It seems that every other commercial on TV is For Fanduel or DraftKings. Yahoo, where I go to get schedules and scores, has their own fantasy game all over the sports page. I went to ESPN and the first two stories aren’t about the games, they’re about who you should pick up for your fantasy team. It seems nobody cares about the actual games anymore, just who is going to score the most points.
I do love me The League, though. That’s some good stuff right there.
Fantasy football drives me berserk for one reason only: when I tune in to ESPN on a Sunday afternoon to see scores, all I want to see are the freaking scores! They should be able to tell me all 15 of the day’s scores in 30 seconds. But nooooooooo! For every game, they have to give us all the relevant stats for all the leading players on both teams, for the fantasy players. What should be quick takes forever because of them!
I wouldn’t care at all what fantasy football aficionados do with their spare time if it didn’t inconvenience ME!!!
Nobody should care about the actual games. I mean, so your hometown team wins a game or two or ten…who cares? You had pretty much no role in the whole thing. I don’t get why people are so proud when their teams win shit or punch other people because they were born in the cities of rival teams. Who gives a fuck?
But with fantasy, at least you ARE personally doing something worth celebrating.
That’s an interesting point of view. I guess we could just run simulations on the computer. It would save everyone a lot of time on Sundays and a lot of head injuries.
I prefer science fiction football.
I was getting towards the point of getting tired of fantasy football. And then “fantasy football” got taken over by this daily gambling bullshit. A hundred times worse. Fantasy football was at least kind of fun because it had some amount of strategy involved - albeit not as fun as any of the other big three US sports, all of which make for better fantasy games. Now it’s just complete luck-based bullshit. Yes, it’s technically still a winnable game of odds. And the reason that the people winning have to play hundreds of entries is because it’s sufficiently random that you have to play those hundreds of entries for the actual odds to win out. Shrinking the sample size even more, from a season to a game, is for people who are such crap at the actual strategy that they’d rather just roll the freaking dice.
Like it’s not hard enough to enjoy football as it is with the three and a half hour games and the two-commercial-breaks-after-a-touchdown and the Goodell. Ten years ago, I (quite literally) would stumble out of bed at 12:50 on a Sunday, get on the couch, and get up ten or so hours later when the football was over. How the hell are they losing me as a fan?!
/rant off
It’s really too much. I just got the latest edition of ESPN The Magazine in the mail and it has a “special promotional cover” that’s nothing but a four page DraftKings ad.
I’m a fantasy football player and I agree! One more daily fantasy league commercial and I’m throwing a beer bottle at the tv. I don’t encourage graffiti but if someone defaced the ads at all the Chicago train stations, I wouldn’t mind.
Plus, rule #1 is that no one cares about your fantasy team. I wish my coworkers would understand this. Rule #2 is that no one cares if you have the over in a particular game. It’s annoying as hell being around compulsive sports gamblers
Much as I would love to find my underpants full of bikini models, I just don’t want to go to the trouble of messing around with fantasy football in order to make it happen.
I like to play daily fantasy football, but I completely agree that the ads have just taken over. You can’t watch sports on TV or listen to sports radio for 2 minutes without getting hammered over the head by DraftKings and FanDuel.
The NFL loves it though because people are still watching blowout games just to see who scores the garbage time TD. And people are watching games between 2 teams they would otherwise care nothing about.
There are already lawmakers looking at closing the loophole which allows daily fantasy sports to operate. My gut tells me that DraftKings and FanDuel are advertising like mad under the assumption that they’ll be legislated out of business sooner rather than later, and so, they’re trying to make their wad of money while they can.
I really object to the takeover of the NFL on tv by the gambling websites. When it first started, fantasy football was fun and mostly harmless, but then it grew to such a huge phenomenon that it started taking over the sport. First it was the “busying up” of the tv screen with endless crawlers about stats and now it has attracted the off-shore gaming people. Shockingly enough, I’m actually interested in seeing the GAME I’m purportedly watching, although I’m apparently in the minority as far as the networks are concerned.
I have no objections to fantasy football, but why not keep all the trivia related to that game online? And as for the gambling ads? They just need to go.
Hear Hear.
I love fantasy football and I love the idea of it and it helps me be involved in games I wouldn’t otherwise care about, but the constant FanDuel and DraftKings ads are just killing me. It’s already been said, but that’s not fantasy…it’s luck.
Up with fantasy, Down with these damn companies
The ads for FanDuel and DraftKings just scream that they’re rip-offs. Can anybody confirm the details of how they work?
And perhaps building a war chest to lobby the hell out of any proposed legislation.
