Confessions Of a Fantasy Footballer

Assuming they haven’t just returned from a five-year sabbatical in Tibet, chances are most sports fans have witnessed or participated in the fantasy sports phenomenon. For those of you who are unfamiliar with fantasy sports, I’ll give you an abridged summary: In fantasy sports, participants draft their own team of real-life players and their team’s success is dependent on the statistical performance of those respective players. Each week your team competes against somebody else’s team. The better your players perform, the more points your team gets, and at the end of the week the team with the most points wins. For example, if I am playing fantasy football and I have Peyton Manning on my team, I would get a bevy of points if he passes for five touchdowns. Different leagues sometimes have different rules, but for brevity’s sake I’ll decline from going into the technical details. This isn’t CC, and I’m not Aristotle, so screw the niceties.

My roommate last year was hooked on fantasy football and I remember feeling slightly jealous when he would tell me about which players dominated for him week in and week out. He had several teams in many different leagues which led to interesting internet conferencing. On some weekends, his team would square off against his homeboy’s team from back home in Cali, and I had a front-row seat to the iChat-facilitated trash-talking. Needless to say, when fantasy football season rolled around this year, I made sure to hop on the wagon. I felt like a 38-year-old virgin, or an adult who never learned to swim, snap his fingers, whistle, or ride a bike—enough was enough.

I participated in my first fantasy football draft on Tuesday, September 11. Along with my roommate—who also has a team in my league—I sat down at my desk in East Campus and I prepared to select what I thought was going to be the greatest fantasy team ever assembled. I had the third pick in the draft and, with my first ever fantasy draft pick, I selected running back Larry Johnson. With virtually everyone on the board (minus LT and Stephen Jackson) I selected a man who missed almost all of this year’s preseason and ran the ball a record 416 times last year! So when he putters through the season and is rundown by week nine, I won’t be able to say I didn’t see it coming. I feel like the equivalent to Larry Johnson this year would be Kobayashi a week after he ate 95 hotdogs in 10 minutes—sore, unresponsive, and merely a shell of his former self. The Larry Johnson selection was an omen for the rest of my draft. An hour and a half later my team had been selected and I had Larry Johnson, Drew Brees, Marshawn Lynch, Reggie Brown, Bernard Berrian, Isaac Bruce, Tony Gonzalez, Jay Cutler, Chris Brown, and the Jacksonville defense.

So what happened during my first game of the year? I got beaten decisively. My opponent violated me by the score of 142-79. Trust me, it hurt then and it still hurts now. That’s what happens when your team is full of underachievers, rookies, and bums. It also didn’t help that I was playing against a team that had Carson Palmer and Jamal Lewis during a week in which one passed for six touchdowns and the other ran for 216 yards.

Do you remember the way your parents treated you when you played competitive sports as a child? I think that most parents view their kids as mini-superstars, unable to do any wrong on the field. In reality, no matter what league, sport, or competition it is, there is NO way that every player is going to be equal. You’re always going to have your good players and your bad players. That’s just the way it is. The same holds true for fantasy football leagues; you’re going to have your good teams and your bad teams.

Going into the season, I had the same mind-set as a naïve mother or father: I thought that my child—or team in my case—was the most endearing and talented in the entire universe. I didn’t realize it a week ago, but the fact of the matter is my team just isn’t that good. My team isn’t bad either, but it falls into that gray area between the two extremes. In the grand scheme of things, last week’s loss is unimportant. I have the whole season ahead of me, and in the really unlikely event that my team fails to succeed all season, I’ll always have next year. The most important thing is that after years of making excuses and putting it off, I finally stepped into the world of fantasy football. So, if you haven’t played fantasy football already, I suggest that you get on that; it’s like the classic quote says, “The saddest summary of life contains three descriptions: could have, would have, and should have.”