Fantasy Football 101: How to play

Yahoo Fantasy expert Matt Harmon walks you thru the most important steps on how to play Yahoo Fantasy Football so you can prepare for the upcoming NFL season. Don't have a fantasy football league yet? Create or join a league: https://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/f1/signup

Video Transcript

MATT HARMON: Welcome to Fantasy football 101. I'm Matt Harmon. I'm a Yahoo Fantasy Football analyst. But we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about you and fantasy football. What is Fantasy Football? It's a 17 week game. You draft players from different teams. They're going to draft quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, even kickers and defenses. It's going to get wild. The whole point of this is, you're going to have matchups every single week against different people in your league.

What does a week look like in Fantasy Football? Well, on Tuesday, you're going to want to put in your waiver claims. Because guess what? That team you drafted that you thought was so good, in August and September, some chaos is going to hit. Injuries-- players aren't going to perform the way you think. You're going to want to add those new players on the waiver wire on Tuesday, and then you're going to set your lineup.

And trust me, you're going to want to take a look at it on Thursday because nothing's worse than going to the weekend for getting to start a player on Thursday Tonight Football. So make sure you check that lineup, you set it, every single week.

All right. So most likely, you got a link from your league's commissioner, email, text message, I don't know, they sent you a link, you joined it. Now we're at the most important part here. It's the draft. It's the beginning of your Fantasy Football journey. So you're going to go in here to the draft experience. You are going to want to go through here and search the running backs, the wide receivers.

Again, you're looking up-- maybe there's someone you know ahead of time. You go ahead and search their name. You can add them right to your cue, so you know-- to make sure to draft them later on. Of course, I will say, this is a great time to go check out our full drafting tutorial for more information, and a little sprinkling of strategy tips before you get started.

Now that you have your team, hey, shout out, you drafted a hell of a team. Here's how you go find it to make sure you see every single week. Who's on your team? If it's stacked up at the right positions-- and of course, this is where you need to go to set your lineup. That team that you drafted is not going to stay the same from week one to week 17. So you want to go to the Add/drop here when you need to make some lineup changes. Throw this guy in the waiver wire, pluck this guy on your team, boom, look at that. Now you're flying.

I talked about the draft as the most exciting part. This is the most important part. Winning these matchups every single week is what determines your win to loss record over the course of the season. Spoiler alert, you want more wins than losses so that you can make it to the fantasy playoffs. And that is how you set the best lineup, so that you can do what this is all about, which is winning.

Thanks for watching this Fantasy Football 101 video. We have an entire collection of these that you need to go check out before your league gets rolling here. While you're connected to the world wide web, why don't you check out all the awesome content offerings we have here at Yahoo Fantasy? The Yahoo Fantasy Football forecast, that's our podcast, and all of the weekly articles and shows we do.

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