Fantasy football mishap causes spat
(Originally published September 2023)
Our fantasy football league held its draft the other night. I’m glad that’s over.
If you don’t know, fantasy football is a monthslong game where you and a dozen or so friends create an online football league and build imaginary teams made up of real players from across the NFL. Each week, your team is pitted against another fantasy team, where you each receive points based on how your players perform in actual games. At the end of the season, the team with the most wins takes the league championship.
In the years Mark and I have shared a fantasy team, we’ve never done well. Until last year. Our strategy—benign neglect of our roster—won us the championship. As a result, we went into this year’s draft feeling cocky.
We’re not as invested in the fantasy league as some people, however. Our “commissioner,” for instance, spent three weeks before this year’s draft conducting complex data analyses to predict the best players. Our preseason research, on the other hand, involved logging onto NFL.com five minutes before the draft and checking the app’s automated recommendations.
Some people may find the draft fun. I do not. Ours is a live event run through the NFL.com app, meaning 12 of us sit in our homes in front of the same screen, watching helplessly as the people ahead of us in the draft order take the players we would like for our own teams.
“Our preseason research involved logging onto NFL.com five minutes before the draft and checking the app’s automated recommendations.”
But the draft isn’t just stressful; it’s also boring. After you finally do get a turn to choose a player, you have to wait up to 20 minutes while everyone else goes. Some people, presumably, use that time to study their opponents’ picks, the remaining available players, and factors like the impact of bye weeks on their lineups.
I go online shopping.
Mark and I generally follow our league’s tendency to pick running backs in the early rounds. This is partly because backs can score a lot of points for your team, and partly because you need a deep bench of them; they have an annoying habit of tearing their hamstrings and other useful body parts.
We rebelled a little by scooping up a top quarterback in the second round. This is not exactly crazy, as good quarterbacks are key to a strong team, but we were the first in our league to take one.
Then things took a turn.
While Mark plays an advisory role in drafting our team, I run the fantasy app. If you have ever received a Siri-dictated, unpunctuated text from him (often something like “I will drop the Morgan horse off in the mortician thanks”), you understand why I need to be the one handling the technology. Therefore, I am fully to blame for what happened next.
After choosing our quarterback, Mark and I settled on a potential wide receiver. While we waited and hoped no one else picked him in the meantime, I browsed for winter leggings. So when our turn finally came up, I wasn’t ready. Startled, I clicked on our chosen player.
Or so I thought.
A moment later, I looked at our lineup and gasped: I had accidentally drafted a second quarterback, long before we needed to secure a backup. And now our opponents would have a chance to snag all the highest-rated receivers before our next turn.
“Why would you do that!?” Mark said, groaning.
I said, “For the same reason you text people, ‘My truck is in the sock hop but I can exhume the mistletoe Friday.’” (My whataboutism game is strong.)
But he kept ranting, and for good reason: I had possibly ruined our chances of having a winning team this year. Remorseful, I said, “Get off my back, you whiner, it’s fine!” but he refused to accept my apology. We barely spoke the rest of the night.
The next day, I forced myself to log into the fantasy app and find out how the draft results had shaken out. Would we be projected to come in dead last out of 12 teams?
Surprisingly, no. In fact, NFL.com’s AI-generated report gave us an A-plus grade for our lineup, adding that, “despite an unconventional approach to the draft,” our team had a good chance of winning this year’s championship.
I texted Mark with the news. He responded, through Siri, “Good I was mad you reel excruciated the raft but I thin queen going to have a crate season.”
He always knows the right thing to say.
