THE THINGS WE DO FOR SPORTS:
Fantasy Football - The Prehistoric Years
Nowadays, it seems everyone and their cousin’s inbred half-brother is involved in Fantasy Football. What once was derided as a pathetic hobby for the sport’s über-nerds is now, well, NOW (©The Worldwide Leader). And despite the fact that the last ones to get it were the actual people who should have been most aware of this time consuming activity in the first place (namely the studio analysts and broadcasting booth crowd), we get to hear their “expert” opinions on who should start or sit this week, who stands in risk of being platooned at the RB slot and whether you should have thrown caution to the wind at draft time and selected Lamont Jordan with a late round pick. These from guys that usually draft wide receivers and tight ends in the first rounds of their respective, well-publicized and heavily-promoted leagues.
I feel special bitterness during these days where everybody fancies themselves an expert at FF for two very simple, perfectly understandable reasons:
1. In 12 years of playing, I’ve never won any of the 22 leagues I’ve been in. Not one.
2. Virtually no one who plays today had to go through the FFP. That’s my acronym for
Fantasy Football Prehistory. Because I’m clever like that, see?
Reason number one is quite hard to own up to. After all my efforts, all the time I’ve spent perusing through off-season free agent movement and rookie scouting… I got nothing to show for it but a third place finish in 2000. I was commissioner for my office league during its first seven years, right until I moved to the USA. And while I never drafted higher than third, I did come up with some pretty decent teams a couple of times. But never finished over third place. I even finished last once, in 1999, when my franchise player Terrell Davis started his downward spiral into the injury vortex that eventually ended his career. To add insult to, well, injury, my then girlfriend (now wife) was added as a last minute replacement to cover for a colleague that had chickened out from our first ever league, and then went on to threepeat as league champion, arousing cries of favoritism by some members. All the accusations were made in jest, since the make-up of our league made it virtually impossible to cheat (you’ll see why later), but the fact of the matter was that my girl was winning, and I was dead on the water almost from the get-go.
But reason number two is the one that really smarts. To quote every old fart who ever wanted to piss on the younger generation’s enjoyment of the moment: You people do not know how good you have it now. What prompts this post is a knee-jerk reaction I experienced when I overheard some asshole complaining about his FF website’s “lack of accuracy with their predictions when assessing strength-of-schedule factors”.
He who uttered those words is hereby cordially invited to suck on a bag of dicks. Tactless comments of that ilk are the stuff bar fights are made of.
Am I exaggerating? Maybe, I dunno. But, much like walking six miles over snow on the way to school and having to set foot into an actual shop to pay for porn, there’s a chance you’ll appreciate more what you have once you know how it was before. So let’s take a placid, nostalgic walk through the past...
(Set your web browser’s background colors to sepia, for dramatic effect).
The year was 1996. The place: Mexico City, a bustling metropolis that was on a painful recovery trek after experiencing its first year or so of an insurgent guerrilla (the now quasi-folkloric Zapatistas), a shaky president who was appointed as candidate when his predecessor took a bullet to the head while campaigning, and an even shakier economy as a consequence of the two preceding factors. The White House being blown to bits was still considered a cool special effect in a summer blockbuster and not a grim omen of things to come, people were kinda confused about which Spice Girl was which (and whether or not there was one actually known as “Old Spice”) and the Arizona (formerly Phoenix-St. Louis-Chicago) Cardinals were enjoying a status of temporary coolness thanks to the annoying gay wide receiver from Jerry Maguire.
You could say those were happier, simpler times. Because, in Mexico at least, the Internet was just about to take off.
I had enjoyed brief forays in the nascent WWW thanks to my buddy Pepe, a shady yet endearing character who drifts in and out of my life during crucial phases to introduce lucrative and usually illegal partnerships in several dubious enterprises, which have involved, at several stages, a XXX video rental service (VHS and Beta, natch!), a bootleg computer software operation (Commodore 64 in 7th grade, and Commodore Amiga during high school), the resale of used lasers from faulty printers and copiers and, of course, hassle-free Internet access, thanks to some confidential phone numbers he had come across while working for a foreign news service.
Let me put you through the process of assembling our first league, back in the day:
• Recruiting wasn’t done via massive e-mail to everyone in the company. First of all, not everyone was entitled to an e-mail account in the publishing house where I worked: those were given out on a very strict basis, in a trickle-down form: the chief editors got their e-mail, then the deputy editors, then the art directors, then the assistant editors, then the graphic designers… The total e-mailification of the company must have taken about six months from its initial inception. And since the whole concept of Fantasy Football was kinda new to begin with (even more so in a country where soccer, and not football, is the national sport), I really had to seek out potential owners the old fashioned way. You know, lots of word of mouth and enthusiastic pitches during lunch and coffee breaks.
