The Best Online Fantasy Football Leagues

So you've heard about the joys of fantasy football, and you're ready to try your hand at being a virtual general manager. Maybe you have a good idea about how various types of leagues work, and you even have a good handle on how you want to build your team. The next steps are to study the different league programs available to you, determine which one best matches your goals, and sign up. To help you get started in your evaluation, here are some of the best online fantasy football games available to you for 2009.

ESPN Fantasy Football 2009

The king of sports news also offers one of the very best free fantasy football games available. Keeper or one-year leagues can be configured for live or automatic drafts, and both points and head-to-head scoring are supported. Players can join private leagues by invitation, or they can sign up for any available public league. ESPN also offers extensive tools for player research, mock drafts to help you get ready for your real draft, player movement mechanisms, and league message boards. There is something for just about everyone here.

http://games.espn.go.com/frontpage/football

FOX Sports Fantasy Football

On a level with ESPN Fantasy Football is this offering from FOX Sports. Pretty much everything that written above about the ESPN game applies here, with the added bonus that player news is easier to access from the FOX fantasy pages than from ESPN's pages. Both games show you on-screen alerts to indicate that new information is available for a particular player, but FOX gives up its goodies with a simple mouseover, while ESPN requires a mouse click and some additional navigation. It may seem like a small distinction, but it can make a big difference when you're doing player research.

http://msn.foxsports.com/fantasy/football/commissioner

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football

Yahoo! offers both a free and PLUS version of their fantasy football game, both of which offer a choice of keeper or one-year leagues and configurable league settings such as which statistics to count, scoring options, and player movement options. The PLUS version offers more advanced league controls and handy research add-ons including as stat tracker, a draft-day kit to get you ready for the player selection process, and a weekly scouting report. In addition, the PLUS game (which costs about $25 for a team and around $125 for a league), offers bobbleheads or t-shirts as prizes for winning teams. As with ESPN and Fox, you can control all of your fantasy teams from one account.

http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/

American Fantasy Football League High-Stakes Fantasy Football

The focus thus far has been on free leagues, because, if you're new to fantasy, you're unlikely to want to pony up cash to play in your first league. Frankly, the free leagues presented here offer you most of the features and excitement you could ever need in playing fantasy football ... unless you really want to play for something more than pride and glory. In that case, you may want to look into a game such as AFFL High-Stakes Fantasy Football, which offers most of the standard features of the free leagues, and then some, plus the chance to win cash prizes for your efforts. Entry fees range from nothing (yes, a free option) to $1400 per team, while available prize payouts range from $25-$50,000, depending on your team level and final finish. As you can imagine, some of the folks involved in these types of leagues are extremely serious about their "hobbies".

http://www.affl.com/

These fantasy football games represent a good cross-section of the options available to you, and they are some of the best to boot. Check out these options, look at a few more if you like (Google is your friend here), and then pick your poison. After that, get cracking and enjoy the fantasy football season!