By MARK COOMES
The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal

Old-school football fans love to gripe about the lack of loyalty in today's game.

Players switch teams, teams switch cities and snot-nosed college kids refuse to play for the franchise that drafts them. It's about "me," not "we"; the individual, not the team.

That's just fine with some fans. They not only understand the sport's mercenary mentality, they employ it. It's the key to conquering the parallel pigskin universe of fantasy football.

HOW TO PLAY FANTASY FOOTBALL

Fantasy football is so called because the games are waged by teams that exist only on paper or online. A basic fantasy league consists of eight to 12 teams. Team owners take turns selecting individual players from National Football League rosters. The owner picks one quarterback, two running backs, three receivers, a place-kicker and a team defense to represent his team each week. Scores are tabulated from statistical data - touchdowns, field goals, extra points and yards gained - that the individual players amass during actual games. Four tips for fantasy football newbies: • Run for glory. Good running backs are harder to find than good quarterbacks or receivers. If you don't draft at least one durable, productive, top-flight running back in the first two or three rounds, you're asking for trouble. • Be objective. Don't take players just because you like them or they play for your favorite team. "Don't draft with your heart," said Eric Karabell, senior editor for ESPN Fantasy Sports. "It's a great way to get yourself beat." • Project performance. "Don't just look at last year's stats and assume a player will duplicate that performance this year," Karabell said. "Try to project what the player will do this year, based on his age, his health, the kind of team he's on and other factors." • Be patient. "Don't cut or trade a guy just because he gets off to a bad start," Karabell said. "Some players start slower than others, and so do their teams." Keep in mind that because of scheduling quirks, some players face a string of top teams to start the season. As the opposition gets weaker, their stats will get better.

"It's not a game that rewards people who play sentimental favorites," said Eric Karabell, senior editor of ESPN Fantasy Games. "Way too many people draft with their hearts, and that will get you beat every time."

In other words, there's an awful lot of reality in fantasy football, an explosively popular pastime that has changed the way millions of fans interact with America's favorite spectator sport.

Various polls peg the number of fantasy football players at somewhere between 12 million and 27 million. Most of them play online. Membership in the world's largest cyberleague, run by Yahoo, jumped 60 percent to nearly 3 million players last year, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

ESPN.com, which offers six different fantasy football-related games, won't divulge any numbers, but Karabell said participation has grown between 40 percent and 50 percent in each of the past three years.

"It's huge and getting huger all time," said Rick Mabrey, a Louisville, Ky., fantasy football whiz. "We're really confident that we are on to something big."

Mabrey and his former Western Kentucky University roommate, Brian Maguire, both 35, have dominated various fantasy leagues for nearly 15 years. Last fall, Maguire netted nearly $6,000 by finishing second out of 3,400 teams in a national contest conducted by Pro Football Weekly magazine.

Fantasy football players play and watch a different game than most National Football League fans.

The notion of slavishly supporting one team is so last century. Though most fantasyphiles still root for a favorite team - Mabrey is a fiend for the St. Louis Rams; Karabell lives and dies with the Philadelphia Eagles - their real loyalties are to the faux franchises they create by cherry-picking star players from every corner of the NFL.

To wit, the team with which Maguire nearly won the Pro Football Weekly contest was built around a quarterback from the Seattle Seahawks, running backs from the San Diego Chargers, Green Bay Packers and Denver Broncos, and receivers from the Rams, Minnesota Vikings and Cincinnati Bengals.

Maguire had a rooting interest in every yard gained and touchdown scored in every game those players competed in - not to mention the players that peopled the other four teams Maguire fielded in various leagues last year.

The vast majority of fantasy football players are men between 18 and 40, surveys show. Just about all of them are thoroughly - and for the most part healthily - occupied from 1 p.m. Sunday afternoon to 1 a.m. Tuesday morning for 17 weeks a year.

There are worse ways for a fellow to spend half of every weekend between Labor Day and Christmas. Maguire and Mabrey's wives apparently think so. The guys insist that their significant others do not consider themselves football widows.

Karabell isn't so sure that's the case in every home.

"Surveys show that the average fantasy football player is in at least two or three different leagues," he said. "Some guys have 10 or even 20 teams."

They presumably share Mabrey's idea of autumnal bliss: "Nothing makes me happier than to sit down and watch a bunch of football games all day."

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