30 years of fantasy football

I had glorious ideas last fall. Looking ahead to this fall, I realized that it would mark 30 years since I started playing fantasy football. Last fall, I sat around the living room with my son Sam, and I dreamed big.

• “We should get all the original guys that were in the league to play one more season together to celebrate 30 years!”
• “How many other people can say they’ve been playing fantasy football since 1992? I bet all kinds of former athletes and coaches would participate in a 30th year celebration!”

  <I then began to dream up the idea of inviting players like Bret Favre (I drafted him in 1992 as a rookie!), Troy Aikman, Barry Sanders, Jerry Rice, Warren Moon.. and the list went on.>

• “What if we got former and current NFL players to send us a short video, congratulating us on such an epic achievement?!”
• “Let’s do a live draft and invite a former NFL commissioner to come manage it! All our former coaches could make plans now!”
• “How fun would it be to do the live draft in a locker room of a real NFL team?!”

After that exuberant dream session, I remember calling two former coaches – Mitch and Kevin. They were… not as enthusiastic as I about the ideas or the vision. They expressed a bit of doubt about former players wanting to be involved. I was shocked.

I envisioned ESPN coming with a camera crew into our draft room, and interviewing us. I saw the tweet stream of congratulations pouring in from around the country posted next to the live broadcast of our draft…

I fumbled the ball

I woke up the next day not quite as fired up. The day after, I had forgotten the vision, and shamefully, I never took any steps to organize the 30TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY SEASON OF THE STINK BABY FANTASY FOOTBALL LEAGUE. I fumbled the ball.

Maybe Troy Aikman will still call?

Fantasy football was so different pre-internet

I’ve written in my post Ode to Fantasy Football about how we played pre-website. Our commissioner was in California, and he ran Dream Sports. We were the Cliff Harris League.^[1]Named after Ouachita Baptist University’s most famous football alum. Cliff Harris was a defensive back and has quite the story. “He is one of only 13 players in NFL history to play in five Super … Continue reading

We sent our lineups in by snail mail. They had to be postmarked by Tuesdays! If you started someone who got injured or sick during the week, you were just.. out of luck.

On occasion, you could pick up the phone and call in to the commissioner and plead your case, and he might change your lineup for you once. It was like a mulligan. And it also seemed to depend on whether he was in a good mood when you called him. We were to later learn that he received phone calls from several coaches in our little league, and that seemed to irritate him just a bit.

We received the scoresheets and standings reports via mail on Thursdays or Fridays. By then, I would have already done the math – literally – using the box scores in the Monday and Tuesday newspapers to figure out whether my team was victorious or not.

I can remember 30-minute phone conversations late into the evenings with other coaches in the league, haggling with them over trades. We are salesmen, agents, and detectives all at the same time, not wanting to get screwed on a trade. There were no online injury reports to reference, so if a coach called with a trade too good to be true in an attempt to dump off an injured player, you just had to use intuition and listen carefully to the tone of their voice. Was that desperation you sensed or were they stupidly giving up a premier player for an unproven rookie?

Enter the internet

With the advent of the interwebs, things changed quickly. Trades became clicks instead of conversations. Subsequently, it seemed like trading became a lot less fun. Whereas before, trading was conversational and relational, the internet reduced trading to transactional.

The ease of drafting became so easy that it was almost an afterthought. We quit having “live” drafts with everyone in the same room or at least on a huge conference call together. We had a chat room off to the side, which made it easier for coaches to draft while they were also watching TV or doing other things, thus removing more of the relational component.

The internet gave us convenience, information (everyone could know the day of an injury), projections and commentary (an entire cottage industry of fantasy football gurus sprang up), immediacy, and saved a ton of time.

When I really think about it, I think the internet propelled fantasy football into the spotlight, but it also made the experience poorer. I know there are still active leagues with banter, betting, conversations and insults galore, as well as gloating, but they seem to be the exception these days.

An ignominious end to the Cliff Harris League

In 1995, our stint with Dream Sports ended. Rather abruptly. We received a note from the commissioner in our year-end report that said, “Dream Sports will no longer service this league next year because we cannot meet the numerous demands of its owners.”

We had been kicked out. We vowed to form our own league and return next year!

1996 and beyond

In 1996, we were back. There were some new owners, and our new commissioner was my wife Carolyn. We called our service “Fantasy Queen Sports” as a nod to her. We renamed our league the Stink Baby League (to candidly admit that we were all whiners and complainers). Carolyn took her job seriously for about two months. Then the league was pretty much run by committee. We shifted to using the new thing called the internet and found a service called Real Time Sports.

Since the 20th century, I used RT Sports for years before trying Yahoo, ESPN, and CBSSports for our fantasy services. We landed on Sleeper about three years ago, and it’s served us well.

The demise of the Stink Baby League and advent of the Weevil League

The Stink Baby League made it until 2005. (Many thanks to Kevin Wieser for the tshirt proof!)

At one time, we had a perpetual trophy for it, but it too has “disappeared” over the years.

I had moved from the Dallas area to southeast Arkansas in 1995. As the Stink Baby League died, I formed a new league with the mighty Boll Weevil^[2]I was the campus minister at the Baptist Student Union at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. The UAM mascot was the Boll Weevil. as our League Name – the Weevil League. I invited local friends and a coach or two frm the Stink Baby League, and away we went.

*Historical footnote: Yes, indeed, a coachless team won the league in 2007 to our everlasting shame. We had a system that the low scorer of the previous week got to set the starters for the coachless team the next week. It motivated losing coaches to try to knock off the ranked teams. And it worked.

The Weevil League has lasted to today, composed more of Virginians than Arkansans, but still going strong. (Strangely this perpetual trophy also vanished – this one about the time I moved from Arkansas, and no coach has yet ‘fessed up to absconding with it.)

The 30th Anniversary of the Cliff Harris League…

Well, it didn’t happen. But it should have. 1992 was a fabulous year to begin playing fantasy football. I’ve been playing ever since – 30 years!

I’m sure Bret Favre was highly disappointed to not be invited to the anniversary season.