"I tried to follow you out, but I did not know that you'd be leading on...
and you might think that people don't live through being dead wrong...
I guess your parents must have raised themselves a strictly pious daughter,
because you move through this crowd just like parting water.
Oh, you dress so nice, you dress to kill. They drop like flies, but who's the funeral for?"
Fantasy football is one of those things I feel girls have just relegated to "pick your battles" status. I imagine when they hear those two words, they smile politely and leave the room until the conversation no longer contains key phrases like, "late-round sleeper," "red zone touches," and "points per reception."
Whatever little sense our temporary obsession makes to them, they don't complain, at least not out loud. They shake their heads, pat us on the head when we don't make the "playoffs", and focus on improving us in other areas. Like chivalry. And hygeine.
Whenever girls decided to adopt this attitude, I don't know, but it happened a relatively short time after the onset of fantasession. Girls seemed to easily pick up on the fact that this was life or death for most males who chose to become involved. I bet it has something to do with scent. I picture guys with fantasession emitting some completely pungent pheremone that says "Better back off, dear, or I might accidentally slay you as I wave this giant posterboard draft chart back and forth like a crazy person, lamenting how stupid I was to pick Larry Johnson first overall when it was clear LaDanian Tomlinson had more upside!"
Of course, we have no idea we smell like this. Remember how hard we struggle with hygeine?
Anyway, however you figured it out, ladies, I applaud you. Honestly, good work. Maybe this was a battle you could have won. But it would have been bloody.
What brought all this to mind was that on this very Sunday evening, 11 of my friends (now mortal enemies) participated in our very own fantasy football draft. For those of you ladies (or cave-dwelling men) who don't know, the draft is what all the guys you know have been locking themselves away in their rooms for 4 hours every day to prepare for. It is why the most visited page on your Firefox browser is Yahoo! Sports and not Jessica Simpson's MySpace page.
And what a draft it was! Two hours of frantic clicking, cursing, complaining, and scrapping your recently developed ulta-secret infallible draft strategy because QBs were flying off the board in round 3.
When the dust had settled, bench spots had been filled, and other people's picks had been belittled, how do you think we celebrated? By talking about how it went for another hour!
So after quietly congratulating myself for picking Lawrence Maroney in round 13 because I, as an astute fantasy owner, found out he would be splitting carries with Corey Dillon this year, I got to thinking...why?
Why is this so important to guys? What is so fun about owning a pretend team of pretend players who play other people's pretend teams? Doesn't this eerily resemble an attempt to play Dungeons and Dragons in the upstairs living room instead of hiding in the basement? Why do we spend 7 months out of the year trying to impress girls, only to waste it all on 5 months of complete, utter female-repulsing behavior?
Almost all male behavior is motivated by one or more of three certain things, so I figured we should start there.
Those three things are:
1) sex (or for the more modest of us, female attention).
2) the opportunity to live vicariously through someone who was introduced to HGH earlier than us. Which lets us pretend that we are getting a lot more of #1 than we really are.
3) the opportunity to assert dominance over other males. Which in our minds, may directly result in more of #1.
Right off the bat, #1 is out as a motivating factor. I don't see the need to explain myself further on this one.
#2 is also out. We primarily use Madden '07 to accomplish this, and fantasy football is a poor substitute for uber-realistic 3-d button-mashing.
#3 seems to be the most plausible motivation for fantasession. What could be better than stomping your good friend's head into the ground through the magic of the internet? Won't your girlfriend be impressed by the shiny gold-spray-painted trophy you won in your keeper league this year?
But then again...
I think all guys realize that girls don't view this as a legitimate accomplishment. No matter how badly your dynamic running back duo crunched the skulls of the inferior Team BigStud (yes ladies, we're that clever. Team BigStud. No one saw that one coming), we somehow inherently realize our female counterparts won't be impressed. And we also know, somewhere deep inside, that it doesn't matter in terms of long term male-to-male bragging rights, either. Win a game of fantasy football and you are way too likely to be written off as "lucky" or "having way too much time on your hands," instead of being given the credit and glory your victory deserves.
So I admit, I was stumped. I just couldn't understand the attraction of this fake internet sport. It was only when I compared fantasy football to another wildly successful Internet game, namely Internet poker, that I made the connection.
Fantasy Football is
just another form of gambling. A cheap way to get the thrills of high-stakes Vegas without the risk of losing money (or dignity).
Think about it. You're basically placing your bets on players, like a roulette wheel. Red Seven (Drew Bledsoe), Black 13 (Chester Taylor), these are the slots on the wheel you are guessing will turn up gold.
Not only is it just like gambling, but it's gambling where you believe you've completely elimanated luck from the equation. You believe in your bets because you did your homework and spent 40 hours on rotoworld.com, memorizing the mock draft of someone more qualified than you. These bets are even more satisfying because it is your own sweat, brains and decisions that will win you the chips, not the luck of the draw.
You get double the satisfaction; the adrenaline rush of gambling, plus the knowledge that it was by your own volition that you won, not that of Lady Luck.
Fantasession began not with football, but with baseball. As far back as 60 years ago, stats geeks pored over endless sheets of .OPS, .SLG, and .WHIP (stats they invented) to pick the best possible teams to win them a meaningless trophy. In other words, this game was invented by nerds without the cajones to get their gambling fix at an actual casino.
This is what draws millions of men to huddle over their computers all week and watch 6 hours of football every Sunday. This is what estranges husbands from their families. This is what gets over-zealous employees fired for taking three-hour lunches to battle on the waiver wire.
This attraction to fantasy football is visceral, carnal, seemingly almost preternatural. A vice to be sure, an addiction even. But one that brings untold satisfaction for very little cost.
So, after many long minutes of pondering, surmising, what have you; what I discovered is that, in essence, fantasy football is exactly and completely as pathetic as I imagined.
Yessss.
"Well, I wasn't ready for what she said next She said, "There is nothing else that you can do No, you can't understand what I'm going through And if the world has changed, well, I'll be damned Oh, 'cause I'm no good at being brave Not even on the better days And there are things we cannot save No matter how hard we try There is nothing else that you can do No, you can't understand what I'm going through And if the world has changed, well, you'll do fine..." Oh, I tried, but no, I could not stand I touched her with a trembling hand I choked I could not say goodbye No matter how hard I tried"
