Living in an NFL Fantasy

Following professional sports is not something I have done all my life. In fact, you could say I was never really the type to know who played over the weekend, let alone who won. I may have said, "Oh, has basketball season started again?" once or twice in my lifetime. In the last two years, however, I find myself able to not only tell you who played and who won, but also describe in detail a team's prospects for the next week as well as how badly/well they played the previous week. I can name most of the starters and produce a stat or two at will. The reasons for my newfound interest in professional sports are hard to name. It could be that for the first time in my life I have a television and a generous cable package in my bedroom, and sporting events are just background enough that I can watch them and still accomplish other tasks. It could also be that the various leagues are doing more than they ever have before to reach beyond their normal demographics. I have always been a Dodger fan, both by lineage and because I grew up in Los Angeles, but I can't say that I would have followed them as closely as I did this year if it hadn't been for the excellent MLB At Bat iPhone app, which brought the games to me wherever I was. It combined sporting events with excellent software and content delivery, so it was an easy sell. Perhaps my increased interest in sports is also a defense mechanism. I've never been any good at hiding what a geek I am, so when making a reference to Firefly and using computer hardware as a sexual euphemism in a single sentence, it's good to be able to follow up with, "I think the Steelers are going to repeat this year, as long as Ben and Troy stay healthy." Sports being a common denominator of sorts among those of many demographics, this slightly-beyond-cursory knowledge lets someone like myself move more freely between groups that would otherwise find our encounters awkward.

As I listened to Fox NFL Sunday announcers compare the various statistics for Brett Favre and Ben Roethlisberger yesterday, it occurred to me that hardcore sports fans have been getting away with a social cheat of some kind. If I told you that I was going to host a gathering where my friends and I would sit around and trade characters and compare their various stats and attributes and then play a game in which those stats and attributes, as well as a generous amount of random chance, determined the outcome of the game and who won, what would you think? If I then told you that we would do this for hours each week, obsessing over our characters and their stats --and agonizing over the outcome, what would you think? Would your thoughts change if I said we were playing Dungeons & Dragons and NOT part of a Fantasy Football league? Probably. But the actual mechanical differences between the two pasttimes are virtually nil. Both involve choosing teams, making decisions about who will go where, and facing predetermined challenges along the way. Both introduce chance; D&D through a 20-sided die and FF through the unpredictability of live sporting events. Both were created decades ago and have survived generations of rule changes and alterations--in fact, Fantasy Football predates Dungeons & Dragons by six years. The many parallels are obvious even to someone who's never actually participated in either, but the stigma surrounding them is just as obviously unbalanced.

The most easily reached for reason for this is that rolling dice and managing the exploits of Elves and Warlocks in the face of dangers such as dragons is far more fantastical and unhinged from reality than the fantasy of being the owner of a football organization and garnering the stats of the best players in football to smite your opponents. Still, in both cases you've left the solid ground of reality, and your suspension of disbelief is just a matter of degree. The chances of Adrian Peterson receiving touchdown passes from Eli Manning all season are no greater odds than that of a Crystal Dragon guarding the Super Bowl trophy. (Yes, I did have to Google, "types of dragons in D&D" to come up with that)

Unfortunately, I don't think the degree of fantasy is the real issue here. The same veil of denial that protects American sports from owning its faults protects the Fantasy Football players from having to own up to the fact that they're nearly indistinguishable from the geeks playing D&D in their parent's garage. American football and baseball are sacred institutions, protected by the covenant long held between the league and its fans that thou shall not hold the players or coaches to the same standards as everyone else, or any standards at all. Nothing associated with these sports can be tarnished, no matter what the antics or criminal activity. Culturally speaking they are forever good and those who are not in tune with this (read: geeks and their ilk) are forever misunderstood. It does not matter how many wives and girlfriends get beaten, it does not matter how many guns get accidentally discharged, how many steroids are found in one's system, or even how many innocent dogs are slaughtered; if it's Football or Baseball, it's gotta be good! So when you really break it down, who lives in the bigger Fantasy--the geeks competing against one another with unreal creatures with clear affiliations to good and evil or the football fans idolizing an organization with a history of turning a blind eye to its criminals?