Issue Date: August 16, 2009

John Elway on winning fantasy football

By Cory Galliher

Thanks to the massive popularity of fantasy football, anyone can take a team to Super Bowl glory. More than 22 million Americans play, says the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. And fantasy websites sometimes pay thousands of dollars to select winners.

Here's how it typically works: You join a league with others and take part in a "draft" where you pick a lineup usually consisting of a quarterback, running backs, wide receivers and other players. Every week, fantasy league members set lineups and earn points according to the real-life performance of their players in NFL games. Generally, the fantasy player with the most points wins.

To find out more about winning strategies, we recently caught up with two-time Super Bowl champ John Elway, who plays fantasy football on opensports.com, a popular social-network sports site. We asked him to shed some light on four critical must-dos for top fantasy play:

Draft for depth. Sure, if you have Tom Brady or Drew Brees at QB, you're likely set at that position. But every star needs a backup. Just consider what happened last year with Brady: He got hurt in the first game and didn't play the rest of the season. Dagger! "You don't know when injuries will occur, so keep an eye out for less-well-known players who could still get the job done," Elway says.

Mind the schedule. Certain players are fabulous at home and indoors but choke during outdoor away games in cold weather. Oh, and don't forget that every NFL team has a "bye" week when it doesn't play at all. If all your best players have the same week off, you're setting yourself up for an automatic loss. "Fantasy football is about preparing in advance," Elway says.

Scour the waivers. That's where players who aren't on a current team owner's roster end up. Don't underestimate value here: Often, a future star is on waivers. After Brady went down, for example, a virtually unknown QB named Matt Cassel took over and had tremendous success. And he started out that season available on waivers in nearly all leagues. "This was a mistake I learned the hard way," Elway says. "I stuck with a team I drafted without making changes soon enough."

Have fun! Even if money is at stake, the real prize is bragging rights. Which means, even though fantasy sites offer public sites in which you join a league with strangers, Elway prefers to play in online private leagues with friends. "It's more fun to gloat after wins with buddies rather than with strangers," he says. "Talking trash, even if it's online, is still fun."