• In order to explain the idea of a Fantasy League to those around me, I had to come up with the leagues’ rules and scoring system. Internet-hosted leagues were out of the question. My company only had one computer terminal with internet capabilities available for reporters, and its use was heavily monitored and regulated strictly for job-related use. Mail and fax leagues were also unfeasible, since they weren’t based in Mexico and none of them made much sense, either form the logistic or economic standpoint. So, I had a long thought about the manpower needed to maintain a very basic league, concluded that a trained monkey could very well deal with it (in said monkey’s spare time, even), and decided to nominate myself as our league’s own trained monkey, only opting for the more dignified title of “Commish”, instead. I bought a Street & Smiths Pro Football guide, mixed and matched scoring systems from several FF services and came up with the setup for my own league… rules and all. There was no turning back! Our Frankenstein League was ALIVE!!!!
• Of course, I had to cut some corners. Since I was going to maintain the whole thing by myself, I told everyone that no substitutions would be allowed during the year. Yeah, laugh away. I was THAT dumb. But so were they, because everyone agreed to my proposal (we were all noobs back then). However, once the subject of injuries came up, we had to devise a plan to overcome their inevitability. In the end, we theorized that the use of extended rosters would help atone for the events of season-ending injuries, benchings and the like. “Theorized” is the operative word here. Now, take a look at how the teams were configured. Yes, these were ALL STARTING POSITIONS for each of the 10 teams:
• 3 Quarterbacks, 4 Running backs, 1 Fullback (!), 4 Wide receivers, 1 Tight End, 2 Kickers, 1 Defensive End, 1 Linebacker, 1 Defensive Back, 1 Coach (!)… Yup, you counted right. Our inaugural league had 19 starting spots.
• Of course, the expanded roster meant that we had to count a lot of stuff on the field to actually give the defensive starters some measure of value against the high scoring offenses. I think INT’s were worth 10 points, forced fumbles were 4, fumble recoveries were 6, and tackles were a point each. Oh, sacks and half sacks were worth 6 and 3 points, respectively. I think we had a week where Cornelius Bennett was the league’s top scorer. As for the coaches, they had this complicated system that accounted for wins, margin of victory, etc. Complete chaos.
• Here’s another ridiculous aspect to our inaugural league: there was no draft. Instead, every “slot” had between 8 and 10 players to choose from. The top eight ranked QB’s were grouped on the QB1 slot, the next eight on QB2, and so forth. Every team owner chose one player from each mini-pool, but the end result was (obviously) that a lot of people chose the same player in several slots. No, players weren’t exclusive to one team (another dumb ass move, of course). In some ways, this wasn’t that big an issue. QB1, for instance, had guys like Favre, Marino, Elway, Moon and some more that matched pretty well, so picks were varied along our teams in this particular spot. But there were other positions where it was clear that there was only one or two logical choices. I think we all had Larry Centers at FB and our TE’s were either Shannon Sharpe or Ben Coates. Oh, and my buddy Qix chose Frank Wychek, I think...
• Oh, guess what else? THERE WEREN’T HEAD TO HEAD MATCHES. Every team’s scores were just added on week after week, with the obvious result that almost half of our league was effectively out of the race by mid-season. Don’t like it, you say? BUILD YOUR OWN FUCKING LEAGUE FROM SCRATCH, BOY!
• Guess what other part of this setup was also a problem? GETTING THE DAMN STATS! Mexican newspapers didn’t carry box scores, so drastic measures had to be taken. Knowing that USA Today carried full stats for every game, I opted to make a weekly foray into Benito Juarez International Airport to buy the McPaper from one of the two newsstands that carried it. Granted, the day’s paper was available around noon (it had to fly over from the States, remember?), and it was liable to sell out. But I made sure that the vendor knew who I was and even offered to pay for a couple of issues in advance. Oh, I’ll also add that the subway ride from my office to the airport and back was, roughly, an hour long. Everyone at the office knew that I had lunch on board a moving subway car on Mondays…
• OK, so Monday’s USA Today covered the Sunday games… but what about Monday Night Football? Easy! I KEPT SCORE! Yes, it was always me and another “volunteer scorer”, patiently sitting through MNF and trying hard to catch a glimpse of every stat that flashed across the screen. Now, due to the peculiar configuration of our teams, we were effectively following only 9 or 10 players (at most) on any given night (we didn’t track stats of players who hadn’t been chosen from the very beginning) , thus making it easier to keep track of every tackle, reception and proper individual yardages. It was a pain, but somehow, it got done. Fuck it, I wasn’t going all the way to the airport in order to pay for another copy of USA Today on Tuesdays!
• Of course, the system hit a few snags along the way. I missed the post-Thanksgiving issue of USA Today and had to bribe a clerk from the American Express lounge at the airport to get me a dog-eared copy left behind by a passenger. And of course, one day I arrived to the airport stand in one of my weekly mad dashes to discover that the usual vendor had been replaced by some guy who had forgotten to save my copy of the paper, so it was back to the AMEX lounge, where they had also ran out. I managed to secure a copy from… a trash can, of all places. Even though we’re talking about pre 9/11 standards of security, the suspicious looks I got from a rent-a-cop and several passers-by made me reconsider all the effort I was putting into the whole ordeal.
• Soon, a couple of instances made my life much easier: a chic tobacco shop/news stand near the office started selling international papers from the previous day, so I quickly managed to guarantee I would be able to buy a Monday copy of USA Today for the rest of the year. But, more importantly, I also happened upon my friend Pepe, who had disappeared from my life a couple of years before due to some uncomfortable debts he had with me from a previous scam/business venture. Though he did owe me a substantial amount of money, he managed to make me forget the debt by offering something else as payment: free Internet access.