Here is a link to an interesting article which explains how the DraftKings and FanDuel type sites work (and why you are a sucker if you sign up to play “just for fun”):
Fantasy sports and daily fantasy sports are completely different things. Daily fantasy is essentially a legal loophole to get around gambling regulations. That’s why you see ads plastered on every available surface, Fanduel and Draftkings are basically online casinos with close to a billion dollars collectively of venture funding.
That is entirely true and it doesn’t take long to figure out who are the pros. They’re in every contest with boatloads of money on the line.
They have fantasy games for a variety of sports that cost money to put in at various amounts in order to win money in other various amounts.
For example: They will have a football day where you pay 100 bucks to play and you pick your players for the day and it plays like free fantasy football. The kicker is that the payout is, say, 10,000 bucks but you’re playing the game with 100,000 people and only the top 3 make any money. You didn’t win? Oh man you better try again…that’ll be another 100 bucks, but c’mon! you win 10 grand! What’s another 100…
I honestly don’t see how this isn’t pure gambling. I know they say things like “this is a skill game.”, but that is BS. Is there some sort of a test to show that you have the skill needed to win?
And so what if it is a skill game? So is poker. And that is gambling. I think there is some skill involved, if you are a stats person. Follow trends, etc. but no stat is going to tell you if your great RB is going to blow out his knee for the season on his first carry of the year, and ruin your fantasy season in the process. That is pure luck, and how is that not gambling then?
I agree with the OP. In fact, I used to be a fantasy football guy in the late 1980’s , early 90’s, where the rules were painfully simple. No fraction of a point scored for a 3 yard gain. Everything was straight-forward. I think I can still remember the scoring rules, which gave legitimate, realistic football scores each week. 35-33, 45-19, etc. not like today’s yahoo league scores of 119.45 - 76.47 nonsense.
6 points for scoring a TD.
3 pts for tossing a TD pass
1 point for every 50 yards rushing, or 100 yards passing.
1 point for an extra point, 3 for a field goal 39 yards or less, 4 pts for 49 yards or less, 6 points for a 50+ yard fg.
That was it. No defense, no special teams, no fractional points. No Points for touches… If your QB threw 50 times a game, so what? He didn’t get a half point for each completion. If your guy ran for 49 yards, well sorry, 0 points.
Try it sometime with your normal league and see how much easier and fun it is to keep track of. Now, though, it would probably be just a step back for folks they’d find it boring. There still was strategy involved in picking your starters, but once the game kicked off, the game (and the player) was locked in with the 7-man team.
Your team started 1 QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 1 TE and 1 K. That was it. No defensive points. Honestly, it was the best damn league I have ever played in. Now, there is just too much crap going on and I don’t have the time. I also didn’t like rooting against a team I like just so I could win my fantasy game, so I walked away. And I haven’t missed it one bit.
The ads are out of control, but I also sense there is going to be a make-or-break legal decision that is either going to keep it going or pull the plug, just like the poker sites. And unlike the poker sites, these fantasy sites have the major sports leagues embracing their product, so a LOT of money is being spent and gambled by the NFL, NBA etc that these leagues and websites will remain viable. Without betting, the NFL believes its games are less popular to the average fan, and that is true. Fantasy makes a casual fan a watch games they’d rarely if ever watch unless there was literally nothing else to do. But when you have a player going in that game, you will likely want to follow it, either by watching it real-time or by watching highlights somewhere. Advertising revenues are soaring. So the NFL sees this for what it is… Another huge revenue stream. And with the sites mentioned, they are getting a piece of the pie. Without them, the game will be driven underground again. People will still play, but not every day and not for the kind of money they are paying now. IMO, at least.
Fantasy warped my football experience… And now, I rarely watch a game unless I have nothing better to do. I haven’t seen a game the first two weeks this season, and haven’t missed them. I’ve seen some highlights, but that’s it. I will probably get back into it once the weather gets colder, but right now, there is just too much to do outside. I have even missed a large chunk of the last few SB’s because I didn’t care about the teams, or who was going to score. Going to a SB party and interacting with people is a lot of fun. More fun than rooting for someone you don’t care about. At least to me. If the Steelers are in the SB, I will watch it. And I will watch any playoff games they are playing… But that is it. Over the past 6 years or so, I don’t even watch all the playoff games any longer… I used to watch every playoff game, regardless of who is playing. No longer. I will now watch a random hockey playoff game (or baseball), but football? The only non-Steeler playoff game I will watch is the SB.
YMM, of course, V.
I see the appeal, but it just no longer works for me.