guys, but I'm in my thirties. So is, and we're like a year and two weeks apart, by the way. So really Irish twins, if you call it, um, it's really hard to make female friends in your thirties, right? Like really freaking difficult. And something that I love is finding mutual interest that draws all together and give us a community. So if anything to me, fantasy football really gives you a community of like-minded women that you can meet up at a sports bar and watch a game, go to an NFL game with, and we have big dreams and ambitions here. And one day we're doing a let's talk that bosses watch party. Okay. We're going to have fun, throw back some beers because we're beer girls at our heart, but nonetheless, that's kind of the long-term goal. So have fun with it. Be freaking competitive, but it is just an enjoyment-based activity. But let's start, like I said, with how to go about setting up a league. So I want to get started with just the most basic form is you want to pick a platform that you're hosting your fantasy football team inside of. There are probably three big players that I would suggest. Sleeper, ESPN, Yahoo, I'm gonna be honest. The Sleeper app is my favorite. We've been running our league in it for the past five or six years. To me, it's the most user-friendly. Um, I just like the interface the best, but those are your three heavy hitters in the fantasy football kind of industry when it comes to hosting your league. [Angela Sims] (6:13 - 6:31) Right. Yeah. And then once you're in that app, you need to decide what type of league that you're going to do. We recommend starting with a redraft league. It's the easiest. It's the easiest to build. It's the easiest to understand. And that's basically just drafting players, um, that are brand new each year. So you're starting a new team each year. [Amanda Black] (6:31 - 7:41) Yeah. There's other terms. You might hear maybe your boyfriend, your husband, your significant other. He might say a keeper league, or he might say his dynasty league, or he might say something like a super flex league. Okay. We're going to get into some of the semantics here, right? You are just going to say, I'm in a redraft league. Okay. Means you're just redrafting your team every year. Like Ang said, keep it basic, keep it simple. But that, if you're just starting and setting up your league for the first time, use that one. When you then set up your redraft league, you got to find 10 to 12 other women. I'm going to say women because like, sure, men can join, but like, let's be real, not the same energy. Nonetheless, you need to find at least 10 to 12 other players to play alongside of you. Okay. I say 10 to 12 because anything less than that just is going to be not competitive. There's going to be a lot of players to pick from anything more than 12. Holy shitballs. It becomes very freaking difficult. Can you have more? Yes. I just saw a girl on social media comment that she's in a 16 team league, 16 people, nuts. I just couldn't even imagine. I know you're like picking from the dumpster of running backs when every single players and don't get me wrong. [Angela Sims] (7:41 - 7:53) I love an obscure ass player, but to get all those at all the time is a little bit rough. Definitely. So yeah, like Amanda said, keep that 10 to 12 league for that competitive nature, which we do and we love. [Amanda Black] (7:54 - 8:05) So yeah. And then I'm going to have into the league. So, and kind of break down for the most basic accessible scoring model for fantasy football leagues. [Angela Sims] (8:05 - 8:34) Right. So you're going to kind of typically set up and what we suggest is a PPR league, which means points per reception. It is by far the easiest point scoring system these days. We recommend it. That's what we play. Simple, simple, simple. Basically you're just getting points for what players do. So points per reception, it's really that simple. So if you think I'm not going to understand this, guess what you are, because guess what? We're here to help you. And I understand it. So anybody can for sure. [Amanda Black] (8:34 - 10:16) For sure. Yeah. Super simple. Um, there's other ways to go about it. But again, that's the most standard model that I would suggest when you're setting up your sleeper app and going into settings PPR. Now you're going to then set up the team that the other players can draft. So every week you're going to have what we call a starting lineup. Okay. You're going to have a starting lineup of guys. And this is going to be the ideal starting lineup that I would suggest you start up for your first fantasy football league. So number one quarterback, you're going to have two running backs that you have to play every week, two wide receivers that you have to play every week, one tight end, two flex spots. Going to break that down here in a hot second, a, um, kicker. So one kicker, a defense, five to seven bench spots. Typically I say, I mean, at least five, I think we've done five in the past several seasons and it works really well. Again, it doesn't give anyone like a super unfair advantage. It makes it a little bit more of an even playing field and you got to make some more game time decisions. We'll get into that later. And then one IR, IR means injured reserve. And I want to explain that as simply as possible. It just means if a guy gets hurt bad enough, the team has to label them to