Fantasy football (American)
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Fantasy Football is a fantasy sports game in which participants (called "owners"), arranged into a league, each draft or acquire via auction a team of real-life American football players and then score points based on those players' statistical performance on the field. A typical fantasy league will employ players from a single football league , such as the NFL or an NCAA division. Leagues can be arranged in which the winner is the team with the most total points at the end of the season, or in a head-to-head format (which mirrors the actual NFL ) in which each team plays against a single opponent each week, and at the end of the year the team with the best win-loss record wins the league. Most leagues set aside the last weeks of the regular season for their own playoffs .

The game originated in 1962 from an idea of Bill Winkenbach , then a Raiders limited partner, with assistance from Bill Tunnell , the Raiders' public relations man, Scotty Stirling , the beat writer from the Oakland Tribune , and George Ross , the Tribune's sports editor, as well as Philip Carmona , Winkenbach's friend. The idea emerged from a three-week road trip the Raiders took to the East Coast . Winkenbach and the others fleshed out the idea during the trip, and upon their return, formed the first fantasy football league, the GOPPPL (Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League).

Fantasy football has evolved in recent years from a mere recreational activity into a big business industry due to the Internet . 15 to 16 million consumers play fantasy sport and that number is growing at a rate of 7% to 10% annually. Fantasy sports have an estimated economic impact of US$ 1.5 billion within the industry and close to $4 billion total economic impact, according to FSTA research completed by the University of Mississippi [ citation needed ] . Fantasy football has surpassed fantasy baseball in popularity and is now the most popular fantasy sport in the United States . [ citation needed ] It is continuing to grow with countless new websites, magazines, and drafting software dedicated to fantasy football being released each year.