The Football Fan's Manifesto

by Michael Tunison

  That isn’t to say the live experience doesn’t still hold appeal. Certainly nothing at home or at a bar can touch the palpable energy of a packed stadium during a tight game. We as fans would prefer the live experience to the televised one, but given how it’s priced beyond our means and that our behavior is being restricted more and more every year, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to muster the will to get out to the stadium. At this point, being able to tell people you attended an event is, for many, is about as important as how much fun you have while you’re there. For the league, or any entertainer, the benefit of exploiting that basic human need for anecdotes to share with others cannot be understated.

  Purists will wheeze the claim that television’s rise has always come at the expense of the live game. Not that there’s no truth to that. In person, TV timeouts are a frequent but jarring break in the action, in which any fluid pacing of the game is broken up. Meanwhile, the timeouts encompass too little time to do anything but make small talk with the person next to you in the lovingly constructed full-body bird costume.

  Before proponents of other sports start getting all fussy, affirming that this proves the NFL is nothing more than an overblown, plodding spectacle, know that this argument is just as true for their, ahem, games as it is for The One True Sport. With the exception of baseball, of course, which is actually better to watch in person than on television, but that’s only by virtue of baseball being so excruciating to watch on TV. Stupid languid baseball broadcast camera. I need frantic cutting and animated dancing robots, not one camera angle from center field. When will you learn?

  Owners aren’t idiots, of course. All right, Mike Brown is. Some of them may not be able to run a winning franchise, but the policies they set as a collective tend to work out well for them in terms of the whole making-money-hand-over-fist thing. They wouldn’t have spent decades bleeding you dry if they weren’t good at it, willing though you may be to let them.

  Will there ever be a breaking point? Many franchises, even as they hike prices and restrict what you can do, have waiting lists for season tickets measured in years, if not decades. Should the televised experience supplant the live one as the viewing experience of choice for fans, won’t that only serve to increase the number of commercial interruptions? Possibly. But then, I envision a breaking point when fans head to luxury boxes with sharp sticks and torches. After that, everything should be alllllll right.

  ARTICLE VI

  The Fantasy Football Chapter (Now with Tear-Out Cheat Sheet!)

  VI.1 Fantasy Baseball Is for Geeks but Fantasy Football Is for Men

  In just the span of the last decade, fantasy football has gone from being the dominion of tens of millions socially backward statistics-fixated sports-enthused geeks to a widely celebrated veritable superorgy of man-children.

  Because only football is badassed enough to make a geeky pursuit like rotisserie leagues a phenomenon that has become even quasi-acceptable in mainstream male culture. According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, more than 80 percent of people who played any fantasy sport played fantasy football. Naturally, they could have played in other sport leagues as well, but, uh, RAWR, FOOTBALL!

  In many ways, fantasy has come to shape the rudiments of football fandom and challenge some of our most basic assumptions about rooting interests. Though no real fan would ever wish for a fantasy football victory if it comes at the expense of a defeat to his real-life team.

  But what if it’s Week 13 and your real-life team is impossibly out of playoff contention and, if the superstar receiver of the team you’re playing that week can just get a touchdown and at least 70 yards, you’ll win the money league for the first time ever? Sorry, still got to support the team. Fantasy football, by its very nature, invites you to consider rival players as individuals, as people. And that can simply not be. Rivals are not to be empathized with. That you even have rival players on your fantasy team is a horrible slight to your fellow members of [insert team name] Nation.

  Your real life team always takes primacy in all non-gambling matters. It should be noted that there is a small but critical difference between gambling against your team and rooting against them with fantasy in mind. In gambling against your team, you’re finding a clever way to recoup money in exchange for your suffering. If it’s a big game, you may do it to protect against the huge kick in the nuts that will result if your team loses. It’s a small consolation you’ll be glad to forfeit if it means you’re jinxing the other team.

  It’s astounding how much fantasy has permeated the entire football experience. Some players in the NFL admit to playing in fantasy leagues. Hot-pants-wearing Redskins tight end Chris Cooley dolefully reported that his three-touchdown performance in a game in December 2005 caused one of his four fantasy teams to be eliminated from playoff contention because his opponent had started Cooley.

  Believe it or not, but fantasy football was the first good thing ever to come out of Oakland. Had to be something. In 1962, Raiders co-owner Bill Winkenbach, Raiders PR employee Bill Tunnell, Oakland Tribune sportswriter Scotty Sterling, and editor George Ross, trying to entertain themselves during a three-week road trip, formed the first fantasy league. Taking their cue from the long-established baseball rotisserie leagues. They named it the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League. Surely this occasion needs to be honored with some sort of federal holiday, preferably one in late August, so people can more easily brush off social and business obligations in favor of holding the draft. This needs to be a national priority.

  The emergence of the Internet allowed it to take off, as football fans aren’t so high on math, and having automated live scoring done by a computer helps take the time commitment issue out of it. That and it puts fantasy sports and porn in one handy little package. Thank you, magical Internet box.

