by Kevin Burton
I was distraught, or as we say in the biz, tilted.
Spoiler alert: Colby Parkinson saved me.
And so, in the aftermath the end of the fantasy football season, I am contented, with three championships to show for my efforts (out of eight leagues), having played “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang multiple times at maximum volume, having survived the slings and arrows of fantasy football, and not least, having survived myself.
My K&J Road Dogs, the team that narrowly escaped last place in mid-season, dominated the final, winning154 to 121. I am proud of that team because it needed a lot of care and feeding after a poor draft.
Season takeaway: keep the faith and play Derrick Henry!
Also victorious, somehow, were my K&J Travelers. That score was 135-130. The Travelers led by six points going into the Monday night game. I had Rams running back Kyren Williams yet to play but my opponent had the quarterback, Matthew Stafford.
Stafford is (or was?) on the short list of candidates for NFL MVP. But he was awful last week and worse Monday night. He outscored Williams by only one point, leaving me with an unexpected but much appreciated five-point win.
The third championship win was for the K&J Silvers from the league I play in with some of my buddies from beep baseball. And that title game, before it all turned sunny, was the source of my winter dismay
Last year I lost the title game when Jamyr Gibbs of Detroit scored a meaningless touchdown at the end of his week 17 game.
Meaningless for the real-life game, a dagger for me.
There I was Sunday, a year after that disappointment, again leading in the title game. My opponent had both Saquon Barkley and Josh Allen playing and I didn’t love my odds. But surprisingly both had poor games.
I was ahead but watching the lead dwindle play by play. I was ahead by one point until the last seconds of the game, when Allen scored six fantasy points for my opponent on a quarterback sneak touchdown.
That left me five points behind with only one player left to play in the Monday night game. This was shaping up to be a worse heartbreak than last year. Why?
Because the one player I had left was not going to be superstar tight end George Kittle. It was Kittle who got me the semi-final win, but he left that game with an injury. I was going to have to play either Kittle’s backup Jake Tonges, or the Rams tight end Colby Parkinson. I had both on my roster.
Either way, my championship ace in the whole, had turned into a joker.
I chose Parkinson.
Then in the first quarter of the San Francisco-Chicago Sunday night game, I watched as Tonges scored the touchdown that would have delivered me a championship had I just played him.
That’s when I tilted. Couldn’t take it.
Being tilted is a temporary insanity all too familiar to fantasy players. It’s a shutting down mentally.
In that moment, I quit fantasy football. I quit all football. I quit this blog. I quit three or four things I haven’t even started yet. I checked out. It’s almost like blacking out.
I turned off what developed into a great Sunday night game. I wouldn’t have cared had I watched it; couldn’t have enjoyed it. I had to wait a whole day to see if Parkinson could deliver me five points.
Now five points is not a lot. If you told me your team needed five points for a championship, I wouldn’t think twice about that. That’s your team. You got this.
As for my team, everything can go wrong. My player can get injured. He can drop passes, have plays called back by penalty. He can fumble and lose two points.
The flow of the game – game script we call it – can turn in a way that the coach doesn’t want or need to use him.
So of course Parkinson scored 1.5 points in the first quarter, 1.6 in the second. Halftime. I trail by 1.9 points.
So I’m thinking, if I lose this I want to lose it by 0.1 points. Maximum pain, but the easy way out of having to play any more fantasy.
But on Parkinson’s next catch he had a decent amount of yac (yards after catch) and when I looked at the app, I was leading.
My opponent immediately congratulated me but I was still on pins and needles. As I said, a player who fumbles loses two fantasy points and at the time I was ahead by less than one point.
The final score was 113 to 107, a real nail-biter to the bitter end. But it was a sweet ending, for a change, for me.
It’s my fifth year in that league. Aside from a flameout year, I had placed fourth, third and last year second before I finally won this year. I was tired of that bride’s maid bit, happy to finally win one.
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