Football season is about to start up, and I’m starting to dread it. Not the games themselves, they’re fine. It’s that it also means that fantasy football is coming. It seems that there’s more radio and press coverage of fantasy vs. real football. This annoys me because:
–IT’S NOT REAL! The fact we’re spending serious time covering imaginary teams is surreal. We all laugh at people speaking Klingon at McDonald’s or shouting “fireball” in the park. Why do we then not blink when someone discusses for five minutes whether Ladamien Tomlinsen or Shawn Alexander starts on their imaginary team?
–It takes time away from actual sports. Never mind the tons of actual football stories, baseball is in the middle of an excellent season. Yet I have to wade through 20 minutes of fantasy talk to hear a discussion of who the Mariners should start at first base.
–The “experts” are ridiculous. It’s nearly impossible to consistently guess who will win games. It’s beyond impossible to guess how two totally different players in totally different situations will do. Yet these smug “experts” pretend to know that.
What do you think?
More than just you I know. I saw a whole segment on ESPN last year where all the guests were lamenting how they thought Fantasy Football was making football too stats based. “My team won this week” used to mean the team they were rooting for, now it’s their fantasy team.
One guy even overheard someone on the phone saying, “Yeah <Local Team> lost, but at least I won my fantasy game.” Enough to make Vince Lombardi roll over in his grave.
/In a league.
Heck, I just started a thread on fantasy football. I do understand where you’re coming from, though. On the geek hierarchy flowchart, I’d probably put FF players at the same level of Trekkies and RPGers (How dare you compare us to LARPers?). It’s true that it shouldn’t take up time on any serious sports broadcast, and it is pretty annoying to hear these meatheads on SportsCenter speculate on who’s gonna have a breakout year.
It’s no less real than any other game, though. You have to try your best to outwit your opponents and play the odds right every week. I can think of a large number of video and board games that employ the same goals.
I was in Miami over the weekend, and I hoped to catch up with some college buddies, including my old roommate who is fighting lymphoma (and thankfully kicking its ass). However, they were at their fantasy football draft with a handful of other guys I didn’t know, everyone had laptops, and they were all completely stressed and obsessed to the point of being oblivious to everything else (including me, the guy visiting from out of town). I showed up with a pie, stayed a couple hours, and finally left when I literally started falling asleep (not that anyone noticed I was there, or that I left). I’ll watch football as a social activity, ideally with friends and beer and plenty of junk food, but fantasy football couldn’t seem like any less fun – especially when everyone is caught up in it except me.
True, but the difference is those video and board games don’t generally get substantial TV and radio coverage (at least not yet they don’t).
I don’t like it.
I played in a league one year. The main thing I didn’t like about it was I think it gives you a terrible mindset for following games. You wind up rooting for things like some team’s kick returner to have a poor return so that your running back has more field to work with.
Or, you have to root for the QB to throw every single play. I’m a huge NFL fan, and the year I played fantasy was the least enjoyable season of foots I’ve ever watched.
Also – I think that fantasy “talk” is the most boring sports talk ever. I love talking football with the guys in the office. But, talking about your fantasy team is not talking about football. Its just talking about player performance, divorced from the actual goals of a football game.
I have no idea why radio talk shows (Don & Mike, or my local guys) think it will be interesting to listeners to put their draft on the radio, or give us weekly updates. Amazingly boring.
And, during the season, pre-game shows like to give their “fantasy picks” for the week. Of course this means nothing. They’re under no restrictions that a normal fantasy owner is. No fantasy owner is going to use that information to change his team at noon on a Sunday. One, because most fantasy owners know more than the asshole on TV. Two, because you can’t just plug players in and out of fantasy teams.
“Oh, you think Peyton Manning is going to have a good game today? I’ll just get my buddy to trade him to me.”
Football season is the best time of year. Fantasy football is a fucking wart on it.
The #1 reason I don’t do FF: What if, on draft day, someone like Brian Westbrook falls into my lap? No way in hell am I going to spend one second rooting for anyone in a green uniform, so unless I happen to manage to draft the full NY Giants roster, I’m screwed.
