This is the time of the year when a plague takes over the US and Canada immediately causing 51 million women to become widows. It’s the start of the NFL season and thus the Fantasy Football black hole virus. However we’re going to focus on the 8 million women whom are also joining fantasy football leagues as we going to give you the play on how to compete and win in any FF league.

Firstly, understand that this is NOT just a man’s activity and women have many attributes that will make them even better players than our male counterparts. Less emotion and not as much attachment to a particular team or conference being major advantages we won’t be burdened with. Moreover, the ability to plainly look quantitative data to make decisions rather than falling back on so called “knowledge of the game” such as assuming how a player will perform because of familiarity with player or the name. The number of women playing fantasy football in the United States and Canada more than doubled since 2007, growing to 8.3 million in 2014, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

If that’s not motivation enough could you imagine anything better than winning your office fantasy league and throwing it in the face of your colleagues? Well, we’re here to help you do that and will update this article on a weekly basis. To start you have to understand they should have never called it fantasy football and instead called it stats pro football or analytics football as it has nothing to do with fantasies but plain and simple mathematics and stats. Firstly you draft a team of players and you don’t need to even assign names to them. You can even call them player A, B, through F with those player being grouped into specific classes where you can play 3 of the players from group A, 2 from group B, and one from the 4 and take the names out of the mix. You evaluate player a based on his stats, and place it in your ‘lineup’ based on who has the most favorable matchup and therefore the highest chance of scoring more points than his counterpart on your opponent’s team. If you can win the majority of the matchups you have a better than average chance of winning the game.

Ok, we understand there is a little more to it than that, but that’s the basics and if you think like a computer that’s the way you would attack the problem. Now how to choose the players to place into those groups? Well, there are tens of websites to help you not to mention several magazines. I personally recommend using the web as they are not printed months in advance and are updated for injuries and such. You can easily search for them but one good one were even if you just follow their scoring and rating system you should finish over .500 league.