Memoirs of a fantasy football manager

My first exposure to fantasy football was in seventh grade. For some reason, the Scholastic book order (do they still do those?) had a fantasy football magazine in it, and somehow I convinced my parents that it was an excellent purchase. I’m not sure what it was in the short description of the magazine that convinced me to put up multiple weeks worth of allowance towards it, but as soon as it arrived, with San Diego Chargers’ runningback LaDainian Tomlinson displayed prominently on its cover, I was hooked. The concept that I could run my own football team, using stats from real life games as markers for how well they performed for my team, was one that blew my mind. I lugged that magazine around everywhere, the number of times I thumbed through it rendering it in bad shape.

I was so enamored that I started to ask around my class for others who would be interested in trying to start up a league. I got some to join and we even drafted players for our teams. With the rules laid out in the magazine and having no knowledge of the various online platforms that supported fantasy football, it was decided that we would score everyone’s players manually each week, going through their stats and assigning points accordingly. This didn’t really work out, as one might expect, and most moved on quickly.

Despite that failure, my interest did not wane. In fact, as the next season rolled around, I was even more determined to find a way to play. As an eighth-grader, I joined my first real league. It was largely made up of family friends, and while the idea of playing against a bunch of adults was a bit intimidating, my want to play outweighed my shyness. I can still remember drafting my first player, Washington runningback Clinton Portis, feeling extremely proud of myself for getting the player that I had wanted. I also remember the feeling of my stomach dropping when one of the other players asked if I knew that Portis had been suspended indefinitely just two days earlier. I’m sure my eyes must have gotten as wide as dinner plates as I stammered that I hadn’t, only to have his expression change from one of utter seriousness to a sly grin. It had, of course, been a jest, a ribbing of the rookie who likely looked overly earnest with their bent up magazine full of scribbled, hand-written notes.

Portis, as it turned out, pretty much single-handedly carried a mostly middle of the road team. Pulling out an even record in my first season as a fantasy football manager wasn’t bad, but I was determined to do better. I had learned some valuable lessons, like needing to do even more research on potential sleepers and not taking anything some of the other players said seriously.

I played in that league for a couple years, but eventually my peers started to join the fantasy football wagon and I started to play with them instead. My knowledge grew, as did what was quickly becoming an obsession. By the time I was in college, I was in a number of different leagues, managing several teams and spending hours upon hours each week scouring over match-ups and stats, trying to find that one guy on the waiver wire that could make or break my season.

There were highs, like winning one league two years in a row or winning two leagues in the same season, and there were lows, like when my three top picks all went out with injury, leaving my team in the cellar. There were times where victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat, like when LeSean Mc-Coy scored two touchdowns on a Sunday night game against the Bears to bring my team back from being down by over twenty points, and times of heartbreak, like when my team somehow managed to cough up an 80-point lead in the second week of a two-week championship match.

As the years went on, something started to change. Managing so many teams meant keeping track of so many players and made it all the more likely that I would need one player to do well in one league while needing them to do poorly in another. Sundays were often relegated to refreshing ESPN box scores, getting a small bit of dopamine every time one of my players’ scores went up. Things got more complicated when the NFL decided to add Thursday night games into the mix, and even more complicated when Tuesday nights also appeared on the table. The starry-eyed, imagined perspective of running my own football team had long since tarnished, the allure likely deadened by experience and managing too many teams in different leagues.

At some point, I looked at the amount of time I was putting into the activity and wondered if it was worth it. I was basically dedicating a whole day of my week to football and I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I once had. The truth of the matter was, I was burnt out.

So I hung it up. After close to fifteen years of playing manager of a made-up collection of football players, I decided to drop out of the game. It had become almost more of a chore than something I enjoyed and it was time to move on.

I haven’t been part of a league for two and a half years now, and I’ve got to say, I feel like I’ve enjoyed those football seasons much more than the prior two or three. Having a more relaxed Sunday where I can just watch the Packers and leave it at that, instead of feeling obligated to watch a Browns/Jaguars match-up just to hope that the Browns defense can hold Jacksonville under 21 points, is something that I’ve come to appreciate.

That being said, talking with Neal about his franchise league has reignited my interest somewhat. The idea of a team carrying over from year to year, keeping the same players and strategizing as such, gives me that same feeling I once had back in seventh-grade. If the right situation came along, I think I could pick it back up.

But for now, I’m content in my retirement from fantasy. My Sundays are my own again and I’m free to keep track of stats and figures at my own leisure, rather than feeling it is an obligation. And hey, the Packers remembered how to play football this past weekend, so maybe Sunday afternoons won’t be as bad the coming weeks. I’m not holding my breath or anything, but stranger things have happened!

A C ertain Point of V iew