Which is why [shameless promotion] I developed the NFL 1-On-1 Pool. All the good stuff (the league setting, rivalries, etc) about FF, with none of the “setting a roster” crap. Just basic pick’em pool action, with a twist. Three slots remaining for the 2007 season! [/shameless promotion]
I’ve participated in fantasy sports, but only basketball and baseball. It’s fun, and a good way to make friends - my first time was as a freshman in college, and it helped me socialize a lot more than I would have without it.
I don’t do it now, just because I don’t feel like it. I certainly understand the fanaticism of the participants - it can be really addictive, like any great game.
Joe
Fantasy football is the number one time waster at my work by far. I’d rather everyone took up chain smoking, it would take less time out of the day.
Fantasy Football is for the guys who used to beat up D&Ders.
Yeah, some people present it like it’s nerds doing it.
Around my office, it’s more regular football fans and gamblers than nerds.
I won’t claim that these folks are any better than Trekkies, but they’re much more like the Alpha Betas in Revenge of the Nerds than the Tri-Lams.
I started a fantasy football team last season for the first time, and I’m not going to do it again. For one thing, it changed the way I watch football; I suddenly found myself wondering how Player X would do, and hoping he got the ball more than his teammates, and so on.
This meant I had effectively stopped watching football. Football is a team sport, not an individual one, and picking apart the teams in deciding who to watch/root for is a fundamentally different approach to it than the one I like.
So no more fantasy football for me.
If anyone asks me about my fantasy NASCAR team, though, they’d better be ready to sit and listen and nod politely for a goood while before I let them get away…
I have played in a fantasy football league for the last 16 years.
But I can not stand it when some schmo wants to tell me all about his team and how awesome his draft went!
Seriously, there is nothing in the world more boring than listening to someone talk about their fantasy team, it has no relation to my existence.
Please shut up, I beg you.
I don’t watch the sport and so all office football stuff is boring or annoying.
The worst is when they beg you to join the betting pool to “be part of the team”, then you bet randomly, and they tell you “well, I guess all the good numbers were taken earlier, but somebody has to lose for there to be winners”. Nice.
Yeah I don’t think it’s a nerd thing, for sure. I know a bunch of nerdy guys and a bunch of…smart-yet-jock-y guys and the nerdy guys don’t go anywhere near sports, let alone fantasy sports. I don’t really know any “meathead” type jocks. Do they do it too?
I am not a fan of fantasy sports. I love sports but really just my home teams. It drives me nuts when I’m watching a game with my brother and an opponent is on his “team.” Like would you really, REALLY root for any Steeler, dude???
Yeah, but those guys are the suckers (in my league, anyway).
I didn’t have this problem, even last year when Tom Coughlin would call Brandon Jacobs number at the goal line instead of Tiki Barber. I still cared more about a GIANT win.
What happened with me is that I started caring more about what was happening in other games outside the NFC East. Suddenly, I cared about all the games on a Sunday, versus a small subset of games.
I love the sport of NFL football, I tried Fantasy one season and, like other posters, it felt totally unnatural. I watched the game entirely differently and it wasn’t enjoyable. I’m not a die-hard fan of any team, but how do you watch a game and root for a team when you have players from both teams on your roster? NFL is a wonderful team sport, it just felt wrong rooting for individuals.
My wife played fantasy with me for that one year and she loved it, it was a way for her to get involved with the games and to help her remember who, what and why. She asked me to play again with her and so far I’ve resisted. On one hand I want to so we can share the same interests, but on the other it totally ruins the game for me.
I got a heck of a decision coming up.
Yeah, I remember when Chester Taylor broke that 95 yard TD run against my beloved Seahawks last year. “YES!!! A 13 point RUN!..wait a minute…GOD DAMN IT!” :mad:
On the other hand, it got me to tune into lots of football games I would not have normally tuned into. Having Reggie Wayne last year, I tuned into as many of the Indy games as I could and saw some great football.
I dislike football generally - fantasy or otherwise - in fact I dislike popular sport generally - it’s like being an alien sometimes - when I’ve never even heard of some famous sports personality who drops into a conversation, or when I don’t even know that the World Cup Final is happening that day.
I don’t mind being an alien, but oddly, some people seem to mind that’s what I am.