Captain Ahab had Moby Dick. The Hatfields had the McCoys. Montresor, Edgar Allen Poe’s vengeful narrator, was haunted by that lout Fortunato.
As for me, fantasy football devotee, the name that triggers lingering torment after all these years is this: Terry Kirby.
Unless you’re a San Francisco 49ers loyalist, you probably don’t remember Terry Kirby. But on one improbable Sunday afternoon in the winter of 1998, the obscure halfback galloped his way to 60 yards and two touchdowns against Detroit. It was Kirby’s greatest performance in an otherwise unremarkable season.
And it ruined us.
The Pigskins, that is. Proud franchise within the Mo’ Better Fantasy Football League, or MBFFL. Unofficially headquartered at the back room of a suburban Denver sports bar, it’s one of the hundreds of thousands of fantasy leagues that gather ritually each autumn to scrutinize statistics, pick players and talk trash. Kirby’s performance that day generated enough points on behalf of our opponent to oust the proud Pigskins from a near-certain playoff berth. (I know: Oh, the humanity.)
The fact that eight years later the psychic scar tissue remains testifies to the grip fantasy football exerts upon those of us who have fallen under its spell. Popularized as a sort of back-room parlor game for football zealots beginning sometime in the early 1980s — nobody seems to know exactly how or why — fantasy football has since vaulted into the sports mainstream, captivating an estimated 10–12 million players each season and spawning a mini-industry of web sites, magazines and TV shows. The game has become so far-reaching that even the starched-shirt-serious National Football League has embraced the fantasy world.
“I was at a league meeting about eight years ago when a league executive came in and said, ‘We don’t want anyone involved in fantasy football. We see this as a form of gambling,’” recalls Bruce Allen, general manager of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “The next year, the league came in and said: ‘We want to get involved in this fantasy football.’”
No wonder. Propelled by a viral fervor, fantasy football has contributed to a boom in the business of professional football, where a new round of television-rights contracts is worth $3.1 billion per year to the league and its 32 teams. The NFL itself is capitalizing on the overall momentum with its own cable television channel, The NFL Network, which delivers year-round coverage of all things football, and a web site, NFL.com, which provides football news, plus information and administrative support for fantasy leagues.
Hard to resist
It’s impossible to quantify fantasy football’s impact on the NFL, but it’s obvious that participating in a fantasy league welds fans to the game in a way that’s addictive. And good for business.
“Fantasy football is my drug,” says Tom Rickwalder, a Virginia graphic artist who participates in two fantasy leagues. On Sundays beginning late in August, you’ll find him camped out in front of a television set watching multiple game feeds simultaneously while he tracks player statistics in real-time. “I literally have four TVs on,” Rickwalder says. “It’s ridiculous.”
For Rickwalder and millions of fantasy team “owners,” participating in fantasy football requires tracking the statistical output of a dozen or more players from a grab bag of NFL teams. That’s one reason fantasy football has propelled interest in NFL players and distant-market teams beyond a fan’s traditional allegiances. Even I’ll admit it: While cheering on my beloved Broncos at their home stadium in Denver, I’ve strayed from the flock more than once by privately hoping a particular Bronco wide receiver has a poor day — because he happens to be on my opponent’s fantasy team. Forgive me, fellow Bronco fans, for I have sinned.
So just what is it about a low-stakes diversion that leads an otherwise loyal fan to abandon ship and obsess over how many receptions a rookie receiver with the Browns might rack up in Week 7? A sociologist at West Virginia Wesleyan College, Don Levy, has published research suggesting that fantasy sports seem to provide a unique venue for companionship that’s otherwise lacking for many. Today’s fantasy sports leagues are yesterday’s bowling alleys and poker tables — at least for men.
