Miles's blog

Susan has entered a fantasy football league.  I have agreed to help her with the draft and to take a team if it looks like the league will be short of players.  I hope I don’t have to.  My fantasy football experiences in the past have not  been terribly rewarding.  Fantasy football is only fun, at least for me, if I win.  And it is impossible to win unless you really put effort into it.  By effort, I mean allow it to take over your life.

First there is the draft.  I don’t follow football, I rarely even listen to Mike and Mike anymore.  (They might as well be on the NFL network as much as they talk about other sports.)  So I bought a magazine.  Plus I downloaded a cheat sheet from ESPN. It lists the top 300 players, both by position and overall.  Now I know that Arian Foster is their choice for top pick, if only I knew who Arian Foster is.  Aaron Rodgers is only fourth. How is that right?  Quarterback always rack up the points and it seems that it is virtually impossible to win without a top quarterback.  Time will have to be spent trying to figure out why these players are ranked on this cheat sheet the way they are.  I mean, they don’t have the Giants defense rated in the top 15.  Didn’t the Giants just win the Super Bowl, and wasn’t their defense the strength of the team?  This is already confusing.

Robert Griffin III (and are you as sick as the RG3 use as I am?) is rated as the 15^th quarterback while Andrew Luck is only the 24^th.  Wasn’t Luck drafted first and Griffin second?  Tim Tebow is rated 26^th while Mark Sanchez is 29^th.  I am pretty sure Sanchez is the starter, does ESPN think Tebow will displace Sanchez or that he will see time at a position other than quarterback?  Susan almost certainly will take Tebow.  (Don’t tell her but for her birthday I am getting her a Tebow Jets jersey.)

Of course, I have to figure in the impact of the bye weeks.  For example, the Bears, Saints, Panthers, and Jaguars are all on bye in week 5.  So I shouldn’t draft both Drew Brees (third among quarterbacks, eighth overall, and Jay Cutler (14^th and 99^th). 

Most of these names are complete mysteries to me.  Just ahead of Mark Sanchez is John Skelton.  I don’t know him.  Is he related to Red Skelton?  The cheat sheet lists 35 tight ends, do that many even play?  I have heard of Reggie Bush, he won the Heisman Trophy, but the guy ahead of him is Roy Helu.  I don’t know Roy Helu.  I can see he is on Washington, and I know they are coached by Mike Shanahan and I know he hates running the ball, so maybe I should skip Helu and go down to Beanie Wells of Arizona.  I don’t know anything about Wells, but I do know what a Beanie is.

Even if I can figure out who to draft, I know the winning teams in fantasy football are those who make effective changes during the year.  I remember waking up at three in the morning to check the injury lists and to call the number for adding some running back who is just off the disabled list or cutting some quarterback who broke his whatsit so I can pick up the backup quarterback.  I realize that some guy not even on the list of 300 players will find a way to rack up dozens of points every week after my first round draft pick goes on injured reserve following his fumble in the second quarter of the first game on a play where he took a 10-yard loss.  The winners of fantasy football are those for whom the daily search for a new tight end, or replacement of one defense with another become more than a hobby.  The obsessed are successful; the rest of us lose.

Fantasy football ruins Sundays (and Monday nights and Thursday nights and some Saturdays in December).  Instead of comfortably sitting back and watching the Bears, I slide closer to the tv and squint at the crawls along the bottom of the screen to see if my player just scored or my opponent’s threw an interception.  The NFL games as part of a league with a championship lose all meaning.  I stop caring who wins or loses each week, I only care who scored, who fumbled or how long that field goal was.  I find myself hoping some team takes a five-yard sack so their kicker can tee it up from 51 yards.  Players become mere objects of scoring and not individuals.  I scour the listings to see if Buffalo vs. Tampa is on tv because I have Buffalo’s quarterback and Tampa’s defense; this despite the New England /Pittsburgh matchup on the other channel.

No, I don’t want to buy into fantasy football anymore.  I like to watch football for what it is. And please, under no circumstances mention fantasy baseball to me.