How FantaSim Football Works

What it is

Playing through a season is a lot like a normal fantasy football season. You'll draft players, set your lineup for weekly matchups, hope you win enough games to make the playoffs, then try to win the championship.

The difference is that the season already happened. You know who had a big year and who didn't before you draft a single player. And you're drafting players to contribute to simulated football games, not based on their fantasy output. So the player with the most fantasy points scored may not always be the best pick on the board. That's why the FSF Ranking has been created to rank players based on how well they contribute to the game of FantaSim Football.

The single biggest difference between traditional fantasy and FantaSim to keep in mind when building a roster: Real-life touchdowns scored don't transfer to FantaSim. In fact, you won't even see them on the draft board. Drafting a receiver that scored twelve times in real life doesn't benefit you in FantaSim. Your players move the ball down a simulated field, and you score when you cross the goal line. What matters for your skill players is yardage and volume.

If you trust the FSF ranking, and draft to turn as many boxes from red to green during your draft, you'll probably do pretty well. That's really all you need to know before you start your first Bot League.

For more details on how the game works, keep reading...

How the stats make the game work

Say you're playing through the 2023 season. It's week 1.

Quarterbacks set the tempo

Whether you run or pass on each play is determined by how often your quarterback passed in that week's real game. If he passed on 65% of plays, you're looking at a shootout. If he only passed 40% of the time, you're in for a run-heavy game.

Whether each pass is completed comes from his week 1 completion percentage. His sacks and interceptions come along too. If your QB took 6 sacks in week 1, the odds are good you're taking a lot of them in FantaSim.

Skill players move the ball

Your RBs, WRs and TEs determine the yardage gained on each play.

So your QB may have gone 29-for-31 in your week 1 matchup. That means you'll complete nearly every pass you throw. But if your receivers didn't gain yardage that week, the ball isn't moving very far. Same goes for rushes.

You want skill players who had both a high number of touches and gained yardage on them.

Kickers work on range and accuracy

Kickers use their whole-season stats rather than that week's. Field goal percentage determines accuracy, and the longest field goal they made all season is the longest kick they'll attempt.

If your kicker made a 59-yarder at some point, your team will try anything inside 59 yards. If his long was 49, you punt from beyond that range. Most of the time, anyway; there's end-game logic where your team may go for it on fourth down.

Volume

Every simulated game runs a full game's worth of plays, whatever your lineup looks like. Your starters have to be able to cover enough plays to simulate a football game.

Falling short costs you sacks

Each week, your starting lineup is measured against three thresholds — rush attempts, receptions, and pass attempts. Fall short of one and your quarterback starts taking sacks he never took in real life. One extra sack chance for every unit you're under.

This is why you can't win by stacking home-run plays. A receiver with one catch for 70 yards looks great on paper. Build a lineup out of players like that and you'll be short of the 22 reception minimum every week. If your team collectively only has 13 receptions, that adds 9 more chances for your QB to be sacked that week.

Running out costs you fumbles

Remember that your skill players' yardage comes from the actual plays they had that week. Add up your starting lineup and you get the number of real catches your team has to draw from. Let's say all your receivers together only caught 13 passes.

So what happens when the simulation calls for a 14th?

There's nothing there. The play falls apart, with a fumble lost. Then the count starts over, so a lineup that keeps outrunning its real plays keeps paying for it. Rushes work the same way.

A lineup with 13 real receptions, in a game where the simulation completes 29 passes, will fumble somewhere around the fourteenth, and then again around the 28th. These type of fumbles aren't bad luck. Your receivers ran out of real catches and the fumbles were a consequence of that.

If that sounds fiddly, it mostly is. These only really show up when you've started a thin lineup, or when your team is blowing someone out and running a huge number of plays. Draft enough volume and you'll rarely see one.

Things not to worry about

Bye weeks. All weeks are normalized to remove them. You only need to worry about whether your players actually played in each week of their team's season.

Quarterback passing yardage. All yardage on passes comes from the receiver's yards gained per play, not the quarterback's total.

Touchdowns. Whether a player scored in real life doesn't matter. Your players move the ball down a field, and touchdowns happen when your team crosses the goal line.

What really matters

Games played. If a player wasn't in the game in real life, he can't contribute to your statline, or your thresholds, for that week. If you've got a Pro Bowl WR who missed 3 weeks of the season, be sure to have receptions coming from the bench for those weeks to cover for him.

Interceptions and sacks. In real football, the team turning the ball over and taking sacks is usually the one that loses. The same applies here.

Yards per carry and per catch. Players with higher per-play averages move you down the field more efficiently. Two backs with the same total yardage are not the same back if one needed a hundred more carries to get there.

Volume. Enough touches to cover a full game, across your starting roster.

The game tells you what happened

Every sack in your play-by-play is labelled with whether it came from your lineup falling short or from your quarterback's real Sunday. Every fumble says whether it was real, a strip-sack, or your players running out of real plays.

If you lose, the box score will tell you exactly why.

Start with a bot league

Pick a season, pick a difficulty, and draft.