“The great thing about football, about sports is, you get an opportunity to prove it. It doesn’t matter what I say, he says, or what anyone else says. You have your opportunity to prove it. Just prove it on Sunday. Talk is talk. Just prove it.”

This is a classic statement, in my opinion. It speaks volumes about the NFL and its relationship to fantasy football. As I emphasize in my new book, The Art of Fantasy Football: Mastering the Metagame, true mastery involves mirroring the emotion and the intensity of the NFL. Professional football – more than most, if not all sports – is a highly emotional endeavor. The speed and ferocity of the game forces its players to call upon any technique to ratchet up the adrenaline. Human beings thrive on emotion and that’s what it means to get “fired up”. Emotion is like a fuel that ignites our will and intensity. It is a focusing technique.

Rodney Harrison is the type of player you want to be aligned with in the world of fantasy football. No matter which way it goes on Sunday, he cares. He has something to prove. Same with Joey Porter. I want to be involved with players like Porter and Harrison . This is what I am always striving to do in fantasy; align myself with outstanding players who are dedicated to the same thing I am: proving it on the field.

I win so many trophies and create league dynasties because I tune in to what is really happening in the world of the NFL. This is the “fantasy” part of the football, me tuning into it. I utilize all of my research, number crunching, schedule preparation and all the different techniques I discuss in my book, to achieve a state of oneness with my dudes.

This is how I prove it on Sunday and beat my opponents. I don’t just talk about it. I do all this insane research and preparation and then I pick and nurture players who want it more than the other ones. They want it more, just like I do. I want doers, not talkers. I want a Rodney Harrison, a Joey Porter.

More to the point, I am Joey Porter and Rodney Harrison.

You know what? He’s right.

The thing is, though, I don’t view luck as something that happens to me but something I make happen. I create my own luck and it feels good. Like karma, luck is something I generate myself through my actions. My preparations are consistent and conducive with success and that is why good things constantly happen to me in the world of fantasy football.

Just as karma implies a reaction to a prior action, luck is the universe’s response to solid preparation. Let’s briefly break down my friend’s psychology on this whole subject. Was it luck that Willie Parker and Michael Turner had such wonderful performances? True, maybe not a lot of people saw it coming. I stole these guys in the middle rounds of the draft because Fast Willie had a disappointing season last year and was coming of a broken leg and Burner Turner was an unproven commodity as a starter because he was Tomlinson’s backup. People were very unsure about them. But I wasn’t.

Both of these guys looked absolutely awesome in the preseason and the vibes all through training camp were outstanding. According to everyone Fast Willy looked better than ever. He was back in 2006 form, the year he helped win me the league trophy. Watching him in the preseason confirmed what I heard. He looked great. Also, the Steeler offense was now geared to be pass-happy, with Santonio Holmes emerging and a new commitment to open up the offense. This was obviously going to have a positive effect on Willie Parker, which was proven on Sunday. The same was true of Turner. He looked great in camp and in the exhibition season and the Falcons were committed to getting him the ball. I had poured over the NFL schedule for weeks prior to our draft and I realized both these guys had excellent matchups from start to finish, especially in a division with relatively poor defenses they were destined to play twice that year. I thought they’d be overlooked in the draft and they were. I thought they’d come out banging right away at the beginning of the season and they did.

I thoroughly research and prepare. I put myself in a position to succeed. Is it luck? I don’t know what you call it but it might as well be the same thing. I appear lucky to my opponents because I manifest what is happening. I use what is naturally occurring to make things happen. I create my own reality. It sounds esoteric and goofy but it is scientific and real. Humans tend to see events in a linear way and so things seem more magical than they are. They see Parker and Turner go ballistic and chalk it up to blind chance when in reality the truth is far different. Other people whom I dominate in fantasy people are unlucky (especially against me) because they are not nearly as prepared as I am. In The Art of Fantasy Football, I show you how to create this type of luck for yourself.

I am lucky at fantasy football. Luck is one of the key reasons I consistently win and create league dynasties. However, my concept of luck is not the one most people understand. This is why so many people hold the false notion that fantasy football is a game based on luck. It isn’t. Or maybe it is. It all depends on how you define the word and the process. And as you now see I prefer to create my own definitions. I define my own terms. And I manifest my own destiny: I take down the trophy and scoop the cash. In fantasy football, nothing else matters.

Seek to create your own luck. This is the way to mastery in fantasy football.

