This weekend is the annual fantasy football draft for our league, recently christened with its new title, "The Little Lebowski Urban Achievers." I have been playing fantasy football for almost 15 years now. Sometime when I was around 12 or 13, I had a family friend who needed one extra person for their league so they invited me in... I guess even then it was apparent that I liked sports and nerdy things in equal measures. The draft took place in the basement of the local VWF, which is a bar for veterans if you're not familiar with that sort of small-town thing. Everyone proceeded to get absolutely shit-faced while sixth grade Mike sat there and dilligently made his selections. If I remember accurately then I really enjoyed my root beer.
It was a much nerdier thing back then, before the internet. You actually had to wait for the boxscores on Monday morning and calculate the scores/winners yourself. I remember sitting with the newspaper between my legs every Monday morning with a pen and paper figuring out if I won my game or not.
It was awesome.
Now Fantasy Football is a completely mainstream and widely accepted practice. There are tens of thousands of leagues on probably 50 websites. Someone got paid to estimate that $8-9 billion dollars of company revenue are lost due to fantasy football every year, due to a decrease in office productivity.
Sometimes you really need to work the phones/email to make that trade... deadline at work be damned.
I enjoy fantasy football for a few different reasons now that I'm older. First and foremost, it helps keep in touch. I live away from everyone now, which isn't a new development because I have lived away for 10 years now. But now more and more people have moved away, as well, so when I go home to Pennsylvania I only get to see a few people at a time. Doing this every year keeps us all in touch, at the very least throughout the entire winter.
The draft, which is this weekend, is honestly (as dorky as this sounds) one of the best weekends of the year, because everyone comes in from wherever they are and we all get to hang out for the weekend and talk football, have the draft, play poker, go out drinking together... whatever. That doesn't get to happen nearly enough. I've been looking forward to this since we started planning it over a month ago.
The email chains going back and forth have spanned 4 or 5 separate chains that have all approached 100 emails back and forth. I love it.
Second of all, I'm ultra competitive and I also enjoy gambling. This involves both! The older we get the higher the entrance fee becomes... so now for $100 you have a very legit chance of winning upwards 0f $900. That's fun times. Also, this is the kind of thing that allows for nearly limitless shit-talking at all times and that is something I appreciate completely.
Thirdly, I realize that this makes football itself 100% more interesting. Instead of caring about only one game per week when the Giants play, I care about EVERY game. This can get dicey when girlfriends are involved but that is one of the reasons that the iPhone was invented... you can now check scores even while you are out doing whatever.
As for the title of this post, which doesn't seem to jive with the subject matter... well, my team name is of course, "The Gentleman Callers". I don't remember how or where I decided to use it, but it's been the name for about 4-5 years now and will be forever more. I even have a sweet logo!
Hell yes!My friend Mark joined the league this year and decided to come in with a very awesome selection on the other side of the class spectrum, "My Couch Pulls Out, But I Don't"... amazing.
Now that I have sufficiently demonstrated my dorkiness with a multi-hundred word love poem about fantasy football, I shall conclude only by saying that I regret nothing.
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