Some sports enthusiasts sit and watch their favorite team and think to themselves, “I could create a better team than this.” Fantasy football is a place where these fans can do just that. Each year, around the beginning of the professional football season, fantasy managers will get ready for their team’s draft. The draft is where teams are picked out of a pool of all current players in the league. There are fantasy leagues for other sports, but football is the most common.
Fantasy football began in 1962 after Bill Winkenbach, partial-owner of the Oakland Raiders, invented it. The poor guy was probably so fed up with the Raiders that he started daydreaming about a team he would actually want to manage. Nowadays, all drafts and leagues are online and managed through various apps. Some of the real try-hards download additional apps that give information on which players are doing well and which players are riding the bench. Some people even spend money on subscriptions to these apps to get advanced statistics and trade proposal grades. Many leagues require a fee to play, so the league has winnings at the end of the season. I suppose it could be worth it if you end up making a profit. Personally, I think spending money to increase your fake football team’s chances of winning is insane.
Draft days for these fake teams can be quite elaborate. Some people throw full-blown parties on draft days. Nothing like cheering on your auto-draft as it selects the Los Angeles Chargers defense with the 11th overall pick. Throwing a party and spending more money to celebrate a fake team just seems illogical.
Some people spend insane amounts of time setting up who they want to draft, and maintaining their team afterwards. They will watch television shows and read articles about how some random bum from the Bengals is going to drop 0.4 more points than Aaron Rodgers in week seven.
However, I don’t really blame those sorts of people whenever they play in leagues that have punishments for the losing team. It seems like you either spend most of your life studying up on which players will play well next week, or you end up getting a tattoo chosen by the rest of the league. Those 0.4 points might be the difference between a peaceful weekend and being forced to stay in an iHop until you eat your age in pancakes.
Overall, fantasy football seems like a fun and exciting way to keep up with sports. Just make sure you don’t spend unreasonable amounts of money and… don’t lose.