There are two main components to any individual’s fantasy draft: information and the analysis of that information. Most people only get the first part right and that is why they lose. There is nothing more important to fantasy mastery than information. People prepare for the draft by scouring news reports, reading blogs, fantasy magazines, watching ESPN, checking out the exhibition games. All of these sources of information are valid and need to be assimilated. However, it is in the process of analyzing this information where most people go wrong, especially in their fantasy draft.

Somebody else’s cheat sheet is not going to take into account how your specific league is constructed. It will not factor in the unique rules and settings that your league uses. Your league settings determine the scoring system and that dictates everything. As I go into detail in my book, no player has any inherent value apart from the scoring system your league adopts. Sure, L.T. is going to thrive under any system but things get much more dicey after the first couple rounds. You also need to understand your league’s roster set-up. This is another thing that the prognosticators are not factoring in when they give you their “picks”. How many quarterbacks do you utilize? Is there a FLEX? How many bench spots? All of these things matter much more than almost anyone realizes.

The main piece of information you should be analyzing though is the NFL schedule. Very few people do this. Contained in the schedule is every single matchup any potential player will encounter during the year. Notice, I did not say “likely to encounter”? It is predetermined, unchanging, written in stone. This is why it is so important to know the NFL schedule cold and to anticipate favorable matchups long before the season. With so many unknowns, the schedule is a constant. As Bob Dylan might put it, the schedule offers you “shelter from the storm.”

A final note on your demeanor during the draft… Whether it is done online or live, always seek out ways to psychologically manipulate your opponents. A big part of the hidden metagame at work is the element of psychological warfare. The draft is one of the best times to begin to put this to work. You want to get inside of people’s heads and manipulate them into making big mistakes. In The Art of Fantasy Football, I show you how to accomplish this goal.

Create your own strategy custom designed for your individual league by properly analyzing the information at your disposal. You will be light years ahead of everyone. 

Ahh, yes… it’s that time of year again. Get excited. Get very excited. With the start of training camp comes the month of August and this is when we football enthusiasts get fired up. Right now is when the fantasy leagues are forming. This is when your draft is being set and league settings are being finalized. This is the infancy of the new season. Everything is fragile and new. Yet even now at this early stage you want to be taking action to ensure your eventual victory.

But what kind of action should you take? Heath Ledger, in his tremendous performance as The Joker in the new Batman movie, gives a wonderful demonstration of the kind of spirit to embody when you play the strategically rich – and often misunderstood – game of fantasy football. Notice, we love The Joker as much for his creativity and dogged determination as anything. This guy has a wicked sense of planning and execution (no pun intended.) Aside from all of his antics, The Joker matches Batman’s intensity and ability to get the job done. He is very effective at what he does.

Fantasy football is a game much suited to the maniacal approach that The Joker demonstrates. In a virtual fantasy realm, it serves you well to think about things on a level of psychological manipulation akin to what a villain like The Joker is doing in a comic book. I go into this subject in detail in my new book, “The Art of Fantasy Football: Mastering the Metagame”, in my discussion on fantasy role playing games and their similarities and contribution to the game of fantasy football. Much as the way you utilize witches and sorcerers in Dungeons & Dragons, you seek to utilize your Chad Johnson or Ladainian Tomlinson in an attempt to destroy your opponent.

Now is the time… now, in the early stages of your fantasy football league, to begin infecting your league with the psychological qualities that will set the tone for things to come. As I detail in my book, there are specific actions you can be taking right now to make sure things unfold in your favor. You should be utilizing all of the psychological tools at your disposal to tilt the outcome in your favor.

This isn’t an esoteric or ephemeral concept. Just ask The Joker. Like Batman, this guy doesn’t just show up. The Joker comes prepared. Both he and Batman conduct spectacular planning sessions. They take their craft seriously. What we see in the end result is the artistry unfolding. But make no mistake. Nothing comes easy. As Sun Tzu pointed out, victory is insured long before the battle. This is actually the crux of The Art of War: who wins and loses is determined early on in the planning stages.

So just as the entire NFL is warming up and strategizing and preparing for the season to come, you too should be operating on a grand master-plan type of level. Focus on what you aim to accomplish and determine a plan to attain that goal. (You’re goal, by the way, should be to scoop the cash and nothing less.) My book will show you exactly how to accomplish this. And don’t be afraid to emulate the carefully plotted shenanigans of The Joker. His brand of psychological manipulation over his opponents, combined with careful planning and deliberate action, is the mindset of the master in this crazy world of fantasy football.