  Fantasy has become so huge that networks and august sports news publications have hired supposed experts for the sole purpose of discussing the fantasy implications of each NFL game. Of course, this has nothing to do with the studies that show that fantasy players on average buy more tickets to sporting events and spend more money at stadia than do other sports fans.

  And why not? Fantasy improves all facets of football. A December game between the Texans and the Rams is an otherwise unwatchable affair between two clubs playing for draft picks. The players don’t care. Even their fans don’t care. No one cares. That is unless the game has fantasy implications for you. If so, you’ll be spending the entire game in rapt attention, you’ll formulate at least thirty game scenarios that result in Andre Johnson getting the 21 points you need. Of course, you’ll find your head in an oven when he only delivers 20, after he fumbles the ball on his final garbage-time catch with the team already up three scores.

  The popularity does not dilute the passion that most bring to fantasy football. In fact, all signs indicate the first fantasy-related homicide is near. Last year, a thirty-eight-year-old Florida man held a knife to his roommate’s neck and threatened to kill him in a dispute that began over fantasy scoring. Alarmists will decry this, but fantasy-related violence is typically relegated to imagined scenarios where fantasy players exact ghastly revenge against NFL players who performed well during weeks they were benched by their fantasy owners.

  VI.2 Know Your Fantasy League or Know Draft Defeat

  When diving headlong into the choppy waters of fantasy football, it helps to know that the act of drafting is an intricate science. Sure, for the uncommitted, there’s always the option of auto-drafting to your heart’s content and getting whacked on a weekly basis by every other owner in the league. Whatever works for you. Those who are ready to sack up do their homework. Every league wants a couple patsies to pony up entry money they have no chance of winning back.

  Before even deciding on which format to enter into, you should know there’s no reason to ever get involved with a public league (unless it carries a mammoth prize, but even then you should supplement it with private leagues). W
hat’s the point of fantasy triumph if it’s not something you can lord over someone you know? Someone like a friend or a coworker who has no choice but to absorb your vicious taunts with quiet resentment. You simply can’t get that satisfaction in a public league. And make a point not to sign up for any league that doesn’t offer head-to-head contests. League-wide rotisserie formats are the worst idea a group of people has entered into aside from cuddle parties. Even survivor leagues, where a team need only not be the lowest scoring team in its league to advance from week to week, don’t provide a sufficient rush. Fantasy football isn’t a war of attrition. It’s supposed to mirror the NFL itself by being a series of bitter duels to determine who gets to advance to meaningful bitter duels.

  The type of league you join will dictate which type of draft you go through. It’s not only the draft that your choice affects; it has other long-term consequences as well, forcing you to select players with an eye toward more than just the immediate future. Matt Millen hates those.

  There are generally two types of drafts: the normal kind and the incredibly involved kind that makes you focus on numbers and hurts your thinkin’ box in ways that have nothing to do with polluting it with booze.

  Standard Draft—The bog standard model, in which you’re free to take whoever you’d like in serpentine order without regard to performance beyond the season or how the players’ predetermined value factors into your budget. For most casual player, this is the tits.

  Auction Draft—But nooooo, there are people who want to make their hobbies as close to having a second job as a GM as humanly possible. In these leagues, dollar amounts are assigned to players as though they were free agents on an imaginary market. You, as a fantasy owner, have to work each draftee into your budget. This concept is usually extended into salary-cap leagues, where the budget must be considered when making trades and acquiring free agents throughout the season. Again, it’s possible—there’s a faint chance—that you’re making too much work for yourself.

  Standard League—Again, no fuss, no muss. You have the players you drafted, but you can sign or trade for new players solely based on availability and the willingness of your trade partner (or how well you can steal their passwords and furtively force them to accept a trade).

  Dynasty Leagues—In a Dynasty League, fantasy owners retain the players they draft from one season to the next, with rookies being the only players drafted with each successive season. So one regrettable draft has the potential to ream you for multiple years instead of mere months. Sounds like a blast.

  Keeper Leagues—The keeper league operates in much the same manner as a dynasty league, in that players can be retained by the same owner from one season to the next, though it’s typically only a handful as opposed to the entire roster, thus giving owners a better chance for unfucking themselves following poor drafts and critical injuries the year previous.

  IDP Leagues—For the hard-core fan who can appreciate some defense, IDP leagues are marked by the drafting of individual defensive players in lieu of the entire defense as a unit, which is the norm in most fantasy leagues.

  Malfeasance Leagues—In general, fantasy football focuses on the positive, though there are so many delectably horrible things in the NFL to celebrate. With the malfeasance league, you can make disgraceful behavior work for you. This league awards points for arrests (one for DUI, two for drug possession, three for drug distribution, four for domestic violence, five for random aggravated assault, six for murder, seven for deviant sexual acts, etc.) as well as for suspensions and being a clubhouse cancer. Did a player on your team just throw a teammate under the bus to the press? Score a point for you. Until you signed up, you couldn’t stand dirty players like Albert Haynesworth or bad apples like Matt Jones. Now they’re the best contributors to your lineup.

