A-P "Fantasy Football"?

[Cetonis]

Around this time of year as the preseason descends upon the NFL, many a football fan finds themselves gathering all sorts of information to prepare for their fanatsy football drafts...

Although a more casual-ish fan, I decided to try my hand at this last year and was generally disappointed for two reasons. First, there are always these awkward situations where your favorite teams go up against your best players, leaving you unable to simply root for the team you want to win. Second, NFL teams don't play to accrue fantasy points, they play to win. You might get a star running back, only to be frustrated every time they bring in the short yardage guy on 1st and goal at the 1 to get the touchdown that would've been 6 points for your team. Similar situations with wide recievers, or pretty much any other position really.

So, I got to thinking it would be really nice if I could play along with the season in a way that allowed me to root for teams, not players, and came up with an experimental game. I'm hoping to find enough people here willing to test it out with me... Here's the baiscs of what I'm thinking:

- 16 players

- Each week, players take turns picking 2 teams they feel they will win and 2 that they feel will lose.

- A correct pick nets a point, and maybe we could add that getting all four right in one week nets a bonus point.

- They cannot pick a team to win/lose already chosen that week to win/lose.

- Unless the previous rule leaves them no choice, players cannot pick the same team to win twice or lose twice in the same season.

- Each player will have a bye week assigned to them between weeks 4-10, as per the NFL schedule.

...something along those lines. Obviously, picks will have to be worked out before the first game of any given week, which gives Tuesday-Saturday for weeks 2-9, then Tuesday-Wednesaday from 10-16. I'm thinking the best way to do the picking each week would be for each player to take turns picking their 2 winners, then pick the losers in reverse order. Of course, pick order will rotate each week.

I would be the one keeping track of things, including a spreadsheet(s) indicating who's chosen what teams already. The only difficult part would be getting picks together in those weeks that have Thursday games (aside from the first, we'd have all the time in the world for that) but perhaps with a little luck there'll be a time everyone can be on and do it quasi-live. But first things first, are there enough people who would like to try this? We might be able to do it with 8, but it'd involve a little bit of shenanigans with the byes (somebody would have to get two half-byes) and maybe a couple other small fixes. Post here if interested ^_^