Football is back, which means fantasy football is back, which means my sons and I are commandeering the family room TV for the next four months of Sundays.
The pro football season always starts the same – with renewed hope and optimism around the hometown Chicago Bears more so than on the players on our fantasy team(s), clutching to the firm belief – however delusional – that this year might be the one to break their nearly 30-year Super Bowl title drought. That usually wears off by about the second quarter.
For the uninitiated, fantasy football falls roughly somewhere on the make-believe scale between G.I. Joe and Batman. No matter your fantasy football acumen – and I’m proud to say I’ve won multiple titles along the way – success is built purely on predicting the athletic performance of others. It’s sort of like hoping to ace your statistical analysis tests in math while having a permanent doctor’s note excusing you from gym class.
It all started humbly enough, with manual calculations of scores the mornings after games, adding up how many points one fantasy team had and how many points the opponent had, based on the real-world showing of the real-world players in the real-world games. This was before the rise of multiple behemoth websites to do these calculations for you. And it’s all done in real time, with analysis, and real-time analytical second-guessing.
There was a time all the players in most fantasy leagues would gather at some pre-determined watering hole at a prescribed time, weeks before the start of the season. Calendars would be cleared months in advance to ensure each general manager could be there. General manager, you say? Yes, this is how we refer to ourselves, having long ago outgrown the dream of being a fireman when we grow up, save for those heroic souls among us who actually went on to be real firemen. Schedules now being what they are, many of us now simply draft online, unable to devote the better part of a day to this sort of thing, like we once did.
Either way, with your entire season’s fortunes riding on it, you dare not miss draft day. When it comes to fantasy football, there’s only thing worse than letting the computer pick your team automatically: letting the guy at the end of the table who doesn’t know football from flambe do it for you. You know that guy. He’s the one who shows up at the draft each year with more computers, magazines and spreadsheets than everybody else combined and still manages to finish last in the league every season.
For the last few years, my older son has gotten in on the fun, not by joining one of my real-world fantasy football leagues, but by instead drafting and managing his own simulated fantasy team online as preparation for one day joining the big boys. It’s straight out of the Modern Father’s Handbook, 2015 edition: “One must ensure that one’s son is adequately prepared to play make believe by first playing pretend make believe before he plays make believe for real.” Hey, there’s pretend pride and pretend reputation at stake here – you’ve got to have credibility in the sandbox, or you’re marked for life.
This year the boy tried valiantly to organize a fantasy football draft with his buddies, only to have things fall through at the 11th hour due to scheduling conflicts and Wi-Fi connectivity issues. Seeing a bonding opportunity for her sons and husband at hand, my wife came up with what will surely go down as the best idea of this fantasy football season: Why not have a mini fantasy football league just for us? And by us, I mean me and our two boys because let’s be honest, our daughter couldn’t care less and my wife has far more pressing real-world issues on her plate than worrying how many touchdowns some guy named “Gronk” scores this weekend.
So Sporto set up the draft, and he, The Builder and I picked our teams. At 11, Sporto gets it, for the most part, understanding who the likely high-point guys are and how to spread his picks out across the necessary positions. The Builder, not so much. At only 7, he’s still far too enamored with players he’s simply heard of like Jay Cutler and Peyton Manning, blissfully unaware of their true comparatively low rankings among the current greats in the game. We helped him along, trying desperately to discourage him from drafting all Bears and Broncos and five quarterbacks along the way when all you really need is two, but he was having fun, and that’s all that mattered.
When Week 1 kicked off Sunday at noon, there we were, the three of us huddled around the TV, dutifully tuned in to the Bears-Packers game … until the first commercial break allowed us to sneak over to the Game Mix and Red Zone and all those other quirky football features on a certain satellite provider that also happens to be the exclusive home to EVERY NFL game played on Sunday afternoons.
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By Tuesday morning when the Cheetos dust had settled, my team – “MankDaddy” – had beaten Sporto’s “DeFlatriots” by 15 points, and the Builder’s “TMoneyBroncos” had lost handily to his computer opponent, fortunes that will likely reverse themselves over and over between now and the end of the season.
Neither of my boys plays tackle football, and to be honest, I doubt they ever will. Who knows what the future of the game even is, with what we now know about the lasting effects of concussions and other injuries. But for 17 Sundays in the fall, fantasy football makes for a pretty good father and sons bonding experience.
And that’s a reality.
Twitter: @RobManker
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives, works, parents in Naperville.