This is Part 4 of a 5-part series, The Christian’s Guide to Fantasy Football.

Here’s Part I , Part II , and Part III.

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Part IV – Some Assembly Required

Now that you’ve found a league and you’ve given your team a worthy name, it’s time to get some players. The way we do that in world of fantasy sports is through one of two routes: the draft or the auction.

Going, Going, Gone

In an auction format owners sit together in a room spending fake money on fake contracts for real players. Owners take turns putting players on the auction block and the bidding increases until someone has overpaid for a guy he never really wanted on his team in the first place. While all the other owners breathe a sigh of relief over this near miss, the owner who won the bidding usually will excuse himself at this time to go outside and throw up in the bushes. This continues on for about 8 hours until everyone has a full roster of players or is too dehydrated from puking to continue.

The auction format is great because it gives everyone equal ground to start off with. Every owner begins with the same amount of money and the same chance at the best players. There’s no owner sitting in the corner griping about “never getting the first pick” and complaining that his draft was ruined before it started. The problem with the auction, however, is that it takes a huge investment of time and energy to survive.

Each year hundreds of fantasy players walk out of auction drafts a shell of the person they were walking in. Sometimes it can cost you more than a good night’s sleep. A few years ago an evangelist from Kentucky was so disoriented from an 11-hour auction on a Saturday afternoon that he showed up the next day to preach at a church wearing nothing but a Peyton Manning jersey and slippers. The ushers scrambled to get him appropriately dressed before the service began, only to have him pulled off of the platform at the last minute when the church’s pastor discovered he had titled his sermon, “Can the Bible Explain Why I Spent $42 on Jeremy Freaking Shockey?”

The Crafty Serpent

The Snake Draft is the most widely used format that fantasy leagues will use to choose players. Unlike the auction format, which until this year was strictly an in-person event, the snake draft can be done easily online or in person, and usually takes between 2 to 3 hours to complete. Despite what some conservatives might tell you, the snake draft, which is also referred to as a “serpentine draft”, is not named after the crafty snake in the Garden of Eden. While it is true that owners who lie and deceive do generally have better teams than those who do not, the snake draft gets its name from the way the draft order looks when it is written out on a board. The order of picks reverses itself every other round, which is why some folks have started referring to it as the “John Kerry” Draft Format.

If you are picking near the beginning or end of a round, you’ll get to make two picks within a few minutes of each other and then have to sit around for 20 minutes while most of the players you are targeting get snatched up by other teams. Team owners with short attention spans generally prefer to be in the middle of the draft order so their pick comes up with regular frequency in the middle of each round. People who smoke or have chronic intestinal issues usually prefer to be at either end of a round so that they have adequate time to do their business without missing out on their pick.

Magazines and The Rizzingtons

In the days leading up to your fantasy draft, it’s a good idea to do some prep work. For most of us, this means going to the local grocery store and spending a few minutes staring at all of the fantasy sports magazine covers. This in itself can be a difficult job. You’ve got to discipline your eyes to stay focused on the task at hand while Tiger Beat, Off-Road Magazine, and Us Weekly vie for your attention with their flashy headlines and distracting color pallets. I recommend getting your magazine at a grocery store and not a gas station or bookstore, otherwise you’ll have even more garbage pulling at your attention. Remember, you’re about to prepare for your fantasy draft, so you need all the blood rushing up the field towards your head.

If you’ve looked through these magazines before, you probably know that the lists of player rankings you’ll find printed in them is almost identical from one magazine to another. What you probably didn’t know is this is because all of these publications get their information from the same source. It’s a master list put out each year by Harold and Louise Rizzington, a chain-smoking couple in their sixties who live off the coast of Massachusetts on Nantucket Island. In the months following the Super Bowl, Harold and Louise lock themselves in their cottage with nothing but boxes of wine and fig newtons, where they run complicated algorithms through seven different computers to create a master list that ranks every fantasy player from Tomlinson to Grossman.

Once their list is finalized, they sell it to all of the trade publications, who in turn make a few subtle changes so their list differs slightly from the original. As a result, you find yourself in the grocery store staring at 8 different magazines that essentially all have the same list of players inside. Don’t be fooled by the outlandish claims you see on their covers claiming to have the best Cheat Sheet or the most accurate mock drafts. They’re all the same. The next time you are picking out a fantasy sports magazine, just remember Harold and Louise inhaling those fig newtons and buy the one with the cheapest cover price (or the one furthest on the shelf from MAXIM).

Once you have your fantasy magazine in hand, you really don’t need to do anything else except show up for the draft. Harold and Louise really have done all the work for you. Other than your magazine, just bring along your league entry fee, a few pens, and a foghorn. (but more on that in Part V)

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(to keep reading) – Part V – Feeling the Draft

(The preceding may or may not be included in Bryan’s book-in-progress, “Let There Be Touchdowns: Why God is a Sports Fan and Why You Should Be Too”. If you’d like to stay current on what’s happening with the book, leave your name and email address here.)

As always, feedback, props, criticisms, and comments are strongly encouraged. Italics: letters in motion.