I don’t think anyone outside the Fantasy Football bubble knows just how serious the process is, because there’s a Fantasy Football Constitution. And if your league commissioner is anywhere as serious as mine, he’ll have it notarized at his work before the draft party.
What’s in a league’s Constitution?
My commish’ emailed us to get draft party dates and I almost didn’t realize there was a word document attached. I opened it to find a nine page document on rules, regulations, point systems, draft order selection parameters and a breakdown of everyone’s roster composition structures.
First thought: WTF
Looking back: W.T.F.
After the initial freak out of the complexity, you’ll realize it’s mostly just the bros being official about everything. It’ll mostly be things you already knew, but need to be in writing to avoid discrepancies later. Every league has its own specific rules, here are some things that I’ve found can vary from league to league.
Fantasy Football Constitution Articles
- League size (how many people/teams are a part of the league)
- Team size (how many NFL players are on your individual teams)
- How you decide draft order (random, previous year’s standings, ridiculous and arbitrary games, etc.)
- Draft type (straight down the line i.e. first to last and start over, or a snake draft which is down the line and back up i.e. 1 through 12, then 12 through 1 and repeating)
- When your weekly picks are locked (the point in each week where you can’t make any changes to your lineup, though it’s typically at kickoff for each respective player’s game)
Hopefully your league is hosted electronically (i.e. Yahoo, ESPN, etc.) because the scoring portion of our constitution is almost an entire page’s worth of material alone. Every time one of the players runs, passes, tackles, eats, drinks, or has a bowel movement there’s an adjustment to their score. Okay, slight exaggeration on those last few, but keeping track of it all manually would be an absolute nightmare. Either way, be sure you also know the scoring structure so you draft players strategically based on point distribution.
Basically, it’s likely going to be a lot of information so take in everything you can. Ask questions to people who have played in that league before, or the commissioner.
Just know though, if you don’t follow the constitution you’re going to be completely Gretchen Weiner’ed and you’ll probably deserve it.
