Envision yourself as the head coach in a roaring football stadium, shouting from the sidelines as one of your players makes an 85 yard run down the field with only 15 yards remaining to the endzone. Your objective as coach is for that player to earn you points for your Fantasy Football team.

What is Fantasy Football, and how does it work? 

ESPN demonstrates through a 2025 Beginner’s Guide, a tutorial on how Fantasy Football is played: you select and draft your own team of 13 to 16 players from the National Football League (NFL) players every week, play against another individual in your league, and keep an eye on their performance during the week’s football games, whether it’s making a pass, scoring a touchdown, or running the ball, you can earn what is called ‘Fantasy points.’ The skill based game is available on numerous sports platforms including Yahoo Fantasy Sports, the NFL’s official website, Sleeper, and CBS Sports Fantasy.

Highlights from the 2025 Fantasy season include the year’s best players including the 49ers’ Christian McCaffrey, their running back with over 1,200 yards and 17 touchdowns, Rams’ Puka Nacua, Falcons’ Bijan Robinson, Seahawks’ Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen. 

Entangled in the world of Fantasy sports, 61 percent of youth 18-29 since 2022 were reported to play Fantasy Football, whereas 26 percent of people 30 and up played in a Fantasy league (Statista).

While enticing  a significant amount of the student body, Fantasy Football has the attraction of competition, and gives individuals the motivation for keeping an eye on specific players. To distinguish Fantasy Football from sports betting or gambling sites, the app relies on cognitive and skillful abilities when playing. The objective of Fantasy is to compete in earning more points than other participants through weekly head-to-head matchups, and monitoring football players throughout the season. 

In contrast to Fantasy, sports betting is more dependent on betting for certain statistics, or a winner. The tactics of sports betting involves more strategy and, in most instances, relies on luck to win. Despite the strategic betting becoming an entertaining competition for some, the act has been deemed illegal in 11 U.S. states: California, Alaska, Hawaii, Georgia, Alabama, Idaho, Minnesota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Texas.

Economics teacher, Christopher Smith, who teaches seniors about sports betting, informed on the risk for individuals who may attempt to gamble. 

Wrapping up the 2025-26 football season, Fantasy players can expect to tune into another NFL season thriller with Superbowl LX on Sunday, Feb 8. There is a fierce rematch between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots—who both last met in the 2015 Superbowl XLIX.