So, a while back, a bunch of folks in my extended family decided they wanted to play fantasy football. If you've never heard of this game, you pretend like you're managing a fake (that's where the "fantasy" part comes in) team of players. You score points based on how well they play, and the point is to score more points than your opponents. It's simple in concept, and it's ridiculously popular.
I like watching football, so I joined up. I figured it was all in fun, and it gave us the chance to do some friendly trash talking in the process. Remember, this is the same crew that made up its own vocabulary for a phone game and turned competitive walking into laugh-out-loud jokes. I knew for darn certain that this was going to lead to jokes and hilarity. Sign me up.
First things first, we needed to draft our players. Just like in the real NFL, each team in a fantasy league takes a turn to pick the player it wants. It can take a while, since folks can take up to 2 minutes to make a single pick. Some folks agonize over who to pick, and there's always, always banter during this process. Well, we had to do that.
One of the keys to this process is figuring out what order people get to pick. The fairest way to do this is to randomly assign the order, so that no one person has an undue advantage. We all knew that, so that's precisely what we did. One guy, however, didn't realize this. When the draft started, he tried to pick someone even though it wasn't his turn. He basically assumed that he had the first pick. In a panic, he called my brother saying that he couldn't pick the player he wanted, and that there was something seriously wrong on his end. To which my brother replied, "hold your horses, it's not your turn yet."
Now, that in it of itself was enough to draw a bit of a chuckle. It's a little embarrassing, but we've all been there. Hell, I write about my little embarrassing moments about once a week. The part that came after, however, pushed us to full blown laughter. Once he realized that he was a bit farther down the list (6th out of 8, if memory serves), he immediately cried foul. I believe the actual wording was something along the lines of, "BS! This is BS! We need to do it over!" See? Like I said, hilarity.
We got the draft out of the way, and then settled in to play the game. We all got "grades" from the website that told us how well it thought we had drafted, and it projected our final records. Well, the website thought that my sister did horribly. We're talking "we don't think you'll win a single game" levels of horrible. Mind you, she is a bonafide, football-watching, grew-up-with-two-older-brothers fan, so she is not clueless about this stuff at all. So, she decreed that her goal was to win one game in the season. At that point, she would reply to the email with something like, "not win a single game huh? How you like dem apples?" It matters not one iota that the email was automatically generated and there won't be an actual person to see this reply. Let's just say I'm rooting for her a little bit.
Better yet, my sister in law doesn't really watch football, but she also signed up to play. She figured it'd be fun if we were all doing it. She kept expecting to do poorly, because of her lack of knowledge. However, I can also tell you that once she saw that her team was doing okay during the first week, she got increasingly excited about it. She happened to be playing me that week, and I got a bunch of text messages with updates about the score. At one point, I saw something like, "this guy right here, that you started, needs to score less than 13 points." She was clearly having some fun with it.
This reminded me of an experiment than a prominent sports blogger conducted once. This guy was really, really into fantasy sports, to the point where he played in multiple leagues and he invested tons of time into it. His wife wasn't all that into it, and she thought it was kind of silly at times. So, he invited her to pick winners and losers, and they'd keep a running tally. She wiped the floor with him, so much so that she was mathematically guaranteed to win before the last week even started. Want to bet who won that first match up between me and my sister in law? Yup, she beat me. There were also quite a few laughs to be had at my expense.
All of the above happened in the span of roughy two weeks. We're not even a quarter of the way through the season. I suspect it's going to be one heck of a ride. Also, I'm going to be quite amused if either my sister or my sister in law pull out the victory.
I like watching football, so I joined up. I figured it was all in fun, and it gave us the chance to do some friendly trash talking in the process. Remember, this is the same crew that made up its own vocabulary for a phone game and turned competitive walking into laugh-out-loud jokes. I knew for darn certain that this was going to lead to jokes and hilarity. Sign me up.
First things first, we needed to draft our players. Just like in the real NFL, each team in a fantasy league takes a turn to pick the player it wants. It can take a while, since folks can take up to 2 minutes to make a single pick. Some folks agonize over who to pick, and there's always, always banter during this process. Well, we had to do that.
One of the keys to this process is figuring out what order people get to pick. The fairest way to do this is to randomly assign the order, so that no one person has an undue advantage. We all knew that, so that's precisely what we did. One guy, however, didn't realize this. When the draft started, he tried to pick someone even though it wasn't his turn. He basically assumed that he had the first pick. In a panic, he called my brother saying that he couldn't pick the player he wanted, and that there was something seriously wrong on his end. To which my brother replied, "hold your horses, it's not your turn yet."
Now, that in it of itself was enough to draw a bit of a chuckle. It's a little embarrassing, but we've all been there. Hell, I write about my little embarrassing moments about once a week. The part that came after, however, pushed us to full blown laughter. Once he realized that he was a bit farther down the list (6th out of 8, if memory serves), he immediately cried foul. I believe the actual wording was something along the lines of, "BS! This is BS! We need to do it over!" See? Like I said, hilarity.
We got the draft out of the way, and then settled in to play the game. We all got "grades" from the website that told us how well it thought we had drafted, and it projected our final records. Well, the website thought that my sister did horribly. We're talking "we don't think you'll win a single game" levels of horrible. Mind you, she is a bonafide, football-watching, grew-up-with-two-older-brothers fan, so she is not clueless about this stuff at all. So, she decreed that her goal was to win one game in the season. At that point, she would reply to the email with something like, "not win a single game huh? How you like dem apples?" It matters not one iota that the email was automatically generated and there won't be an actual person to see this reply. Let's just say I'm rooting for her a little bit.
Better yet, my sister in law doesn't really watch football, but she also signed up to play. She figured it'd be fun if we were all doing it. She kept expecting to do poorly, because of her lack of knowledge. However, I can also tell you that once she saw that her team was doing okay during the first week, she got increasingly excited about it. She happened to be playing me that week, and I got a bunch of text messages with updates about the score. At one point, I saw something like, "this guy right here, that you started, needs to score less than 13 points." She was clearly having some fun with it.
This reminded me of an experiment than a prominent sports blogger conducted once. This guy was really, really into fantasy sports, to the point where he played in multiple leagues and he invested tons of time into it. His wife wasn't all that into it, and she thought it was kind of silly at times. So, he invited her to pick winners and losers, and they'd keep a running tally. She wiped the floor with him, so much so that she was mathematically guaranteed to win before the last week even started. Want to bet who won that first match up between me and my sister in law? Yup, she beat me. There were also quite a few laughs to be had at my expense.
All of the above happened in the span of roughy two weeks. We're not even a quarter of the way through the season. I suspect it's going to be one heck of a ride. Also, I'm going to be quite amused if either my sister or my sister in law pull out the victory.
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