In a nutshell, rotisserie sports involves generating teams from actual players and using the stats that they generate to rank who has made the better team. There are several different ways that teams can get generated, there are several different stats that you can track, there are different pools of players you can select from but they all pretty much use the same method of ranking teams. Below I'll attempt to describe a little bit about each.
First off, you'll need to choose which league (or leagues) you'll be choosing your players from. For the purposes of my explanation, we'll assume we're talking about a baseball rotis league. You can choose to only use players from the AL, you can choose to only use players from the NL, or you can choose to use players from both. Let's assume we're using both. Then, you'll need to choose a roster to use. Most baseball rotis league rosters are set up the same way. You'll have some number of players who must qualify at each of the different positions that real major league players play. For example, in the LVDRL (my league) each roster must have 5 outfielders, 2 catchers, 1 first baseman, 1 second baseman, 1 shortstop, 1 third baseman, 1 corner utility player (1st or 3rd), 1 middle utility player (2nd or short) and 9 pitchers. In order for a players to qualify at a position in rotis, he must have played at least some number of games at that particular position in real life. For example, you can not draft Jose Canseco as your shortstop. The LVDRL uses 20 games in the past season or 5 games in this current season as a positional qualifier.
Now, if the league is a draft league, you'd determine a draft order and then take turns choosing players from the pool of players selected (In this case both AL and NL) until everyone has a complete roster. Once a player is chosen, that owner owns that player for the season and no one else can draft him.
If the league is a money, or auction, league it's handled quite a bit differently. Each team owner is given a set amount of money to work with, and from this money you must pay everyone on your roster, and you ONLY have that set amount of money to work with. For example, in the last money league I was in, we started with $263 (funny money) and had to pay all 23 players from that sum, leaving an average for $11/player. So then each player would be auctioned instead of drafted. This gives everyone an equal chance at every player. A player would be put up for bid and then an auction would take place. The owner that offers the most money gets the player, then that salary is subtracted from the total and the owner now has that much less money to bid on other players. So now the dilemma is this; Do I pay Barry Bonds $60 and now only have $203 for 22 other players and end up surrounding him with lesser talent? Or do I try to compete by not drafting superstars and drafting more lesser valuable players? It makes for alot of fun this way.
Each league can decide what stats it wants to track. Most leagues, however, use the same basic categories with only some minor modifications. You can also choose how many different categories to use. All the leagues I've been in use either 8 total categories or 10 total categories. In baseball, that would mean 4 or 5 batting categories, ie; Batting Average, RBI, Home Runs, Runs Score, Stolen Bases, Runs Produced, etc... and 4 or 5 pitching categories, ie; ERA, Wins, Saves, Baserunners to Innings Pitched Ratio, Strikeouts, etc... In hoops, the league I'm un uses FG pct, 3's made, FT's made, Rebounds, Assists, Steals, Blocks, and Total Points. You would then pick your team to try and have the 'best' team according to all these categories.
Now that you have categories and teams, how does it score and work? Good question. You would take each category and rank each team according to TEAM totals. If the category was HomeRuns, you would add up ALL the HomeRuns hit by every player on your team to get a TEAM total. Then your team total would be ranked against the other teams totals and points would be assigned. If the league was a 3 team league and Team A ranked 1st, it would get 3 points assigned, if Team B ranked 2nd, it would get 2 points, and if Team C were last, it would get 1. You could then do this for all the other categories and add up the total points earned and the team that earned the most points at the end of the season would be the winner. To see a good example of how this work check out my current hoops rotis team page.
So, there ya have it. That's Rotisserie Sports in a nutshell. There are many variations that can be used but this is a good generic basis to understand how it works. If you have any comments or questions, please e-mail me directly and I'd be MORE than happy to answer any questions or offer any suggestions.
Dana Lane ( lane@ultranet.com ). to mail me from Netscape.