2009 Fantasy Football Leagues

Fantasy football is a form of office pool that is a fantasy sports game in which participants (called "fantasy league owners") are arranged into a league to pit their fantasy players against each other. The person who creates the fantasy football league is called the commissioner, and that person invites other fantasy football "owners" into their fantasy league to compete for weekly fantasy points.

Each team drafts or acquires via auction a team of real-life American football players and then scores points based on those players' statistical on-the-field performances. A typical fantasy league will employ players from the entire NFL including rookies and undrafted players.

Fantasy leagues can be arranged in which the winner is the team with the most total points at the end of the fantasy season, or in a head-to-head format (which mirrors the actual NFL) in which each team plays against a single opponent each week. At the end of the year, win-loss records determine league rankings or qualification into a playoff bracket. Most leagues set aside the last weeks of the regular season for their own playoffs. Just prior to the 2009 NFL season, Colin Cowherd of ESPN said "more than 27 million players play fantasy football. They spend an average of nine hours a week (during football season... playing fantasy football)."