FAKE RONJAN!!Post-mortem to a fantasy football career
The League is a great show. Sure it's silly and can be tasteless at times, but at the core it's a story of a group of friends bound together by a fantasy football league.
I watched a lot of The League during my two weeks off of work for paternity leave (welcome to the family, Damon!), and it left me feeling nostalgic. My exit from NFL participation means I'm out of all of my fantasy football leagues starting this year, and I'm going to miss that camaraderie.
To give myself some semblance of closure, I figure I'd write up my favorite memories from a 16-year career in fantasy football. I realize that this is a self-indulgent column, particularly because no one cares about anyone's fantasy team but their own ... but hopefully it's at least semi-relateable!
There are so many good memories -- like the time that I benched Corey Dillon on my fantasy team, then proceeded to watch him break the single-game rushing record in person in the stadium -- so it's hard to focus. But here are five that will stay with me:
1. Humble beginnings
My first season of fantasy football was in 1998, and boy, were things different back then! I started the Goosey Fantasy League with 9 of my high school buddies on sandbox.com, and all of us were fantasy football first-timers who had no idea what to expect.
The draft was automated -- everyone ranked the players they wanted one night, and woke up with a full team the next morning. We could pick up players in the middle of live games -- that's how I got rookie Fred Taylor, literally seconds after a 52-yard touchdown run during a game in his rookie season. And there were no playoffs -- we had a 17-week season and the team with the best record won the championship.
I'd consider this back in the dark ages, before major sports sites had fantasy coverage, so no one knew which positions were valuable or what strategies made sense. As a result, no one thought to overvalue running backs (a travesty that has ruined the sport in modern times), and we ended up with a balanced league.
We kept the league going, eventually converting to a dynasty format in 2000 as the Sycamore Dynasty League. I love looking back at the draft we held that year. It's crazy to think that Peyton Manning was the #2 pick back in 2000, and he'll still be a top pick in 2014.
The SDL is still going to this day, and I'm going to miss you guys.
2. Repeating mistakes
I'm a horrendous trader, and I'm a slow learner.
In 1998, Terrell Davis was having a monster season, with 1,000 yards through his first 7 games. I was a huge Broncos fan at the time, and I wanted in. Tim, my friend who had Terrell Davis, had a mediocre team, so I figured I'd entice him by trading all of my stars. So long, Marshall Faulk, Fred Taylor, and Joey Galloway! Whoops. I may have acquired the eventual 1998 MVP on my squad, but Tim would not lose again and he took home the 1998 league championship.
Two years later, I again traded away a star for Terrell Davis. This time around, it was in a dynasty league (the SDL), and I traded away 2nd-year Edgerrin James to my friend Stephan. TD ran for just 282 yards in 2000 and only played one more year, while Edgerrin James had several elite, franchise-cornerstone seasons.
I wasn't done. In 2007, I started a league with several folks in our Nielsen office, and I was smart enough to draft rookie Adrian Peterson as my 3rd running back. I traded him to my friend Jonny, and I was lucky enough to play Jonny the week that Peterson set the NFL single-game rushing record. I somehow won that game, and ultimately eliminated Jonny and Peterson in the playoffs, but you'd think i'd learn, right?
Nope! I made the same mistake in 2012, trading Peterson halfway through his league MVP season, and again trading him to Jonny! That trade cost me a shot at the playoffs in The Prestige-ous League, our high-stakes auction league.
Slow learner indeed.
3. This game is 60%* luck
How do I know this? Simple. I somehow won a 60-team league of fantasy football uber-experts back in 2003, taking home my first fantasy football championship.
That league was serious business. I was recruited to the league in college because I was an active member of the fantasy football message board site Footballguys.com (great site, by the way), and the idea was to play fantasy football against the most active members of other fantasy football communities to see which one was the best.
These guys were really impressive. They'd project stats for each player, they'd run complex algorithms to optimize their lineups, and some of them even got paid gigs in the future to write about fantasy football. If I beat these guys, luck had to be a huge factor. (I finished in the top 3rd of the league in 3 of my 4 seasons.)
Of course, this is why the sport is so great. It hits the sweet spot. If it were too skill-based, it wouldn't be accessible. If it were too luck-based, people wouldn't find it worth investing the time. It has the perfect balance of both.
*The 60% figure comes from some regression analyses I ran back in college.
4. Grand theft team name
I won my second fantasy football championship in 2005 with a mediocre team in the SDL that I named the Norwalk Connectican'ts. The team was 6-7 in the regular season before getting hot and winning the title in a Cinderella run. It's still the only below-.500 championship team I've seen in fantasy football -- quite embarrassing.
The next season, I moved to the Bronx and named my team the Bronx Conchs, hoping for a strong title defense. My friend Tim had other ideas, though. Known as .hopesfall. for the previous five seasons, Tim decided to steal my name, calling his team the Cincinnati Conchs a few weeks into the season.
I was forced to rename my team once more, this time to the Bronx Politicians as my star running backs were (Reggie) Bush and (Frank) Gore. I reached the championship game in 2006, only to be defeated by none other than the Cincinnati Conchs in a heartbreaking title game.
My team responded in 2007 to take the #1 seed on the strength of several members of the record-breaking, 16-0 New England Patriots. My reward? A first-round loss to the Cincinnati Conchs, who ultimately repeated as champions.
I still consider Tim's success those two years to be fraudulent!
5. Going out on top
We started The Prestige-ous League in 2012, a high-stakes keeper auction league among a group of close friends with ties to Nielsen. In its first two years, it's been the most competitive, balanced league I've ever been a part of -- likely a combination of financial investment, the inherent fairness of the auction system, and the competitiveness of wanting to beat some of your closest friends so you can talk trash the next day.
My team was competitive in 2012, but ultimately missed the playoffs after a series of devastatingly close losses.
I rebounded in 2013 as Globex Corporation. While I didn't have any single player who could win me a championship, I drafted a deep team with several sleepers that hit. Andy Dalton, Philip Rivers, Knowshon Moreno, and Josh Gordon were revelations, all picked up for cheap in the auction. A few trades later and I had a top 5 player in every roster spot outside of wide receiver, and I finished as the #2 seed in the league.
The playoffs began, however, and I was dead in the water in the semis. I trailed my buddy Jonny by 18 points going into the Monday Night Football game with just my kicker remaining. I met Jonny for dinner that night and congratulated him on his fantasy win, wishing him luck in the championship game.
Then Justin Tucker started kicking. And kicking. And kicking. With just seconds left in the game, he'd scored 16 fantasy points for me on 5 field goals, and he was lining up for a 61-yard field goal at the buzzer that would give me the comeback victory. The kick is up ... and it's good! Just barely inside the post and over the crossbar.
Pandemonium! Or, at least I think it was. I had gone to sleep at halftime, assuming I'd lost the game. I woke up to a chaotic text message thread with several friends in the league. Needless to say, this was the best fantasy football moment of my life. It simply can't get better than this.
I won the league for my 3rd championship the following weekend, and I think I've gotten everything I can out of this sport. It's been a blast, and I hope to find another way to replace the years of camaraderie that fantasy football has provided.
-rj