I think that some of my initial reluctance to examine the matter was due to guilt, to a certain extent. I felt guilty about quitting but not too terribly guilty, which just made me feel more guilty for not feeling guilty enough, which is about as twisted and self-defeating as my overthinking ever gets. The fantasy league in question was started by a friend of mine who moved from Virginia out to Colorado but wanted to keep in touch with his friends back east. And I have to hand it to him, it certainly had its virtues in pursuit of that goal in the beginning. When you leave a place, you can make use of your e-mail account and visit frequently, but it’s fairly dispiriting how many people find it very easy to leave e-mails unanswered (not maliciously, and often with the best of intentions along the lines of “I could write a quick note now, or a lengthy thought-out missive later, so I’ll put it off til later …”) or how often people happen to have different, unbreakable previous engagements when you happen to be in town. By uniting his friends in a fantasy football league, my buddy implemented a mailing list where the whole point was smacktalk and where the occasions for such were both regular and varied, not to mention held in common. And whereas a random visit might not have induced everyone to rearrange their own schedules, a fantasy draft at the beginning of each season was much more compelling. So my buddy locked in seeing everyone at least once a year, and email contact thereafter, and all was well.
Funny enough, problems arose because things may have worked too well. My buddy had a lot of friends and tried to get them all involved in the league. For most of the past seven years there have been 14 or 16 teams and I have come to the inescapable conclusion that this is way too many. A fantasy league probably works best with 8 or 10 teams, because that way every team can have a fairly impressive and deep roster. And as a “coach” in a small league you can actually employ some strategy from week to week – do I start my QB who is a future hall-of-famer, or my backup who happens to be going against the worst pass defense in the league this week? In a bigger league, each team gets one good QB if they’re lucky, and their backup will probably be a rookie or a perennial loser or a literal benchwarmer as insurance against season-ending injury. There’s no choice at all who to start every week. And this gets boring over the course of a single year, let along seven of them.
So at that point maybe you don’t play to win, you just play for the camaraderie and fun. But the 14 people in the league weren’t all friends with each other; some were, but mainly they just all happened to be friends with my buddy living in CO. So my buddy constantly had a blast trash-talking whomever he was in head-to-head competition with from Sunday to Sunday, but when I found myself, for example, matched up against my buddy’s brother-in-law, I had a distinctly different (read: more guarded and weird) experience. On the other hand, some of my buddy’s friends were just generally infatuated with the kind of button-pushing trashtalk that is really developmentally appropriate when you are 15 years old but tedious as hell when you’re 30-something. And a pre-existing friendship with someone like that, as my buddy had going for him, would make it easier to swallow, but I found the deliberate obnoxiousness of a near-stranger harder and harder to get anything out of.
And, apparently, other people felt the same way I did. I actually quit the league as part of a mass exodus that was prompted by the annual “When are we holding the draft?” e-mail which set off a string of “I think actually I’m out this year” responses. A lot of the other quitters hit some of the same notes I struck above. Needless to say, I felt even more guilty about bailing on the league at the same time nearly half the other coaches were bailing, because I wasn’t just quietly stepping away but rather participating in what might be the demise of the entire thing. Which, I should emphasize, was not what I wanted. I was never bitter or angry about the fantasy football league, just less and less interested and ultimately unwilling to pretend I was into it for one more season. And if the league should keep going with 8 teams and a totally new dynamic, mazel tov to the V2.
Meanwhile I’ve got the pick’em pool and my major takeaway from last season was that I really enjoy that format a lot more as an adjunct to football. (By which I mean I enjoy football season itself, watching as many games as possible all day every Sunday and rooting for the Giants and against the rest of the NFC East, and any other diversion or game of skill-and-chance on top of that is pure fluffy icing.) Pick’em requires a modicum of thoughtful strategy every week, and does not entail one person locking up Peyton Manning and profiting from his success all season, and therefore can accommodate far more prognosticators in the same pool, and every week there’s one big lauded winner as opposed to half the league winning individual contests that no one else cares about.
It probably didn’t help that last year was my first season in the pick’em pool run by my dad’s childhood friend, which gave the whole experience the added shininess of novelty, whereas fantasy football was getting old and tired and I had been forced to miss the draft that year so my team was essentially picked by someone else and then delivered to me devoid of my own emotional investment. (And on top of that, while it was a good buddy who did the proxy-drafting, and he diligently and dutifully made his picks based on projected stats to give me the best possible team based on my draft position, the end result was that my biggest-name player was Terrell Owens, who I never would have drafted myself under any circumstances, for reasons which should be obvious.) I would have missed this year’s draft too, I think, because most people were pushing for a weekend when my family and I will be vacationing at the beach. Still, all in all and even with irrational guilt, I think I made the right choice.
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