The number of teams in your Fantasy Football league can be driven by multiple motives, and is an important factor in starting up your league or making a decision to expand.

As a founder of a new league, a minimum number of teams (and owners) needs to be found in order to have a competitive environment. For example, in a league with only four teams, every owner would have a top notch star at every position and there wouldn’t be as much value in drafting strategy and skills. In a larger league of 10-12 teams however, the scarcity of talent at some positions will make a strong draft strategy invaluable.

If you can get 10 or 12 friends and family to join a league, then those are the league sizes I recommend. They seem to have the best balance of having enough teams for good competition and good fun.

If finding that many interested players isn’t happening for you, then the lowest number of teams I would recommend would be 8.  As a word of warning, starting a new league with 8 solid and interested players is much better than stretching to find two more maybe players who end up managing their team on autopilot after four games.  You can always expand after the first season as the owners in your league recruit interested friends with their enthusiasm for the first season.

If you want to try 6 players or 16 players, then please give it a try and have a great time doing it.

If you are someone who runs or plays in an unusually large or small league let us know about your experience in the comments.

Starting a Fantasy Football league will be one of the most exciting tasks you can be involved in as a sports fan. Being the energizing force to get your friends together and pull the trigger on this “Fantasy football thing” will bring you a lot of pride.

But how to start? For now, I am going to leave the plan for how to evangelize about the fun and the competition to your own methods and let you persuade your friends and family to join up with you.

What will come next though are some practical questions some of which are easier to answer than others.

At the most basic, what is Fantasy Football anyway? It is a game where each team will assemble a roster of players through some draft format and then throughout the season the performance of individual players on that roster will help determine the success of that team in its weekly matchups. Typical rosters start a QB, 2 RBs, 2 WR’s, 1 TE, 1 K, and 1 Defense/Special Teams, but there are multiple variations on this standard.

How many teams should we have in our league? In my experiences, a typical league these days has between 10-12 teams although 12 seems to be a standard number. I have seen leagues play with as little as 6 teams (not recommended) and as high as 14 (a little high for my taste).

What type of draft formats do we use? Basically, there are two styles. Traditional and auction. Traditional is similar to normal draft formats like the regular NFL draft, except that the drafts are usually conducted in a serpentine style that gives the last person in the round the first pick in the next round.  An auction format is what it sounds like. Each owner will have a fixed amount of salary cap money to bid on players they want. They can bid any price on any player until they run out of money.

What scoring rules should we use? Scoring rules generally give points to individuals in skill positions based on how they perform compared to traditional football metrics like touchdowns and yards. There are almost countless tweaks that can be applied to scoring formats. For example, bonuses can be awarded for long touchdowns. Adding points per reception is another tweak. Scoring is very customizable in most online formats and is formalized in the League constitution (official rules).

Should we have a redraft league or a keeper league? This is one of the toughest questions to answer and will define your league. A redraft league is what it sounds like, players re-enter the draft pool each season and are available to anyone. In a keeper league, some number of players from 1 to the entire roster size can be protected and kept into the next season. This will limit the available pool of players each year available for draft as top names are kept from season to season. The Legend has had it both ways and prefers a limited number of “Franchise” players be allowed to each team. My preference is two keeper players for each team as this seems to be a good balance between the two formats.

Where will we set it up? In the early days, we kept our league via email lineup submission and hand scoring put into Excel. Now, we use online tools and I would bet that almost everyone with a league does this. For what is a relatively low cost when spread out over the league members, a lot of value is added. Online drafting, lineup management, and automatic live scoring are key features. I can remember being the most tech savvy of my group in the early years and finding out how to put a chat room on a geocities site which we used for our first non-phone draft! There are multiple sites available, but The Legend has to vote for CBS Sportsline.

Lastly, who is going to manage all this? You will need a Commissioner. The Commish is someone to act as the leader of the league who steps in to moderate any disputes that may come up during the season and provide general league leadership and direction. If you are starting the league yourself, you will likely be in this role. The Legend is a Commish in one league, and can provide some empathy for what at times can be a thankless task.

These are high level comments on some key questions that I will flesh out with more details in the next several posts.