• But mind you: the net was nothing like we have today. We’re talking about the days where a full page took as much as 5 or 6 minutes to load, and where you chose to navigate “without images” in order to save some time from the endless downloads. My old, modem-less PC at home didn’t quite cut it, so I resolved to have Pepe visit me at work and install an Internet connection in the brand new Apple Power PC my employers had provided for me. Within a couple of hours I had a usable, almost unlimited net connection up and running… in my cubicle!
• Now, even though I was using a shared account, I had to use it judiciously. For starters, I still needed a phone line, and a constantly busy line would have eventually called attention to my illegal setup. I decided to use the net as little as possible, and saved the extended connection periods either for the early mornings or for the late hours around the end of the day, where incoming phone calls would dwindle. I even got a couple of extra-long phone cables that enabled me to use colleagues’ phone lines when they weren’t around, so sometimes I could take calls in my line without having to disconnect from the net first. Eventually, I managed to befriend one of the guys from the tech department who added an extra phone line to my area, and I became the sole beneficiary of the clandestine, semi-permanent Internet connection. Life was good!
• The stats on the web were a huge step forward for our league. I think ESPN might have carried full box scores for games in their “Insider Access” (yes, they’ve been running that racket for a while), but I distinctly remember their server’s unreliable nature and patchy connection. So, the USA Today website became my number one option for stats, due to its text-heavy interface (less images to load) and familiarity. I no longer had to buy the paper, so my weekly subway escapades to the airport and the pricey tobacco shop around the office quickly became a thing of the past. Now it was just a matter of feeding the stats from the web pages into an Excel file I came up with that calculated everyone’s totals after applying my archaic, ridiculous scoring formulas. Voilá! Scores!
• Still, the system was far from perfect. I manually updated the website stats into my Excel spreadsheet, and occasionally made the odd blunder here and there. Fortunately, it was almost always a question of a couple of points, and I managed to catch every significant error in time. I even conducted periodical revisions of past box scores from my “newspaper stats” era, and caught a couple of insignificant omissions. Anyway, the cumulative score format was really forgiving, since we didn’t had those pesky head-to-head matchups whose outcome frequently depends on accounting for every yard, tackle or PAT. While it was imperfect, rudimentary and predictable, the first year of the league came to an end leaving behind an unlikely champion (the future wife), an ironic last place (Commissioner Monkey Boy) and a healthy bunch of converts, most of whom became regulars from years on and who provided the necessary feedback for our league’s future incarnations.
Every year we managed to add something new. First of all, we added a draft and exclusive players for each team. We gradually reduced the starting lineups to a manageable size and individual players became exclusive to the team that drafted them. We dropped the individual defensive players for the D/ST slot that is commonplace nowadays. More importantly, substitutions were slowly incorporated into our system. The first year we allowed 5 subs per team, none of which could be enacted past week 8 of the regular season. In time, I allowed for 3 subs per week, season long, as long as they happened 24 hours before game time. We experimented with “franchise players” (an failed idea that provided endless chuckles when a Steelers zealot chose Plaxico Burress during his rookie year). And, of course, head to head matchups and a playoff system became our standard.
I moved to the USA in 2003, and ever since I’ve been able to play in a couple of FF leagues every year. Juggling between teams and services has almost become second nature. Throw in my forays into Fantasy Baseball and Fantasy English Premiere League and you’ll see obvious signs of a) chronic unemployment, and b) the decline of Western civilization. That, in my book, is a good thing. Truth is I enjoy each NFL season more than the one before, even if my team sucks (Go Niners!). I’ve learned to mentally multitask in ways that would make a Jedi proud just by following 7 games simultaneously on DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket, while I keep a couple of browser windows open with my teams’ real time progress. How cool is it that you don’t even have to press “refresh” anymore, thanks to JavaScript?
And yet, I still haven’t won the big one. I might be destined for a Dan Marino-like run in this Fantasy Football gig: setting records, playing for a long time… and leaving the game empty handed.
Except for one little fact: I do not plan on leaving the game. Ever. I’ll leave instructions so I can keep playing even beyond the grave. Why? Because the game OWES ME! That’s why…
See you on Sunday!
– Mr. Bad Example
September 20, 2007 11:31 PM
NFL.COM, circa 1996: I found this homepage in Waybackmachine.com, without the main logo or the actual picture of Tony Martin. Bet you didn’t notice it was a drawing of him, right? Oh, and a shout out to 49ers linebacker Lee Woodall as well!
USA TODAY (1996): To this day, I still have to fight the urge to buy the paper compulsively, thinking I have to go through the box scores and feed the weekend stats. That’s rookie Eddie George up there, to the left.
EARLY PEYTON: See? Eli wasn’t the first Manning to always look constipated.
SportsLine USA (1996): Before the CBS years. They did have Fantasy Football support. But we couldn’t get it in Mexico. So it was up to USA Today stats and our trusty Excel spreadsheet. Who cares? Steve was still our QB!