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Fantasy University: Course 103 — How does scoring work in fantasy football?

mo castillo
Senior Editor
·3 min read

When drafting a fantasy football team, one of the main things to keep in mind is your league’s scoring settings — AKA, how the players on your team accumulate points. These points determine how your team fares against an opponent every week of the fantasy football season.

Fantasy University 103: How does scoring work?
Fantasy University 103: How does scoring work?

Suffice it to say, you want to be one of the high-scoring teams in your league, so you have a chance to win your matchup week in and week out.

As mentioned, your fantasy football team must face off with your leaguemates each and every week of the season, with each victory helping you rise up the league’s standings; the more you win, the higher up the standings you are, and the greater your chances are at the playoffs. Like the real-life NFL playoffs, fantasy playoffs feature a select group of teams facing off in do-or-die matchups for 2-4 weeks (depending on your settings) to ultimately determine a season champion.

This is the most common, default scoring type in fantasy football: Head-to-Head points.

There are other types of league scoring settings across other fantasy sports, but we’ll stick to H2H Points for this course, as that is by far the most common type of football league and likely the scoring settings you’ll use.

Now, the players on your team are the ones doing the scoring for you. Your customizable league settings ultimately determine how the point structure lays out, but this is how they are earned in default Yahoo Leagues:

As mentioned, a private league commissioner, with input from their league members, can customize scoring as they see fit.

How your team accumulates points should determine the players you draft. For example, if your league awards a full point for every reception (Full PPR), you’ll want to draft players with the most opportunities to tally a reception. In these leagues, you’ll be inclined to target players with potential for a high volume of targets over players with less potential for volume, perhaps on a crowded depth chart.

So, to recap: your fantasy team faces off against a leaguemate (IE, your opponent) every week. Whoever scores the most points in the matchup wins. Your place in the standings at the end of the regular fantasy season determines whether you make the fantasy playoffs. If you make the playoffs, then you take part in a tournament-style, one-and-done weekly gauntlet to determine a fantasy champion.

Then, the season is over, the laurels are spread, and you get to wait in eager anticipation to do it all again next year!

But to have a better chance to win a fantasy title, it's not just about nailing your draft and then booking your reservation for the playoffs; there is work to be done to improve your team all season. Every week, you'll have the opportunity to add (and drop) players to improve your roster and boost your chances to win it all. We'll teach you the ins and outs of how to do it in the next course!