Is your fantasy football team an awe inspiring, dominant juggernaut so good that people don’t mind listening to you talk about them? (The answer is no, it’s a well known fact that the most boring thing on the planet is listening to someone else talk about their fantasy team, of course it is super interesting to talk about your own. This is the same phenomenon as talking about dreams). This could only be because of your deep understanding of the intricacies and minor subtleties of the team game (This may or may not be true, you could be Bill Belichick, Is that you BB?? I love you…moving on). Now, take a deep breath here, for all of your understanding of the game, your fantasy team would win*Drum Roll* 0 real football games. Now before you get all butt hurt, relax, everyone’s team would.
Fantasy football is by far the most popular of fantasy sports and it’s seemingly easy to see why, the NFL is by far the most popular professional sports league, so why wouldn’t that be the case. Here is the deeper and more brutal truth, FF is by far the dumbest and easiest fantasy sport to understand and it doesn’t really require any understanding of the sport. If you don’t play FF let me break down this fairly easily for you, here’s how you can build a decent team with no research whatsoever.
Fantasy Football Team in 3 Easy Steps
1) Sit down the season before and mindlessly watch hours of football highlights, specifically noting the names that are said the most often.
2) Draft those names, and most the recognizable names available (gathered in your head from years of watching Joe Buck, Troy Aikman and Phil Simms call games i.e. Oh man, they keep talking about how great this Reggie Wayne guy has been, I’m getting him.)
3) Pick some guys from your team that they talk about on your local sports radio drive time show.
Alright and we’re done. Now this team probably won’t win you any trophies or bragging rights but it would probably go .500 over the course of a season, that’s not bad, and it probably makes it more fun for you to root on Sunday as you are toggling between afternoon games featuring teams you have no interest in. But I always thought the point of fantasy sports was to pit your intellect and understanding of the game against others and FF just doesn’t offer much, if any, of that.
There are a few reasons for this, first is roster construction. In a standard fantasy league you wouldn’t have a punter or an offensive line, you wouldn’t carry many backups and you just grabbed a random defense and kicker in the last 2 rounds. You most likely drafted some combination of running back, wide receiver and Aaron Rodgers with your first two picks. So far only that guy that picked up Aaron Rodgers is on his way to making an actual successful football team. (It’s a QB league now. You don’t win without a good one or Tim Tebow. Don’t believe me, ask Larry Fitzgerald how much better his numbers would look if John Skelton and Kevin Kolb weren’t throwing ducks in his general vicinity)
Secondly FF values touchdowns over everything else. A 59 yard run to the opponent’s 1 yard line is less valuable than a plunge into the end zone from a goal line back. Why should that 1 yard be worth so much more? In last night’s Giants/Eagles game Desean Jackson ran a punt back to the 20 that set up a touchdown pass on the very next play, this did not factor at all into his fantasy output but most certainly helped his team win must needed game. Other than the touchdown variance mentioned above FF also values rushing yards at 2.5X passing yards, which is exactly how real football is played because if its 3rd and 1 you only need to run for the 1 yard but you need to throw for 2 and ½ yards…oh wait that actually isn’t true. That creates a pretty huge schism between fantasy and reality if you ask me.
Why am I just talking about FF and not the other fantasy sports (in this case basketball and baseball)? Well because to be good at playing fantasy basketball and baseball you have to build a team that would actually be successful if constructed in real life. Want to win your fantasy basketball league? Draft a super duper star in the first round, some one that can carry your team, for example KD and surround that guy with a secondary scoring option, some bangers to rebound and block shots, a good point guard to create for everyone and other role players to fill in the stat sheet. Well this is also how you build a championship basketball team. You get your one elite player and build everything around them. It has worked pretty successfully since the beginning of forever. That imaginary KD built team would probably win 50+ games depending on conference and schedule, that’s pretty friggin’ good.
Fantasy baseball is cut from the same cloth, you need to find good hitters at each position and a pitching staff that strikes out a lot of guys, while keeping walks down and having low ERAs. If you could build a team like that you would win 95+ games depending on ballpark and luck. Also, since you have to draft roughly a million guys and there are only about five elite guys at each position you also need to have a great understanding of depth charts, prospects etc.
“Hold on buddy, stop making fun of FF, fantasy baseball doesn’t have defense either.”
Hey imaginary guy yelling at me, shut up, but you are correct. However a baseball player’s defense is not that necessary for actual success. (Given that every professional baseball player is a PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL PLAYER and should be counted on to make routine plays.) Put it this way the greatest hitting season ever, according to WAR is Babe Ruth in 1921 when he hit 59 HRs while driving in 171 with a slash line of .378/.512/.846 if you don’t understand baseball find someone who does and have them explain how ball-droppingly amazing that is. That year Babe Ruth was worth almost 14 wins. That makes a 98-55 juggernaut into in 84-69 team that would have finished either 3rd or 4th in that division. On the other hand according to the same stat (WAR) except its defensive counterpart the best season ever belongs to Adam Everett who was worth 4 wins to Houston Astros team that finished 82-80. If I had told Phil Garner (that team’s manager) that Adam Everett was going to hit .378/.512/.846 but boot every 5th ball that was hit to him as opposed to playing amazing defense but hitting .239/.290/.352, Mr. Garner would be looking for a line-up card large enough to hide his visible erection behind. I would argue that most of baseball defense is good pitching and the rest is some competent fielding. So yes, if you built your real life baseball team like a fantasy team (big hitters, strong starting pitching and one bullpen anchor) and ignored defense, you could be for example the 2004 Boston Red Sox. (My favoritist, whiskey-drinkingest team of all time)
So my point is this Fantast Football as a whole is the least like its actual counterpart.(I had some line here about how you could win with a terrible rushing QB like Tim Tebow, I’m actually taking that back, I don’t know how it keeps working but it keeps working.) It bastardizes the sport and throws off our perception of what makes players good and successful. It makes stars out of 1 year flashes and…BOOM! My fantasy team is F*****g stacked this year. 10-1 BABY!!! Championship here I come!
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