Fantasy Football

So, yes, I get the whole fantasy sports thing. It makes games that you usually wouldn't care about matter all of the sudden. I once participated in an office pool called a 'Confidence Pool' where you picked a winner to every game and assigned points to each game based on how sure you were that a certain team would win, and whoever had the most points for the week won some money. If I were still involved in that, or had a fantasy player performing in tonight's Monday Night Football game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Houston Texans, I might actually care a little bit about the game, instead of not caring at all. But I think people have gotten a little TOO into the whole fantasy sports thing. I have a friend who is way into it, and he is all of the sudden obsessed with the Washington Redskins because he has Clinton Portis on his fantasy football team. So we'll be doing something completely unrelated to football, and he'll be checking his phone to see the score of the Redskins game. Then, if they scored a touchdown, there is a brief celebration, but then he has to find out HOW they scored, and if they scored in any way that didn't involve Clinton Portis, then there is anger. If I'm ever out on a Sunday night and Sportscenter is on, there are guys all around who have memorized the rushing statistics for some guy I've never heard of playing in a game completely unrelated to Chicago. Then there are the guys who are actually pulling against the team they normal pull for because an opposing player is on their fantasy team. Kind of fucked up, right?

Although the obsession with stats is annoying, it is the satisfaction people get by having a successful fantasy football week that is the weirdest. I understand that they are happy with what is essentially winning a bet, but these guys start to act like they themselves won the game. Like THEY are the real athletes, and the members of their fantasy football team are just tools that they work with. Or maybe more like they are playing a game of Madden where the real life Clinton Portis is nothing more than a collection of polygons with assigned attributes for size and speed to them. Of course, the whole thing seems like nothing than the luck of where you pick in your fantasy draft combined with a couple of choices. It is like a game of blackjack: always hit on 11 and lower, never hit on 16 or higher. In your fantasy draft, if you pick first you probably pick Adrian Peterson or Peyton Manning, or Tom Brady. You might have picked Tom Brady, and normally he would score a million touchdowns for you. You might have hit on 12 in blackjack and gotten a 10 and busted. It happens. Or maybe you get lucky and pick out this year's big breakout running back. Feel free to celebrate if you just got $100 from winning your league, but just leave it at that. Don't walk around acting like you should be an NFL General Manager just because you can identify that they guy who was the best quarterback in the league last year happens to be having a good year this year as well.

Another unfortunate side effect from the whole fantasy sports thing is that if you don't participate in fantasy sports, but are still a sports fan, you have to hear about it all the time, like it is its own legitimate sport. There are shows on ESPN completely dedicated to talking about fantasy stats. There are crawls at the bottom of the screen during football games just listing player stats for all of the fantasy players. There are extensive day-by-day injury reports on sports channels and websites so people can know who to play on Sunday. On espn.com, the first main tab at the top of the site is ESPN, then the second main tab is Fantasy, followed by each of the major sports. Then the other day I read a news article about a certain fantasy football event like this one. Hey ESPN, how about we leave the sports reporting to actual sporting events, and leave the stories about people betting on sporting events out for now. Unfortunately, I'm sure they have their site set up that way for a reason. Meaning: I'm sure that a large percentage of their visitors are there for fantasy reasons. Maybe one day we can go back to enjoying sports for the sake of sports, and lose the constant need to have a personal financial and emotional stake in every game. It worked for, like, at least 150 years. Maybe it will work again.