Fantrax 101: Creating a Fantasy Football League
Welcome to Fantrax, the home of fantasy sports and the official partner of Faceoff Sports Network. Never used Fantrax? Perfect. You’ve come to the right place to learn how to start your next fantasy sports league! Whether you’re looking for fantasy football, baseball, basketball, or something else, they’ve got you covered. No website out there has more customization capabilities than Fantrax. You can check out all of Fantrax’s features on the Feature Comparison page.
How Do I Sign Up For A New Fantrax Account?
Before you can dig into Fantrax’s features, you must first sign up for a new account. You can begin the registration process by clicking on the “SIGN UP” button located in the upper right-hand corner of the home screen. After you enter all of your basic information, you will see a box that says, “How did you hear about us?” Be sure to let Fantrax know that your friends at the FF Faceoff sent you!
How Do I Create A New League On Fantrax?
To start, go to the upper left area of the site page, and you will see the “games” drop-down tab. There are many season-long fantasy games to choose from but today we’re here to create a fantasy football team. Click the” NFL” icon which will bring you to the NFL fantasy football lobby. It may look confusing here as there are commissioner, classic draft, best ball, and mock drafts to choose from.
We’re here to create a redraft league so under the commissioner area, click the “Create League” tab. Here is where the fun begins! The create league gives you three different tabs to choose from. “Use a Fantrax Default Setup”, “Moving from Another Site” and “Copy League”. Moving from another site only allows you to bring in a Yahoo! or ESPN league. Copy league takes a current or previous league and gives you the option to carry over scoring from another league. Thus, many options to choose from, and very simple to bring over a league.
*If you need help, DM me on Twitter @RyanMiner_FFB.
Let’s get back on track here with creating our league! Step 1 will be “what do you want to do?” By clicking on the “Use a Fantrax Default Setup”, we are moving onto Step 2, known as “choose league type.” You will have 15 different types of leagues to create your league from. Choose the one that best fits your standard. Don’t know which one to use? That’s what’s great about Fantrax. If you move your mouse over each square, it will give you a description of what each type of league scoring means.
To conclude with the last step known as “Step 3: Enter basic settings”. First, you will choose a league name, followed by your team’s name, league type, draft type, promotion code, and league description. If you have any issues, there is a purple question mark in each box of what you are to do in each box. Once you have put all your league’s information in, click the submit button. This may take a few seconds to get to this part of the screen, but don’t fret, your league is being created!
League Settings
Congratulations! Your league has now been created. In this area, you have many options for the league that you just created. The first thing to do is invite friends and/or family members to get your league going! There are five ways to invite people too! You can share it on Twitter or Facebook. Send an invite through email. You can also copy the invite link and share it via Twitter or text message (if you create it over your phone). Finally, you can “invite friends from past leagues” that were previously used via Fantrax.
Commissioner
As the creator of the league, you are known as the commissioner. You can customize the league or head to league home once you’ve sent out invites. We’re going to keep it simple here and go to “league home”. Here you have the same options as you did when you created the league! If you thought you missed something in the setup, you can fix it all here!
You’ll be able to invite friends, set your draft date, and change things (scoring, league name, draft date, etc.) on the fly. The site is very user-friendly. If you think hitting the back arrow on your browser will mess things up, it won’t! It’s easy to flow through. Fantrax has made this stress free to set up and use.
Customization
Want to change your league name, or add a league logo or wall logo? Go back to the general tab and make these changes. You can also change the scoring to something different, it’s that simple.
So, your league doesn’t want to use the current scoring? No problem. As commissioner, you just click under the commissioner tab “league setup”. There are many blue tabs to work from general to miscellaneous. You set the league to how you want to fit it! Build teams and schedules, have a roster pool of all NFL teams, or even do what some fantasy baseball teams do and create an AFC or NFC only and even go a little more into Devy and add them to the player pool! How fun is that?
Roster Setup
We’ll continue with the “Rosters” tab, which gives you the ability to set up roster positions and the number of starters and bench players. You even have the option to set an injured reserve, a taxi squad (dynasty teams), and a min/max if you want to for a position you want to play (rotisserie) and count best players (best ball). Many different scoring options. Finally, at the bottom, you can select positions. Max number of starters, along with removing positions. If you remove positions, a popup box will appear to tell you that certain scoring will be removed with the position.
Scoring
Next, we’re going to head over to the scoring tab. Here you can set your scoring to your preferences. What to do tight end premium? Select the “Score Positions Differently” box, and the positions pop up. Since we’re looking at the tight end and I want to give them a reception bonus, I click the “Category” box and select receptions. A box will pop up below and you assign what additional points you want to have. As soon as you’re done, be sure to click the “Save” button or nothing will be saved. You can change the scoring of any position, offense, and defense to get the scoring settings to your league’s preference.
Transactions & Periods
In the “Transactions & Periods” tab, you will select what you want your league to do: lineups, trades, and claims/drops. The data here is already auto-filled in, but you can change it to whatever your league agrees upon. Line-up lock means what player is in your lineup “locks” five minutes before kickoff. The rest is pretty self-explanatory, and you can run it for a season as is and change it the following year.
Salaries & Contracts
From here we go into our salaries and contracts tab. If you are doing a salary cap league (also known as an auction) you can set a set value for the league ($200 is a good start) and have free agents, be the minimum price ($1 is standard). Contacts look like a fun part of the game here as it looks like you are a true general manager of your team. You can have it automated or custom. The great thing is with questions on all these, there’s a question mark you can click on to give you a better understanding of what it means.
The Draft
The next part of our tabs is the draft tab. The draft is the most fun part of your whole fantasy football league. You’ll need to decide how you’re going to run your draft. You can do your draft online as a standard snake draft or auction league, an automated one (which doesn’t sound fun), or an offline one where it looks like you will add the roster yourself. Here you will also set your league’s draft date and time, along with total rounds and what to do with the undrafted players.
Fantrax recently updated their draft room making it easier to use and more visually appealing.
Desktop
Mobile
Fees and Prizes
Next, we are up to the Fees and Prizes tab. Here Fantrax offers a FREE treasurer to use for the site! Who doesn’t like something free? In the fees section, you can set a value for your league when they do waiver wire pickups, trades, and anything else that you would like to help make that pot grow. The prize tab is where you can add a prize to the winner. Something like a jersey, helmet, or whatever you want to give away to the winner of the league. You can even have a trophy along with place winners winning something. Just add it all in.
Miscellaneous
Last but not least, we have come to the end of our tabs as this is the miscellaneous tab or “Misc.” Here you can select if it’s a redraft, keeper, devy, college, or dynasty league. There is also a tiebreaker tab to help with teams that have the same record, and tiebreakers can be many to choose from, so there should be no grief when it comes to standings, matchup tie (if you choose to), and playoff tie. The final tab is a bylaws tab. You can put rules and other league standards that aren’t spelled out anywhere else. League issues? Bylaws should fix it.
Lastly, I hope this helped you out. I like the layout of Fantrax and will be trying many different kinds of leagues out on here. As I stated earlier, if you have any questions, feel free to DM me on Twitter @RyanMiner_FFB!
Now let’s go play some fantasy football!
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