IR, which means they're going to miss four or more games. So you, that player then gets labeled with a literal sticker thing next to it that says IR and you know that you can then place that player in the IR position and they are now saved on your team until they're no longer injured. So it's a really nice way to safety net a player. That's like your guy. He's a great reliable player and he just hurt himself for a temporary moment. If somebody hurts themselves big, you can drop them the fuck off your bench, right? If they, they broke their leg and they're never coming back, you're good. Um, but if they didn't, uh, Isaiah Pacheco, didn't he break his leg for you last year or two years ago? [Angela Sims] (10:16 - 10:44) I had Nick Chubb. Well, I picked up Nick Chubb hoping even though I, he was on my IR that he would come back and it was a little, yeah, but it's a good way to keep a player and not drop a player. And then all of a sudden in my luck, this would happen. You know, you, you drop them, you think, oh, they're going to be on IR and then, uh, oh, guess what they're back. And then it's like, what the hell? Like, of course that would be my luck. And, you know, probably that'll happen sometimes. So it's okay. [Amanda Black] (10:45 - 11:31) And then I mentioned about two flex spots. So flex spots just mean it's flex, flexible spots, spots that you can choose where players go, depending on who you want to play there. So there are three options for that flex spot. You can do a running back, a wide receiver or a tight end. Ladies, hear me out. You are very rarely, very, very rarely going to play a tight end in your flex position. You are likely only going to be playing a wide receiver and a running back. I say that because I see people make a huge mistake where they're like, well, I can put a tight end there. So I'm going to, they are going to score far less points than your wide receiver and you're running back. Okay. So flex spots, you're going to play a flexible player, either a wide receiver, a running back, or a tight end. And again, we'll get into the semantics of all of this later, but that's going to be what I could basically keep it at to begin. [Angela Sims] (11:32 - 11:39) Um, so that's pretty simple. I mean, it's like flexible spot, flexible player. That's pretty simple. [Amanda Black] (11:39 - 12:08) Yeah. And then walk them through once everything set there, there, obviously they have the platform picked. That's number one, right? So we'll run a little list here, pick your platform. Number one, you want to set it up as a redraft league. You want to make sure your scoring system is PPR points per reception. And then you want to make sure you have your starting lineup listed with all the spots I just mentioned. The key tip there is just to flex spots and an IR spot, five bench spots, and then your normal players that I listed if you scroll back and eat a little review there. [Angela Sims] (12:09 - 12:41) All right. So once you've set up your league rules roster, you need to pick a draft date. That's super important. And you want to make sure that your draft date fits to everyone's schedule. So there's an actual, um, feature on sleeper called a poll where you can put out a couple of different dates. That way you can coordinate with your teams. Uh, you can coordinate with your league and then make sure that the draft it actually happens. Cause you don't want to have to set a date last minute and then shit, nobody shows up. So super important to set a draft date and you can do that right on sleeper. So utilize it. [Amanda Black] (12:41 - 13:15) Yeah, absolutely. And keep in mind that you can do that draft live. If everyone's local to you, you could do it over zoom, but also in the sleeper app, everyone can see what's happening throughout the entire time. You could even do it on your freaking phone. So it's super convenient. You could do it on computer. You could do it on your phone. I've literally done it like in a group setting with a bunch of other people and everyone's all around. It's fun, right? Good times are had by all, but you can do it anyway. And you just want to make sure that happens. So that way, most people can be there live and they don't have to go on what we call auto draft, which just means the computer picks for them. You don't want that. Okay. Yeah. [Angela Sims] (13:16 - 13:41) It's always like really sad when you're ready. I'm waiting for my next pick. That person's going the time because there's a timer that goes timer that takes down and then it just auto drafts for him. And it's like, I mean, it's even worse if that player that gets picked up is like the player you were about to freaking pick up and you're like, well, would that person have even done it? Or did the computer have a smarter pick than they would? I don't know. But yeah, yeah, absolutely. [Amanda Black] (13:41 - 14:00) Absolutely. And then once you do that, then you just have to pick the type of draft that you're going to do and we do suggest a snake draft. And essentially what that means, the order flips each time. So the number one pick of the overall draft goes. And then when it gets to the 10th or 12th pick, they get to pick two picks back to back and then it snakes back, boom, boom, snakes. Simple explanatory, right? [Angela Sims] (14:01 - 14:06) Cool. I don't know what's better to be first or last because last was kind of clutch. I