Others say fantasy football simply delivers a harmonic convergence of competition, strategy, bragging rights and light-hearted fun. “I think there’s a variety of reasons for its popularity,” says Dan Grogan, a longtime fantasy football analyst who has made a living since the early
1990s publishing magazines and Web content devoted to the game. “We’re competitive by nature, and fantasy football is almost like a chess game in many respects. You have to really know it to play it. You’re making moves to try to outwit and outplay your opponents. And the camaraderie it engenders is phenomenal.”
Cheat sheet
Here’s how fantasy football works: Participants in a league “draft” players onto a personalized team roster in accordance with prescribed rules. In my league, for example, you have to assemble and activate each week a roster including one quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, a team defense (say, the Chicago Bears) and a place-kicker. The thing is, once I’ve drafted Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, he’s off the board. No other team gets to calculate his weekly statistics into a team total. If my guys end up scoring more touchdowns, catching more passes, scampering for more yards and registering more quarterback sacks than whatever opponent I’ve been assigned for that week, I win a few bucks and get to level all sorts of trash-talk at my rival. We play a 16-week season, with the last two weeks constituting the league’s “playoffs” that ultimately will determine a champion.
Leagues embrace a variety of scoring systems that range from Dullsville-simple (1 point for touchdowns and turnovers) to elegantly complex (higher point totals for breakaway TDs vs. one-yard dives, for instance). It sounds simple enough, but you’d be surprised how much scoring influence fantasy owners can exert by paying close attention to injuries, weekly NFL game matchups and real-life coaching changes that can transform a wide-open offensive attack into a more conservative (read: fantasy point-killing) approach.
Grogan, whose grogansports.com Web site offers prescient takes on all things fantasy, advises that, if nothing else, newbies to the game get a grip on how their league tallies points. Leagues that include gross yardage in their point calculations tend to favor different sorts of players, for instance, than leagues that reward points solely based on touchdowns. One other bit of advice: If you’re new to a league, browbeat somebody into giving you a copy of last year’s draft, Grogan suggests. Scanning the list of last year’s early picks will offer insight into what kinds of players are most highly prized — and worth taking for your team.
Once your team is drafted, you’ll need to decide which of your players to activate for each weekend’s matchup — an exercise that leads some fantasy owners to extraordinary lengths. Allen, the Buccaneers GM, says he’s learned to stop answering the phone when fantasy zealots come calling. “I’m talking about hundreds and hundreds of phone calls,” Allen says. “They’ll ask, ‘Are you going to play Chris Simms a lot this week? How many times are you going to give Carnell (Williams) the ball?’ You want to make sure you’re not picking up the phones around happy hour on Wednesdays and Thursdays.”
Where Fantasy Football Clicks
Like everything else in life, the Internet has revolutionized fantasy football. In the game’s formative years, about the only way fantasy participants could find out whether they won or lost was to scour the box scores printed in daily newspapers — which explains why all across the U.S. people were once so eager to rise from bed on Monday mornings. Now, statistics are fed to the fantasy populace almost instantly from a variety of web sites and even some emerging interactive TV services that deliver the dope on Tom Brady’s cumulative throwing yardage within moments of his last completion. Here’s a Screenz-approved list of four Web sites that fit the statistical bill for almost any fantasy player:
ESPN.com The 300-pound-lineman of sports sites has its fantasy act down pat, with decent commentary and advice, plus an ESPN-managed fantasy league that’s ultra-competitive. Better still, the content is free for anybody who registers.
Grogansports.com What Mel Kuyper is to the NFL draft, brothers Dan and Kelly Grogan are to fantasy football: Obsessed. Great insight on often-overlooked sleeper picks for your team. Some free content, some paid stuff that’s worth the money.
Sportingnews.com A worthy contender in the fantasy realm, notable for its breadth of writers with local-market insight into who’s hot and who’s not. A mix of free and subscription ($4.99 a month) content.
Rotoworld.com Great default site for quick updates on players culled from all over the web in record time. Plug in your players’ names on Friday morning before your lineup’s due to make sure nobody’s injured.
