|
Once again I've said yes when I meant no. Some friends insisted I join their fantasy football league and rather hesitantly I did so. Well, to be more precise, I was euchred into doing it. The sight of grown men groveling, pretending that they only need one more person to fill out their bracket-or whatever-reduced me to wrongheaded thinking. I should have realized the error of my ways when they instantly hopped to their feet and I believe I heard them say something like, “Hot damn, he fell for it.” Or similar. And, worse, I know their motives; They're looking for a sucker who doesn't mind being last and, really, expects to be. My rise to spectacular failure is traceable and, to some, possibly even a learning curve. Just down, not up
The word “fantasy” has always implied something that isn't real, non-existent, ethereal in a place that isn't there. But combine that with the word “football” and what you've got is a raging, snarling beast that drives men to charts, statistics and drink. Not necessarily in that order. And it's not just limited to football, one can have “fantasy” any sport and it will draw to it devotees of that the same violent reaction as does football to many others. But I was unaware of that. I thought this to be the equivalent to the office pool on the Super Bowl, charitably allowing a child to beat you at checkers, playing something innocent. As it would work out, I was the innocent and the “something” was a Lorelei on a rock luring the many to disaster. And so with that-which is to say nothing-in mind, I figured out the basics of the thing and began. Unfortunately, my natural tendency to regard many things as a quasi scientific experiment led me down a path less taken by everyone save me. What I did was regard this fantasy group of players as something in a Petri dish. Put there, cultured, observed and then after a stated period of time, Conclusions Drawn. The main conclusion was that I didn't know what the hell I was doing. For what I thought the purpose of Fantasy Football was meant selecting a team and then never varying the players and seeing how correctly you'd picked over time. Bye weeks meant nothing to me, nor did admissions to the DL list not to mention unforeseen encounters with the law. By season's end I had perhaps a dozen or so men still playing-and that includes the offense-so it will come as no surprize that I finished dead last. Worse, really, than dead last but it's not possible to have a player ranked in negative numbers.
Puzzled as to what few errors I might have committed, I wandered over to the Athletic Director's office at the school at which I was lecturing. Friendly as a fund raiser, he listened to my question, my explanation to my question and then my charted results. His face went from being tanned to blank to blanched and that preceded his jaw dropping. Clearly he was in the presence of one of the true innocents of the world and perhaps one of the stupidest. However I was the guest and he was the host and so, as carefully as possible, he began the task of deconstructing everything I thought about Fantasy Football and then trying to present the basics of the realities. Imagine a permissive parent trying to coax a truculent three year old to eat spinach and you've an approximation of this unfortunate interview. But I did learn and I was grateful. However, had this gentleman known what I'd learned he would have been bashing his head against a door jamb. Walking back to the lab I concentrated on two sets of numbers; The realities (sic) of fantasy football and some new and interesting numbers about the perturbation of the ellipsoid orbit of Mars. These are two groups of figures that cannot-or should not-be aligned, nor did I try. However, inadvertently, they did cross pollinate one another which led to my next disaster in the newly revealed world of Fantasy Football.
The main thing I'd learned from the stricken AD was that this was not, as I had imagined, a static thing. It had movements and consequences not only week to week but day to day. One had to be au courant with whether a hamstring had been strung or an arrest had been made. Then there was that whole thing about “Byes”. Somehow I'd never noticed that not every team played every week. In my philosophy, save for the “season” which didn't strike me as long enough to get a vacation, they didn't do much else beside collect cheques and sit around being boors and thugs. And then one had to stack all these variables up and, voila!, Eureka, you'd have a winning side. Save that I didn't.
In the world in which I lived, the word “fantasy” did not really exist, it was replaced by “speculation”. There is no future in investigating “fantasy” but speculation is what keeps the scientific community humming. Also blocking my view of the problem at hand was that by the time the next fantasy football season, and the real football season as well, rolled around I was in Russia working on a satellite programme. Now, you know and I know that American style football isn't played in newly Tzarist Russia. Soccer(football) da, but American style, nyet. Further, most of my life had been lived beneath the code of Amateurism and so professional sports as a whole (save golf and tennis) were beyond my purview. To also help set the scene for what happened next consider this. At the time of my next team I was an American Citizen of South African lineage and some basic culture working in Russia-in Russian-on a multinational satellite trying to select real players from American football teams to really not play as a group in a fantasy situation. So it's probably obvious as to why on my second time out I did only marginally better than the time before. I still finished last but, as I'd had time, I'd swapped and dropped and added players, never successfully, and given as much of the limited time I had to trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And, to finish off these season I couldn't even really participate in the last two week as I was aboard a Russian Nuclear Submarine in the Barents Sea preparing to launch the satellite. I don't ask for absolution for my errors but surely one can see how distraction and confusion led me astray.
