Thursday, August 28, 2008
Nearly every family has them: heirlooms, traditions, coming of age moments. A father gives his son his lucky fishing pole or a watch his great grandfather passed down.
One such moment transpired this summer when my dad relinquished the reins of Frank’s Fantasy Football League to me. You’d be hard pressed to find a prouder pigskin prognosticator in Lawrence.
Growing up, I knew each year when football season was near by the sight of my house packed in the basement, garage and living room with fire-hazard amounts of friends and family.
Rustling pages of their Fantasy Football Index and hurling insults, praise and beer cans after each draft pick, my dad and his friends made the annual draft became a spectacle in itself.
Amidst the smell of homemade chili that permeated the house, my little brother Kevin and I took cover and hunkered down to watch the crazies in action.
And just as often as I was in awe of my dad achieving fantasy football glory, it was my mom who was in the middle of the wickedness, meticulously crafting a team that would put grown men to shame a few months later.
More than 20 years old, the FFFL is actually young considering fantasy football has been around for nearly 50 years.
So why does it still have that aura of a growing phenomena?
For one, lazy sportswriters and editors who cannot think of anything fresh to run in periods of relative sporting inactivity like to write “trend stories” or features on what they perceive to be an up-and-coming entity in sports.
So each year we are likely to see “fresh” takes on fantasy football’s meteoric rise in popularity. Maybe headers along the lines of “Groups of Friends Gathering for Fantasy Drafts in Every State.”
Stop the presses.
Truth is, fantasy football has grown substantially every year of its existence, and we likely could know the effects of fantasy football on office productivity after devouring the Wall Street Journal’s “latest” findings.
Fantasy football’s continuous ascent into becoming one of sports fans’ greatest obsessions has a great deal to do with this Information Age we live in.
Every NFL snap on television broadcasts is now succeeded by a graphic popping out of the scoreboard with each players’ stats. Larry Johnson: 1 rush, -2 yards… Larry Johnson: 2 rushes, 1 yard…
We can also draft, trade and set our lineups via cell phone. And of course there is the Internet: A vast plain of knowledge for us to track each touchdown, knee sprain and arrest.
No longer must league owners stay up late each Sunday and calculate the stats of each fantasy leaguer’s team as my dad did. Today our computers do our work for us after every play.
Fantasy football will always have a sense of nostalgia with me. Peering out of the hallway in our awkward footie pajamas, Kevin and I didn’t see our dad scanning his iPhone for draft advice.
No, phones still had cords then and those cords were usually wrapped around the neck of the poor schmuck who picked Barry Sanders ahead of my dad.
So on the eve of fantasy football’s 47th season, this theoretical sport inches closer to overtaking real football as America’s New New Favorite Pastime.
Each season, as ticket and parking prices grow more obscene at NFL stadiums, corporate executives and other big wigs will fill the luxury boxes — which will soon replace all other seats — to watch Adrian Peterson and LaDainian Tomlinson go on their touchdown benders.
Meanwhile, our homes and the sports bars of America will become the real stage for this new sport as we don the jerseys of players from our fantasy teams and cheer and jeer at every moment of every game.
Because with fantasy football, at least one person will have something at stake every minute of each season.
Chiefs coach Herm Edwards is ahead of the curve. In his attempt to put positive spin on the Chiefs’ upcoming season, Herm alluded to personnel decisions as being “like fantasy football.”
Edwards, an NFL coach, just compared reality to fantasy.
Perhaps he’s on to something. When he is fired by Carl Peterson in Peterson’s last attempt to save face in Kansas City, Edwards can become a head coach in America’s most popular sport.
Like many of us already are.
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