A Look Into the Nerdom of Fantasy Football

Here at Off The Bench we’re a mostly baseball blog, and this week I’ll be broadening your horizons and making you feel infinitely better about yourself by giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the nerdiest nerds of nerdy nerd-dom. We are going to have a look at my own fantasy football league and the fantasy football summit we held last week. What exactly is a Fantasy Football Summit? Allow me to explain, and provide a little background, with what follows.

I’ve been in the same league for seven years now and throughout those years we’ve only had two people leave our league. One was voted out by the other managers for lack of attention paid to the league, and the other was given a temporary leave of absence to serve with the Peace Corps in Togo. This league has survived high school and college graduations, girlfriends, long distances, and jobs. But recently we found ourselves at a crossroads. Last season turned out to be the worst yet, due to efforts we made to take our league to the next level of fantasy football.

Last summer we drafted and ratified our first league Constitution, with the goal of forming a better, more in-depth, league. Essentially, we felt that after six years we needed to evolve, to go from a regular fantasy league to the type of league that will eventually meet once a year for a draft in Vegas despite our wives complaints. It took many hours on the phone, many gigabytes of Facebook messages, but eventually we got it done.  We changed everything from the draft format to the payout.

When we first kicked off we were a run-of-the-mill fantasy league with a yearly open draft and $20 buy-in. We then upgraded, or so we thought. The buy-in spiked to $50, and we went with a mini-keeper format: two carry-overs to next year’s roster with limitations on player eligibility for keeper status.  The idea was to promote greater interest and achieve parity, but it didn’t work.  Half-way through the season the better teams traded away future picks for players that would help in the playoffs. This would have been fine, and expected, except for the gross number of trades that occurred. We became a league of haves and have-nots. It was the worst time any of us had ever had playing fantasy football, and we agreed to address the issues.

If presidents and prime ministers can have summits, we sure as hell can too. Here’s what happened. Last week we arrived at my friend’s house at 9 and left at 11:30. There was a lot of name calling and shit talking, some members postured for dominance, while others just wanted to make sure the league remained a fun escape from the real world. One of our members even threatened to quit if he didn’t get his way.

Members came prepared with personally-created statistics. That’s right, spreadsheets were in full force. A unique metric was fashioned to analyze the trades involving future draft picks and current players. (For more information about this statistical measure, see the comments section of this post.) We then proceeded to break down every trade from last year. In the end, based off the new metric, every trade but one was grossly lopsided in terms of return value. The only one that wasn’t was my only trade of the season. I traded away a third rounder and Davone Bess and got Larry Fitzgerald and a tenth round pick.

We spent two and a half hours discussing the faults of our league, the merits of self-created stats, the possibility of lottery drafts, new pay-outs, past trades, and even the few positives from the previous year. We had spreadsheets of where everyone would be positioned next season based on the past year and the trades that happened.  

It was chaos and do you know what we decided? Absolutely nothing. We discussed the need for further discussion, and everyone agreed that two and half hours did not solve anything. We needed to spend more time on our league. We definitively, concretely determined that there were four possible ways to move forward, and that we had a long process in front of us. (Again, see the comments section if the possible solutions intrigue you.)

So as football creeps back into our minds, leagues start to form, and you wonder to yourself whether or not you should continue to play fantasy football, just remember: even if you are the biggest nerd in your league, somewhere out there, we exist. There will always be bigger nerds than you, and those people have jobs and girlfriends and drink and party. All hope is not lost. You can be a huge fantasy football nerd and still have a normal life.

-David Ringold