Sports

Fantasy Football has ruined the NFL for me (except when I win)

Fantasy Football has become as much a staple of fall Sundays as the games themselves. (Side note: everyone has a team. Nobody cares about your team.) People have always been in love with the idea of ​​playing King, and fans have been clamoring for teams to allow them to be in charge of the staff. Fantasy Football offers the avenue for both. It allows you to be in a position to make all decisions and forces you to suffer all the consequences of such decisions. A bad draft will result in a LONG season. As for the performance on the field of your favorite football team? A victory for them is nice, but it becomes the icing on the cake. To hell with loyalties.

How many of you, right now, couldn’t confidently name your favorite team’s opponent this week, but could easily recite whether or not your recovering RB2 participated in practice this week? At what point did our priorities get so out of control? I think the answer is simple: people like to feel empowered. As a fan, you don’t have a bit of control over how your favorite team runs. As a fantasy owner, you can make a blockbuster trade in week 1 if your heart desires. That control creates a sense of investment. It creates a sense of pride that can sometimes be hard to find in franchises run by billionaires. It can be particularly hard to find when these billionaires like to pretend to be general managers (hey, everyone likes to feel important), as has been the case with my Dallas Cowboys since Jerry Jones bought the team. So the solution is to build your own team, put together a roster, and live and die by the results.

Fantasy Football has created a way, outside the confines of sports betting, to keep almost every game interesting. That is the appeal of betting, essentially. It’s a way to create excitement in a football game that would otherwise be meaningless. Now, most fantasy football leagues offer an ultimate reward, but I’d say the chance to win money is just one of the motivating factors. The competition between friends… The opportunity to show off superior sports intellect and amazing foresight… These are the things that drive a true fantasy football user. And, if you’re lucky enough (yes, LUCK) to avoid injury and the fantasy gods decide you’d make a passable champion, the money is a nice bonus.

However, what happens when your fantasy football loyalties are in direct conflict with your loyalties as a fan of an NFL team? Surely you wouldn’t be so manipulated by a competition that you would forget where your heart is. You can try to convince yourself that you can root for both a victory for your favorite team and a great fantasy performance for your players. Ultimately though, you’ll find that fantasy football has simply ruined the NFL for you. And you can accept that, as long as you’re winning.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *