In late September, I sat nervously at a cheap, fold-out table and reached my hand into a baseball cap hoping to remove a small crumpled piece of paper that had No.1 written on it. It was in this moment that I realized how it feels to be in control of my own football team. My own fantasy football team, that is.
Fantasy football has evolved from a low-key cult among hardcore football fans with a gambling fix into a multi-million dollar industry that encompasses everyone and their mother, literally. One of the leagues I am currently in has a mother, two grandmothers and a great-grandfather participating.
Countless sports Web sites, including media giants cbssportsline.com and espn.com, now offer gratis league management services to any group of armchair general managers willing to form a league.
These Web sites receive so many daily hits from sports junkies that they are provided free of charge because of the enormous amount of revenue drawn through advertising spots within the site’s pages.
Hundreds of Web sites, hotlines and magazines have also sprung up and are selling themselves on guarantees that they will help the average Joe (no pun intended here) fantasy owner tear through his/her leagues faster than John Madden at a Thanksgiving buffet.
The concept of Fantasy Football is fairly simple. The winner of a team selects players based on their position. The owner also selects back-up players to account for injury, bye weeks (weeks during which teams don’t play) or to have a different player if another one isn’t doing well.
In the league I am a part of, every week a quarterback, two running backs, two receivers, a kicker and a tight end are “started.” When a player is “started,” his statistics for the week (i.e. touchdowns, yards, interceptions, fumbles) will determine how many points he earns for your team. Different teams play one another, and the team with the most points is declared the winner for that week, just like in professional football.
The team with the best record at the end of the regular season wins the league, bragging rights and usually a considerable amount of money.
Every year after I find myself in the basement (last place) of my league, I declare that I will never participate in another fantasy football league, only to find myself reaching into that baseball hat come early autumn again later that year.
As my roommate can attest to my angry shouts at the television every Sunday afternoon, I hate my fantasy team.
The guys on my team suck, and the ones who are decent never seem to be in my starting lineup when they do well.
I do not take blame for the fact that my team sucks more than a porn star. Tom Brady became a touchdown machine after he knocked up a model, Randy Moss apparently “decided to play,” and Tony Romo got over that botched snap and started to play like he wasn’t a Dallas Cowboy.
Meanwhile, Stephen Jackson and the Rams forgot how to score, Larry Johnson got hurt, and Shaun Alexander … I don’t even know what he’s been doing in Seattle.
I’m not sure if it’s the rush of being involved in a team sport once again, the power trip I can go on when I want to cut or trade a player, or the title of team manager that I see under my name when I log in that keeps me coming back to this fictitious world of football.
Or maybe, as Luda put it, it’s just “my fa fa fa fant ta-sy.”
Leave a Reply