The Brett Favre drama, though, can teach us a valuable lesson about getting our priorities straight. In my new book, “The Art of Fantasy Football: Mastering the Metagame”, I explore in depth the concept of maintaining focus. The idea is that in order to dominate your fantasy league, year after year as I have done, you need to use the power of intention to make things happen. This simply means that you have a goal in mind and you refuse to allow obstacles to get in your way. In order to harness this intention, however, you must first utilize the power of attention. The trick here is that whatever you put your attention on will grow stronger (guided to a specific end through your intention) and conversely, whatever you take your attention away from will wither and die.
 
The enemy, then, is lack of focus: distraction. Whatever diverts your focus away from your desired goal can be considered a blockade. This brings me back to good old number 4. It’s not that I don’t like Brett Favre. He’s a swell guy. Gunslinger’s arm, plays for the love of the game, blah, blah, blah. We’ve heard all the Brett Favre clichés; so much in fact that I think there is a book of them out there that the media outlets go to when they do a piece on the man.
 
It is also not that I think he should stay retired, or that I think he should come back, or that I think he should do another blue jeans commercial. The fact of the matter is that when it comes to fantasy football: I don’t care. Not only is Brett Favre a historically mediocre (to poor) fantasy QB to begin with, the question of his retirement is irrelevant to the work you should be doing right now fantasy-wise.
 
There are a million things you should be focused on right now and Brett Favre is at the bottom of the list. While the media chatters on and on about this one situation, you should be analyzing the upcoming NFL schedule, looking for good matchups and researching the teams and the players you will potentially put on your squad. In short, you should be preparing for the season, using all of your fantasy time for that purpose.
 
True, it is tempting to get caught up in drama. After all, diversion, distraction, procrastination, these are all moods we humans easily get caught up in. But we also know these are enemies of our intended goal. It makes it even more difficult and confusing because the media is where we look for our information. And as I point out in my book, information is the key to fantasy football. The lesson Brett Favre can teach us, though, is to always be on the lookout for a bad seed. Focus on what you should be focused on, not only now… but throughout the entire season. In “The Art of Fantasy Football” I show you specifically, what those things are.
 
Beware of distractions. They will destroy even the best intentions. When you get the impression that something is irrelevant, it probably is. Trust your intuition and maintain your focus. Pay attention to what’s important. This will ensure your intended goal: crushing your opponents and taking down the league trophy.

Important lessons can be derived from the genesis of the game. It is extremely revealing, for instance, that the game was conceived before the advent of the technology that made it mainstream. Just as in an old school fantasy game like Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy football is not computer based. Rather, it is constructed in such a way that the number values associated with the scoring of the game could just as well be kept longhand, with a paper and pencil. In fact, that is exactly how Bill Winkenbach and his buddies kept score (and how everyone before the internet played the game.) 

Stripped of technology, we can evaluate the game for what it is: a numbers game based on performance. The numbers themselves are completely arbitrary, depending on how you decide to set up the rules. Therefore, the rules your league adopts will determine the scoring and eventually who wins and who loses. Fantasy football is a game based on number values and scoring. Fantasy football is a game based on statistics. That’s it. Nothing more. Fantasy football is really an antiquated game played online. 

In order to become a true master you must learn and control the secret metagame at work in fantasy football as discussed in The Art of Fantasy Football.

Most people are familiar with the film, The Matrix, (and if you’re not, you need to seriously catch up on your movie watching, but I digress) – In the movie, fairly early on, Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, gives the interminably naïve Keanu Reeve’s character, Neo, a choice in the form of two pills, one red, one blue. Take the blue pill, you wake up like nothing happened, just as you were before; take the red pill, and like Alice through the looking glass, you will suddenly see everything very differently. Your entire reality will be turned upside down. But in that process comes the promise of enlightenment, to see the truth for the very first time. In the Matrix, Neo chooses the red pill, and the ability to see reality, the simple truth, which he had not known until now: that what he thought was real, what he had always assumed to be his world, his life, his environment, everything, was all a fabrication. Despite where he thought he was, he was actually somewhere else. Who he had assumed he was, he wasn’t. And everything he thought he was doing, he was not.

The above scenario is how most people approach fantasy football, just like Neo before the Red Pill. They assume they are playing the game, yet they are not. They continually lose, year after year, to their own shame and embarrassment. I know because I used to be one of those people myself, many years ago, before I swallowed my own red pill and took those deliberate and often painful first steps towards the truth. You see, the reason why you lose at fantasy football is that you are not – in all actuality – playing the game of fantasy football, even though you believe with all your heart that you are. This not only insures that you will lose, but it completely hinders your potential to grow and get better, because as they say in the recovery movement, you can’t be helped until you admit you have a problem. Morpheus explains as much to Neo when he tells him he himself must choose to see reality, he must choose the red pill. And so must you.