You may have heard the expression, “Third Time's the Charm”? Hogwash. For my next adventure in lala land I'd done a bit more research, read blogs on the topic and listened to friends whose enthusiasm for football bordered on mania. And, should they be fixated on one team, monomania. But up pops another wall and it's called, “Wandering Knowledge of Anything”. Names of players and the positions they filled, also a total misunderstanding of what the names of positions really were meant to indicate. For example, I heard considerable at a cocktail party about a “snapper”. Now see it as I did. It's summer, we're wandering in and out of the house to the lawn and they're discussing “snappers”. I'd just bought a new lawn mower for my home (known as the mausoleum) so I thought I knew what the discussion was about. Party/drinking/lawns/mowing/snapper. And I got snapped. Equally unhelpful is that I am afflicted with the sort of mind that retains rather too much information, most of it superfluous but...it's still there. I approached picking my next squad with a more alert eye. I had names in mind to look for and some vague idea as to the position they played. Because I'd written a piece satirizing them, I was aware of Rex Grossman and Peyton Manning. Brett Favre was another name known to me but after that...However, Roman Gabriel, Joe Montana and Roger Staubach were fixtures in my memory and so I upgraded them to “active player” status and that didn't end happily. Thanks to an advertisement for a soft drink I knew who Joe Green was but beyond his name and his inferred reputation, that was it. And there were other more contemporary names that resonated with me but what they did and for whom they did it was lost to flight and song. It was, I believe, about this time that I went through what I refer to as “The Defense Problem”. Given a bit of research I'd learned that in addition to quarterbacks, there were nickel backs, full backs and perhaps half backs. Applying the same logic to the defense as well as the offense I'd been thwarted in that you didn't pick that person by person, but group by group. It had been hard enough to come up with sufficient mis-information about offense and now to discover that I needed a whole new set of mental muscles to select one whole group of men to represent me was daunting. The resolution was what I always do when faced with a “situation” in professional football, I go with something from Kansas City. Not that I know much about it as a team, but over the years I've gathered a certain wandering familiarity with them if only because they're the “local” team. (and in this part of the world where people routine drive hundreds of miles in a day to do nothing very important, the 200 miles to Kansas city seems local). Again, it was a losing year but I felt I'd made progress. Of what sort I was unsure but certainly progress.
Having stacked up three successive losing seasons I took some time off but this year the game is on again. I've been working at it. I almost know the names of all the teams and into which league they fall. I've made a concerted effort to learn the names of players but in many cases I'm stymied by the tendency to combine what is incorrectly thought to be Afrocentric with “La's” and misspellings that contribute to my confusion. (Once in Nairobi I'd ask a friend, Japhet Keti, a Ministerial level politician, what he thought of Kwanza. He thought he'd never heard of it. As best I could I explained it to him and he just shook his head. Had he known the expression, he would have told me that this was clearly a Hallmark created holiday. He then suggested we go to the Tamarind Seed for lunch and to get sufficiently drunk to boo President Moi.) The net result to this is that I cannot remember names that have no relevance in my memory banks. I realize this makes me seem prejudiced toward white players, but that's not the case, I can remember Matt or Steve or Jake whereas La Twantonian goes right by me. So that's where we stand just now. Next weekend I have to endure public humiliation by participating in what is called an “online draft”. This, I gather, is to emulate the tatty little fraud run by the NFL to do something over the course of several days that which could have been done in two or three hours in an office. But I've a strategy this time. However bad they may be I'm going to make all my selections from the....wait for it....Kansas City Chiefs. I told this to someone who looked at me strangely and said, “They're not a very good team”. Well I know that but “not very good” surpasses the perfectly awful teams that I've picked in the past. And I've got the bye week problem solved. That's when I substitute Green Bay. ( I once blogged about Aaron Rodgers so I somewhat feel comfortable if unfamiliar with them.)
So that's it. My fantasy strategy for this year and I certainly hope it works or, to put it more accurately, I hope the Chiefs work. And, who knows? Perhaps they'll have one of their “surprizing” years when they almost make the playoffs. I can dream can't I? After all, what are dream but the alternate form of fantasy. It all takes place in your mind. And, just as in dreams, you're using real people to do things with other real people that they'd never do. Wish me Luck.
Postscript
Since I wrote that, my friends have let me out of my obligation. Even they couldn't miss having a “real” player and, the final truth, they found someone who desperately wanted in as much as I wanted out. So although I may privately run a total to see how I'm not doing, others will not be forced to wonder at my stupidity. It's better that way. PJ
|
