Team Pick-em Games Newest Internet Sensation

Welcome to X-pert Ed’s inaugural column covering Team Pick-em style games of fantasy football. This will be a weekly column covering the best picks for Team style games. This is an area that has little coverage from the other content sites since they primarily concentrate on individual player games that make up the majority of the market.

Team style games are beginning to gain traction in the heavily played fantasy football market. The reasons are simple. They are much easier to play, take much less time commitment, and all you have to know are the good teams and the bad ones. This makes them quite appealing to a wider audience of football fans of all ages and genders. You will experience the same adrenalin rush of scoreboard watching that characterizes individual player games.

Here are a few helpful hints to help you do well in your contest or leagues for any team pick-em style game. First, you will need to get a copy of the NFL schedule (you will need it to see the match-ups and when certain teams play at home). Second, you will need to purchase one or two fantasy magazines that have detailed write-ups of each team. There are over 25 choices this year, so plan to spend a little time at your local Barnes & Noble or Borders to preview what they have in stock. The most important information to look for, are the ratings or rankings of this year’s offenses and defenses. Also pay attention to new player acquisitions. Last year the New Orleans Saints acquired Drew Brees and Reggie Bush started coming into his own. They turned out to be one of the top offenses in the NFL and came within one win of the Super Bowl.

There are few places to play these games, so we will focus on our favorite site, TD-7 Fantasy Football (www.td-7football.com). They offer 2 contests, a season long game called "TD-7 Goal Rush" and a series of four 4-week elimination tournaments called "TD-7 Elimination Showdown". They also feature a unique style of league play which allows you to draft 2 teams for Offense and 2 teams for Defense per four week period. Players that opt for league play will find two head-head style season contests, a “Skins” style game for weekly action and a “Last Man Standing” for bi-weekly excitement. The last two years of team stats that you will need are also on their website.

Each week we will list our favorite picks in this column. They will be based on the most current information that we have. There will be a heavy bias on the schedule. The feature picks may be a very good team playing a very bad team in the good team’s home stadium. Last year it paid to take any decent defense against the hapless offensive Oakland Raiders. For point spread contests, the picks become much more difficult. Remember, the spreads try to make the game a toss up. For survivor pools, the opposite is true unless you have a restriction on using the same team more than once. Many people play in 3 or more contests during the year, since they know they will fair badly in some of them.

We will do our best to keep the column fairly short and to the point. Check our column as often as you wish and good luck wherever you play in 2008.