To quote another movie, Training Day, “This is chess, not checkers!” The people who have been winning your fantasy league year after year understand this. They not only are playing the game, while the weak players are not, they also understand the complexity and diverse strategy involved in taking down league trophies. And furthermore, they rely on, even prey on, your incorrect presupposition that you are approaching the endeavor with the proper amount of seriousness, let alone the aforementioned concept that you’re not even on the right playing field. They are playing fantasy football and you’re chasing shadows.

This all leads to the concept of “the metagame” which is the main subject of my new book, “The Art of Winning Fantasy Football, Mastering the Metagame”, a secret strategy guide which I produced for the Fantasy Football Institute, where I am lead instructor. In any area of life, in fact even the process of everyday life itself, within its form and movement contains a set of unifying principles – a paradigm – which governs and dictates the action that unfolds. Just as a pasta maker will not brew coffee, you will never win at fantasy football if you are operating the wrong machine. This underlying framework is known as the metagame, the game within the game, the set of rules that govern the action. And in fantasy football, more than in most games, the metagame is particularly difficult to identify. Indeed, winning fantasy football is derived from mastering the metagame. This is the critical understanding you will need in order to thrive and crush your opponents. My book is devoted to giving you this understanding, the tools and techniques, the paradigm shift (the red pill) which will enable you to see the real world of fantasy football.

You’ve been running around in the dark and you didn’t even know it. Step into the light. I will teach you the real game of fantasy football, the unifying set of principles that govern the game, I will empower you to empower yourself and crush the people who have been crushing you. I will teach you how to dominate your league year after year. As the ancient Chinese proverb says, “give a man a fish and he has food for a day, teach a man to fish and he has food for a lifetime.” I don’t give picks and stats like the others, that information is everywhere. What I will teach you is how to see the truth. Emboldened with that knowledge you will be playing the real game of fantasy football, likely for the very first time. This is how you will win.

Yet I've come to realize over the years that many people choose not to follow the NFL draft. Over the weekend, I made calls to all the people I'm in a fantasy league with… all of them, even a guy I know who is down in South America right now. You see, I know where everyone was last weekend and I know for a fact that only a handful of my opponents came anywhere near the NFL draft. And it is no coincidence that the people I talked to who were paying attention to the draft are the very same ones who have given me the toughest battles over the years.

The knowledge all winners seem to share is the direct correlation between awareness and success in fantasy football. I spend a great deal of time delving into the concept of awareness in my new book "The Art of Fantasy Football" because it is at the crux of everything we do in the fantasy realm. Every action that we perform at a fantasy level should be based on a consistent pattern of awareness; paying attention to the information at your disposal.

There are many reasons to watch the NFL draft, the most obvious is that these are the future players on your fantasy team. Several months, a few years down the road, take a sneak peek past all the speculation, projections and opinions and recognize the simple truth: these are your future dudes; your potential 2010 star running back, your 2012 stud quarterback. This is your future team! Your fantasy future. What could possibly be not worth paying attention to about that?

There are no items of disinterest when it comes to dominating the game of fantasy football. As I point out repeatedly in my book, it is in the details where you find the keys to victory. By being aware of occurrences along the way, you gain a severe edge over your opponents. Choosing to not follow the NFL draft, a typical error many people make, is a tremendous mistake.

I learned a lot of things watching the draft this weekend. First and foremost, I was reminded just how much I love football. It is fantastic in the midst of the NBA playoffs and the start of the baseball season, to see the NFL machine back in action. It is awesome to hear Boomer and Mort and Mel Kiper Jr. and the whole gang talking up the sport we love.

And love is the key to awareness. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points out in his seminal work on the subject, Flow, it is when you are completely engrossed in something that you are the most aware. In fantasy football terms, this simply means: I love football. When I'm watching the NFL draft, I'm passionate about it; I'm into it, I'm paying attention. I'm aware. It is this built up awareness strung together over time, a proven pattern of consistent moment-based knowledge about the NFL that gives me my edge over my opponents. It is literally the key that facilitates victory.

I noticed that all is well in the NFL. I love Roger Goodell's new streamlined draft moved back three hours for the west coast. It is easy to see why the NFL is a more profitable league than all the other sports leagues combined. How cool was it to see the tears stream down Glenn Dorsey's face when the Chiefs came calling with the fifth pick? I saw the absence of first round receiver selections and I noticed the AFC's emphasis on defense this coming year, the possible emergence of the Raiders, a wake up alarm sounded by the Tuna in Miami, and on and on. This past weekend will directly impact fantasy football for years to come.

This past weekend, I was paying close attention to the NFL draft. Were you?