  Okay, okay, this last type of league doesn’t technically exist, but it needs to happen. Enterprising fans of the world, let’s do this. For the betterment of fankind.

  Once settled on a league, the first concern of a draftee is the structure of the team being put together. How many receivers, running backs, and flex players (a slot on the lineup open to either a back, a receiver, or a tight end) are set in your lineup? Next, you have to know the scoring value assigned to each statistic. Are you in a points-per-reception league? If so, are you content salivating over underneath-route-dwelling receivers like Wes Welker? Does the league give points for return yardage on special teams? It does? What kind of bullshit league did you join? How many do you get per passing touchdown? How many yards does your quarterback have to throw for you to get a point? Arcane though they may seem, the answers to these questions will go a long way toward determining your drafting board and ultimately the gang of disappointments whose names you will curse until the end of days, or at least the end of the season.

  The league commissioner will ultimately make these calls. The job of commissioner is a thankless one in which the poor sap thrust into the role will have to preside over petty complaints of unfair trades, deal with people who are slow to pay their membership fees, and perform the rest of the administrative duties only a type A personality could derive pleasure from. But with great responsibility comes, well, not a whole lot of power. You could abuse your authority to change league rules in your favor, but there’s also nothing to stop your league mates from beating you with socks filled with nickels if you do.

  VI.3 Naming Your Fantasy Team, or Which Anchorman Reference Shall You Go With?

  The naming of your fantasy team is an act of equal, possibly even greater importance than naming your children, and deserves at least as much thought and intoxication to nail down. This may come as a painful realization, but almost certainly your team isn’t going to triumph in its league. In addition to loss of pride and countless hours of work, you will also forfeit whatever money you paid to enter your league. You should be prepared for this.

  In the face of such excruciating failure, your only hope for saving face, besides blaming the randomness of injuries and shady waiver deals for ruining your otherwise fantastic drafting performance, is the genius of your team name.

  There exists but one inviolable rule for fantasy team naming: be funny. This is a tall task for any football fan because, on the whole, football fans are overly serious dipshits.

  It’s easy. Dick jokes, fart jokes, tit jokes, fat jokes, movie quotes, fantasy violence, violence, mockery of the poor, epithets both racial and religious, contempt for the wealthy, sexual deviancy, blind anger, focused anger, low-grade homophobia, mild cripplephobia, intense xenophobia, sexism, retards, and even SIDS can all be funny, given a deft enough touch.

  If you happen to be in a league with work colleagues or women, you should probably knock that list down to movie quotes. Also, why the hell are you in a league with women?

  Ultimately, the greatest challenge for any fantasy team name is braving the test of time. Most often, a name has enough humorous oomph to survive maybe a few weeks of laughs before becoming incredibly tiresome. You must strive for a name that can endure over the course of a season.

  Chances are, that timeless resplendent gem of hilarity isn’t going to come to you. That’s fine. You’re just a boring asshole is all. At the very least, you can try to be topical. Beware though. While it may be tempting to riff off the biggest story of the off-season, the key to being funny is being original. And deeply offensive. But mostly original.

  For example, remember back in the beginning of the 2007 season after Michael Vick was sent to prison for running a dog-fighting ring? Sure, it was an endless source of laughs. However, every other doucheweasel had a fantasy team name playing on an aspect of that scandal. It was “rape stand” this and “Bad Newz Kennel Club” that. A month into the season and a Michael Vick joke was as tired as “I’m Rick James, bitch.” Beware that trap by anticipating the longevity of a crude reference. Think long and hard before cursorily submitting Visante Shiancock for your fantasy team this year. Surely there was some obscure player who got in
a hilarious drug bust during the off-season from which you can draw material. The police blotter is the stuff of which great fantasy names are made.

  It should be noted that if you are playing in multiple leagues (and if you aren’t, why not? Who are you, President Obama? Your time isn’t that valuable) you may absolutely not recycle team names. Not from years past. Not from your teams in other leagues. It’s out of the question.

  VI.4 The Fantasy Draft Is the Only Time Being an Unrepentant Homer Doesn’t Help

  Here’s when the whole of your strategic genius is brought to bear. Do you start going all homer and scoop up every player possible from your real-life favorite team? It bespeaks hard-core fandom, even if it’s a sure-fire recipe for disaster in fantasy. Especially if your real-life team happens to the Lions or the Raiders. Conversely, do you eschew your favorite team entirely, fearing that your fanhood will blind you to players’ actual worth, or worse still, that having them on your fantasy team will jinx members of the real-life team irreparably? Both approaches, it should be noted, are incredibly asinine.

  Now where to convene to divvy up players like European monarchs divvied up Africa? Weighing the options for the location of your draft will at least enable you to make a mistake from an informed perspective.

  THE BAR

  Pro: Reduced chance of wife walking in mid-draft to tell you to watch the kids.

  Con: People in public who aren’t predisposed to understand your nerdish leanings judging you as the embarrassing tool you are.

  SOMEONE’S HOUSE

  Pro: Not having to pony up cash for every drink; chance to geek out without eliciting disdainful looks from attractive women, as there will be none present.