Fantasy Football 101

The integration of Fantasy Football into my teachings this year has been an extremely successful experience and has become an important part of my Algebra I curriculum at Foothill High School in San Jose, CA. After a thorough online investigation of Fantasy Football options, I implemented my league based upon the guidelines in the Fantasy Football and Mathematics Teacher's Resource Guide at FantasySportsMath.com. The FantasySportsMath.com web site states that their implementation is designed for a wide variety of grade levels (grades 5-12 and basic college mathematics), and I have been able to build upon the Algebra I aspects of the implementation in my classroom. In fact, I enthusiatically recommend this approach to any teacher looking for an alternative approach for preparing their students for the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) or any similar state exam.

I first introduced the game to each of my Algebra I classes during the first week of school, originally concentrating on getting the students familiar with the rules and drafting a team. I divided my class into groups of four, making sure that at least one student on each fantasy team passed my “Tiki Barber Test” of being able to identify Tiki Barber as the running back for the New York Giants. By the end of the first week, each team had chosen fourteen NFL players based upon a 42 million dollar budget and the player values listed in the NFL 2006-2007 Player Values Sheet at FantasySportsMath.com.

Now that all of the teams for my league were set up, I needed to find a web site that could provide statistics for the league. Although I looked at several free football web sites, I ended up joining a Fantasy Football League at CBS SportsLine (http://www.sportsline.com/fantasy) to enable me to accumulate and distribute my weekly statistics. I have been told by the FantasySportsMath.com web site that they expect to make these statistics available through the web site next year, which would be a major benefit to every participating school.

For my Algebra I class, I was able to skip the more table-based methods in the Teacher’s Resource Guide and introduce the algebra-based Fantasy Football equation during the very first week of competition. My students used the basic formula for the first several weeks of the season, and originally most of the students were convinced that the equation was too difficult for them to ever learn and master. However, after we spent a day using this equation with the sample statistics in the Teacher’s Resource Guide, many of the students were already ready for the actual competition.

We have had one Fantasy Football lesson per week since the first week, usually on Thursday so that I have ample time to gather all of the statistics. I start out my Fantasy Football lessons by distributing three items to each of my students:

• Weekly scoring worksheet to record the team’s results (from the Fantasy Football and Mathematics Student Workbook)
• Printout of the weekly statistics for every player (from CBS SportsLine)
• Printout of the weekly lineups for each fantasy team (from my Fantasy Football Spreadsheet)

I then write the week’s equation on the board and work out an example before letting the students finish the rest of their worksheet. Eventually, I used some of the 111 different scoring systems in the Teacher’s Resource Guide to introduce increasingly more difficult equations. Some of the beginning Algebra I skills learned that the class has already learned through Fantasy Football include:

• Order of Operations (PEMDAS)
• Algebraic substitution
• Commutative and Identity properties
• Distributive property of multiplication over addition

Since I don’t allow calculators in my classroom for Algebra I, I have also used the equation to teach the students how to perform multiplication and division in their heads without paper or a calculator (perish the thought!). Specifically, I ask the students to calculate the passing, rushing and receiving values by dividing the yardages by 25 and 10 in their heads. For some of my students, even dividing by 10 was not a trivial matter at first but they all quickly grasped the concept after some instruction. I was eventually able to cross reference this knowledge about division by 10 to provide insight into my scientific notation lessons. Even dividing by 25 was pretty easy for most of my students once they understood that dividing by 25 was the same as determining how many quarters were in a dollar (or two dollars, etc.).