Fantasy Football

I love fantasy football. I mean I hate fantasy football. It'll drive me nuts, this is know. It's pretty simple in concept, really. You choose a team name and team colors. You have a player draft online with 11 other owners. You start a quarterback, two running backs, three receivers, a tight end, field goal kicker and a defense. You usually add in a utility player, which most of the time has to be a running back or a receiver. You draft extra guys so you have players on the bench in case of injuries, stupid bye weeks, or so you can play the wrong guy from week to week. Whatever the player does for his real team that week, he does for your team if you put him in your lineup. If you don't put him in your lineup he scores three touchdowns and everybody ridicules you on the league message board. So of course you put him in the next week and he catches one pass for five yards while the guy you bench scores the three touchdowns. As far as I can figure out, that's pretty much how it works.

The players in your lineup score points for you. At least in theory they do. They six points for a touchdown, plus points depending on how many yards they run, catch, throw or kick for, if they're the kicker. Your opponent for the week has his lineup and players too. Usually better ones. Whoever scores the most points wins the match.

Picking a cool team name is one of my most important strategies. One of my teams is always named Sierra. I live just down the road from the entrance to Sequoia National Park. I started out with studly names like the Sierra Grizzlies and Sierra Hawks. In subsequent years I scaled down to names that better reflect my prowess. This year was the Sierra Marmots. A rodent that barks and gnaws through your car hoses to drink your antifreeze more or less reflects my strategy for victory and how my teams customarily perform.

My other team is called the Valley something or others. I live in the San Joaquin Valley. It gets hot in the summer, so I used to name them things like the Valley Heat and Valley Fever. Names like that worked well in the smack talk on the league message board. I could issue clever and intimidating challenges like, "The Heat will roast the Unicorns this week!" Or, "The Fever will infect the Titans this week!" My foe would generally respond with something along the lines of, "Your team sucks." Despite the pitiful riposte he would win by a score somewhere in the neighborhood of 128-9. Where is the justice in that? So this year I named the team the Valley Vultures, bowing to the reality that the only teams I could beat were the ones with more injured players than active ones.

That calls to mind my best talent in fantasy football, picking injured players. I don't mess around with tight ends and kickers, either. I have a positive genius for picking the best player in the league who will suffer a season-ending injury that year. I'm particularly adept at drafting running backs to fill this role. I can count on my number one running back to go down about midway through the season. They do this to get my hopes up and then dash them. They do it on purpose.

It started in my first season with Marshall Faulk. The next year Ricky "Cannabis" Williams decided to retire before the season started. The next year Priest Holmes went down. Without him I didn't have a prayer. This year I lost Larry Johnson from one team and Ronnie Brown from the other. Brown was leading the league in rushing at the time, and Johnson had led the league in touchdowns. The one good thing about this annual occurrence is that it gives me a great alibi for losing. I'm not sure how I subconsciously determine whose ACL will blow out in advance; I guess I'm just a natural.

What do I get for playing fantasy football? I get to see my guys put forth tremendous efforts, like when my receivers do that dumb thing where they try to stick the ball out at the goal line and fumble it away. I get to see my players set records, like when my quarterback Donavan McNabb got sacked 12 times in one game. I see my guys defy all odds, like when my defense gives up 42 points to the stinking Falcons. I get to see amazing forces of nature such as playing my hot second string quarterback against the lousy Cleveland pass defense and it snows so hard his receivers can't hold onto the ball. I get the satisfaction of putting guys in the lineup who roll their ankles in pregame warmups and don't play. I get to appreciate the subtlety and element of surprise in football strategy by seeing one of my running backs carry the ball down to the one yard line and then play fake into the line on the next play while the quarterback rolls out and throws the touchdown pass to the tight end. I get to imagine my opponent's elation at that moment because the tight end is on his team.

I've just got to come up with a better game plan next year. Like picking the yellow jerseys and naming my team the Sierra Gold Rush. Get it? Yellow, Sierra Gold Rush? Brilliant. I'll be unstoppable!