think it was last last last year. [Amanda Black] (14:07 - 14:26) You know what? I know I have that same internal dilemma. Honestly, I prefer to be somewhere in the middle of the fucking board. Like I never get two back to back picks, but I feel like I'm able to understand a little bit more and not have to make like this urgent. I think first I have to reach for people where I'm taking someone who I probably wouldn't have taken, but I know someone else. I don't know. [Angela Sims] (14:27 - 14:29) That's a good point. That's a good point. [Amanda Black] (14:29 - 15:01) Because we're talking, this is all the shit we're going to get into more in depth as we continue to put these episodes out guys. So keep in mind that we are here to help you do everything from the top to bottom when it comes to fantasy football league. So this is kind of our recap of setting up a fantasy football league. Next week we're going to talk about managing your team and how to go about that successfully. That way you feel really confident walking into obviously draft day, but also walking into the first week, not feeling like a chicken with your head cut off. Like what the fuck am I doing here? Specifically, if you're showing up in a male dominated league, I want you to feel super confident, right? [Angela Sims] (15:01 - 15:01) Heck yeah. [Amanda Black] (15:02 - 15:02) Yeah. [Angela Sims] (15:02 - 15:07) Don't absolutely second guess yourself and be in there with such confidence because you listen to us. [Amanda Black] (15:08 - 16:48) Absolutely. A hundred percent. Well, that is our overall crash course and all things fantasy football. And it really just the crash course and setting up your very first fantasy football league. So if this is your first season, I hope you feel a little bit more confident going in banding a group of women together and getting that ready. Keep in mind that over on social media, on my TikTok at let's talk football says, I actually have a video connecting other women to join leagues. So if you're starting a league and you want a big old group of women, go over their comment. There's so many women right now in my comment section, looking for a league league situation, like amazing to see so much fun. I know. I was like, holy shit. There's like so many women looking and wanting to get into this. So I love it. So there's a hub over there to make sure you look at. And before we wrap, we've got a little something fun because why would we check out a little something fun, right? So a little something fun coming to you this season and we're actually running a contest where two of you can join our fantasy football league and play this season right alongside of us. So if you're looking for a league and you don't just want to play in any league, you want to play in our league, here's what you're going to do to do that or do to join that. Let's say you're going to screenshot this episode on any of your platforms that you're listening to this on Spotify, Apple music, YouTube, wherever you're listening, take that screenshot and then send it over to social media and tag us. We are at let's talk football sis on both Instagram and TikTok. Once you do that, you're going to enter into our drawing. You do that more times, more entries. So if you post us every single day until we draw, and we're going to draw that in our next episode. So you're going to make sure you tune into that. So tag the living shit out of us so we can get a little bit of recognition from everyone else out there so they can join and listen and get a cutting edge. Share this with the girls, right? And then we will pick our winner next week live. That way you guys can potentially join our league right alongside of us. [Angela Sims] (16:49 - 17:20) Yeah, and don't worry. We're going to keep it fun. We're going to keep all this knowledge coming at you and we're so excited to keep going and to do this. And you know that people say like, oh it made it out of the group chat like this literally made it out of the freaking group chat, which is like the whole entire last year has been Amanda and I doing things that we talked about doing and then actually freaking doing them. So one of your one of the group chat things is start a fantasy league or join a fantasy league. You are in the freaking right place. So we're so excited to have you here. [Amanda Black] (17:20 - 17:56) Absolutely. If you guys again, thank you guys so much for tuning in. If you like this episode, please make sure you hit that subscribe button and subscribe helps us so much. So hit the subscribe button and follow us on social media. We are at let's talk football sets like I already mentioned on TikTok, on Instagram. We're going to be over on YouTube so you can check us out there as well. We're going to have a ton of additional topics over on our TikTok and social media platforms. So make sure you check us out. Lots of videos, lots of tips, lots of strategies. So make sure you follow us along there for the ride. And if you ever have any suggestions on what you want to see from us, it's a take to ask because we're likely to give you exactly what you want, right? [Angela Sims] (17:57 - 17:57) Exactly. [Amanda Black] (17:57 - 18:06) Absolutely. Well, thank you guys so much for listening. We are so excited to talk fantasy football alongside of you. And until next time, we'll see you guys later. We'll see you later guys.