The season is now over for all five of my fantasy football leagues and I am here to brag a little bit about how I did this season. In four of the five leagues, I managed to win the league championship and take away several very nice prizes.

In what most should consider to be a strange fantasy football season, I thought I did pretty well playing with such starters as Matt Leinert, Leon Washington, Desmond Clark, Ladell Betts and Isaac Bruce. Although these players may not have been at the top of, or even on, most people's lists come draft day, they were still major contributors to my winning games at certain points during the season.

Of course, my teams were also comprised with, what many considered to be, some of the top players in fantasy football, such as Shaun Alexander, LaDanian Tomlinson and Larry Johnson. I had Matt Hasslebeck and Jake Delhomme at quarterback and had some of the top defenses in the league (at the time) like Chicago, Carolina and Indianapolis. I was basing my picks off of the previous season's performances and not really what I thought would happen during the new season.

The first half of the season was a little bit rough. The big power players in my lineup, mainly Tomlinson, Johnson and Alexander, had a rough start to the year and it was almost more beneficial to bench them than to play them. Other stars helped me out at the beginning, mostly free agent pickups I got when some of my players either went down with an injury as the season started or were benched. There were some good free agent pickups out there and I snapped up such talent as Rex Grossman, Robbie Gould, Maurice Jones Drew, Charlie Frye and Bernard Berrian.

After purging part of my roster for each team, and filling those holes with players I thought had some potential, I began to win more of my games, some of them by large margins. As the "big three" (Tomlinson, Johnson and Alexander) began to pick things up a bit, I started to win games by larger margins.

Thanks to other players such as Brian Westbrook, Drew Brees and Ronnie Brown, I began to pick up the pace and take the top spot in most of my leagues. Those who had such players as Peyton Manning, Joseph Addai and Phillip Rivers couldn't even beat me. I was winning close matches as if no one could touch me.

I felt like I was pretty lucky in most of the games that I played, sometimes not necessarily scoring a lot of points (I had a lot of wins by one or two points) and other times blowing my opponent out. Soon, the playoffs arrived and it was time to buckle up, pick the very best lineups and hope that the teams that I had crafted out of available free agents and players who were starting to get hot at the right time would win. In most cases, I had a lot of luck just as I did during the regular season, and I pulled out several interesting victories during the course of the playoffs.

In the end, I won four out of five league championships, making it to the championship game in all leagues, but losing one. After playing fantasy football for several seasons, I felt that I had finally reached the top.

It has been a long and hard struggle over several seasons, learning the scoring system, learning as much as I could about the players, doing a lot of research, spending hours picking lineups each week and crossing my fingers, but it all worked out in the end.

My best advice on winning your fantasy football league next year is to make sure that you look at the whole picture when drafting players. Be sure to think about the situation that the team is currently in at that time and not necessarily base your decision on how well the player performed the previous year. Also, pay attention to the sleeper picks put out by ESPN and MSN.com. Their list of sleepers was very good this year and provided a lot of surprises (and some top producers).

Sure, sometimes it is difficult to choose the right players in a fantasy draft, but with plenty of time to do some research, as well as a thorough knowledge of the game and the players involved, anyone can win their fantasy league. It just takes time and effort, but with as much fun as fantasy football is, it is well worth it.