by Kevin Burton
My Kool & The Gang tape doesn’t play so well anymore. Found this out Sunday.
I had the greatest hits record on CD, but I lent it to one of my neighbors when I lived in Ohio and never got it back. But I had to hear the song, Celebration, so I got Alexa to play it.
Over and over and over.
For the second year in a row one of my fantasy football teams won its championship. The K&J Moondogs finished second in the regular season, but won the final 123 to 107.
In the grand scheme, nothing I do is less meaningful than fantasy football. But the last half of 2023 was rough enough for me that I ran with the fantasy title and celebrated in high-decibel exaltation.
My wife is no longer amazed, but still amused by my outbursts on Sundays watching the NFL. Playing fantasy football has shaped, some would say warped, the way I watch the games. My shouting is about individual players rather than my favorite team.
As a Bengals fan I am all about the orange and black and the jungle. As a fantasy player I grew to hate Cincinnati wideout Tee Higgins. I drafted him to be my top wide receiver on my K&J Silvers team. But his frequent injuries and inconsistent play exasperated me, made me wish I could get rid of him. But he was on the Yahoo Fantasy no-drop list.
How thoroughly does fantasy in the football sense, consume reality? On another team I had Bengals kicker Evan McPherson. So for that team I began to route for Cincinnati to kick a lot of field goals rather than score touchdowns. Not such a good wish for the actual Bengals.
But once the games were over Sunday, and the fantasy football season was over, I turned back into a regular Bengals fan. Too bad that by the time I got there the Bengals had been eliminated from playoff competition.
Also too bad that Higgins, a very talented receiver overshadowed in Cincinnati by JaM’arr Chase, is almost certain to leave the team in free agency for big money and top dog status elsewhere.
I had five fantasy teams this year. Along with the champion I had two others that made the playoffs, one finishing second one third. I had two teams that finished ninth. One was ninth out of 12, which was a disaster. The other finished ninth out of 20, missing the playoffs by one spot. That was better than I expected from that league.
Fantasy is about mathematics and probabilities more than it is about sports. When I was an agriculture reporter at a newspaper in Iowa, I would try to forecast the price of soybeans in the US by keeping track of how the Brazilian soybean crop was faring. That never went well. Trying to predict the individual performances of NFL football players proved similarly frustrating much of the time.
With the soybean prices you need to factor in potential government subsidies, weather and diseases such as brown stem rot. In fantasy you have to look at weather, injuries and something called game script.
If you have a running back that you want to play, you have to consider who his team is playing against. Is the other team so much better that they are likely to be way ahead, forcing the first team to pass more and turn away from your running back. That’s game script.
There is also pure dumb luck working in both directions.
This year more than my first two as a fantasy manager, I was wearied by mid-week designations of a player as “questionable.” Do I need to get a different player or not? If so, which different player?
When noon Central time came and went Sunday I rejoiced that all my fantasy decisions were over for the year, win lose or draw. I was thinking, get thee behind me fantasy, and brown stem rot on all your fields!
But this was almost certainly a reflection of my real-life stresses. And you almost certainly will find me watching all three days of the NFL draft, unless honey-dos and household duty (a kind of familial game script) prevent it.
This will be in preparation of another year of fantasy torment. So hail the mighty Moondogs! And to Tee Higgins, God speed. All is forgiven.
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