Fantasy Drafts I'd Love

There's nothing quite like the annual rite of the fantasy football draft, and now there are websites like OnlineDraft that can make anything into a game.

I love the superhero drafts that the staff at The Ringer and Matthew Berry and Robert Downey Jr. have done in the past, and the tastiest draft of all might be the SB Nation Thanksgiving draft.

So what else can we make into a snake-style draft that can both thrill and cause copious eyerolls? Here are some ideas, mostly twists on the ones discussed above:

1. Easter foods - There's at least one draft for Easter candy, but there don't seem to be any drafts for Easter food. As one of my high school friends once noted, it's really a spring Thanksgiving. Ham is as big on Easter as turkey and stuffing are in November, so ham could be the Christian McCaffrey of draft day.

2. Holidays - All the major holidays like Christmas and the 4th of July will be taken well before the end of the first round, but there are more than enough holidays to fill out double-digit rounds, and I'm hearing that National Ice Cream Day is a solid fourth-round pick.

3. New Superheroes - We could narrow the player pool to only those heroes who appear in Marvel's "phase 4" or later. Or maybe a draft could include only X-Men characters. The possibilities for superhero drafts are sky high.

4. All-Time Fantasy Football - If we could find a way to get Jerry Rice, LaDainian Tomlinson, and Pat Mahomes into the same fantasy game, the first round of the draft alone would be epic! Would Jerry Rice go first overall? When would the first QB go off the board? We need to find a way to make this happen!

5. Pick Your Own - What else could we draft? Next Gen football stats, sports announcers, offensive linemen.... Just like Captain America, I could do this all day!

Improving on the Already Terrific NFL RedZone

NFL RedZone is one of the best inventions in the history of professional football, but there are ways that it could be even better. 

One of the things I find myself doing constantly during NFL Sundays is checking my phone to see how my fantasy team is playing. Am I winning my matchup? Has my player's long TD catch been accounted for yet? How many points, exactly, do my players have?

It's because RedZone only shows total fantasy points for full PPR leagues that I end up checking on that last question. But what if RedZone included point totals for multiple types of fantasy leagues? (1) Including half PPR totals on the bottom line during the broadcast in addition to full PPR stats would give fans easier access to a more diverse array of fantasy numbers.

And why stop there? NFL Network's marketing department can go to work to find out which fantasy formats are most popular or growing and cater to their largest fan bases the most while also spending time calculating stats for even the most unique scoring formats.

Maybe in the future the NFL will even develop its programming so fans can customize the stats they see while watching RedZone. Then every fan could get exactly what they ask for, and perhaps RedZone would increase its reported weekly viewership of 1 to 1.5 million (2). The sky is the limit for NFL RedZone when it comes to fantasy football.

1- Let's be honest, I'd still be checking my fantasy team on my phone, even if RedZone added these features.

2 - According to The Athletic's Richard Deitsch in "The Future of NFL RedZone beyond episode No. 200: Media Circus": NFL RedZone

Improving Fantasy Football

Every week, millions of Americans set their fantasy football lineups in hopes of a head-to-head victory over one of their friends. They check their score, root for their players, and banter jokingly over the best waiver wire pickups for the week. But despite the enjoyment that so many people take away from fantasy, there are still tweaks that can make it an even more interesting and equitable game.

To start, I'd like to add a little more flavor to the kicking game. I propose that leagues give kickers six full points for a field goal longer than 59 yards and award bonuses for game-winning or record-breaking field goals. The public league I play in already gives bonuses for field goals of 40-49 and 50+ yards, so why not reward special teamers who make even lengthier kicks? I also think fantasy players should receive an additional one-point bonus for any game-winning field goal. That 39-yarder as time expires? It gets you four. And when someone makes the first 67-yard field goal in NFL history, it should count for eight fantasy points: six for the kick and two for breaking the all-time record.

Speaking of breaking records, I would also like fantasy managers to earn bonuses for any record that is broken or milestone that is set by a player they manage during a game. Prominence of the record will play an important role in determining the amount of the bonus. Tom Brady's 600th TD earlier in the year would be worth somewhere around eight to 10 fantasy points, four for the passing TD and four to six for the milestone. Justin Tucker's 66-yarder would be a two-point bonus for the distance record, while an RB surpassing the all-time rushing record would earn somewhere around eight to 10 bonus points. Among other things, this adds to the intrigue and fantasy-relevance of players who are still legends on the field, but no longer produce in fantasy on a weekly basis. Drafts and waiver wires will be more competitive whenever record-breaking opportunities come up as fantasy managers compete for the players likely to receive large bonuses. Managers will need to make difficult roster decisions about who to keep or drop in favor of the legends of the game.

There is caveat here that needs to be addressed, and that's the fact that there could be leagues somewhere in this fantasy football multiverse that already use rules like these. There's no easy way to check an entire planet's leagues, although I have to admit there's something about the task that I find enticing.

As great a game as fantasy football is, it can still use a few tweaks. I think awarding kickers additional bonuses and giving out additional points for record-breaking and milestone performances will make the game even more interesting and add more skill-based incentives to the sport.

All I Need to Know, I Learned from Fantasy Football

When I was in high school, one of my teachers had a sign up in her classroom that said, "All I Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten." To some extent, I think that statement is true, and I also think it's true of a sport we all hold near and dear to our hearts. Yes, that's right, I'm talking about fantasy football. 

Fantasy football? A "sport" where people maneuver real players on a fake team to try and score more points than other similarly-obsessed managers who are also maneuvering real players on a fake team?

Yes. Fantasy football is a far more educational pastime than you think. Consider some parallels to life that I found in my years playing:

1. You have to take risks. I took so many risks in my draft this year, that Yahoo! projected me to finish in last place in my league. They thought my team was bad, though I disagreed ....

2. Sometimes things don't work out. Last year, I chose David Johnson as my first-round pick in a full-point PPR league, thinking that his pass-catching abilities combined with Kliff Kingsbury's offense would make him a top player.

They didn't. Johnson caught just 36 balls on the year, and only started in 9 of Arizona's 16 games. It's just like when I didn't get into my first choice of colleges, which is probably something that happens to a lot of people. So, yeah, sometimes things don't work out, but ...

3. ... sometimes they do! This year, I thought about choosing Clyde Edwards-Helaire with the fifth-overall pick, even with Alvin Kamara available. Luckily, I ended up celebrating as the Saint went marching into the end zone 21 times. It's kind of like when I got a job in sports media right after I finished grad school. Things worked out!

4. Life is a game of chance. At the end of the year, my team, despite the projections, went 13-3 and took home my first-ever fantasy championship, helped along by the aforementioned Kamara, super receiver Calvin Ridley and rookie standouts Justin Jefferson and Justin Herbert, not to mention late-season acquisition Jalen Hurts. But what if, say, Brandon Aiyuk had become the top rookie wide receiver instead of Jefferson? Or if I'd shed my early, risk-taking strategy and grabbed a more-proven Mecole Hardman off waivers instead of the newest star Viking wideout? It was all chance.

Fantasy football really is a fun game, and we are lucky to have the luxury of playing a game on our devices for fun. Its lessons were and remain a microcosmic reminder of the things life teaches us each and every day, and perhaps one of my bigger disappointments right now is that I have to wait until 2021 to do it all again. Until then, remember that sometimes things don't work out ... but sometimes they do!