Like comic books, video games, and basically every other geeky pastime, fantasy football has exploded into the mainstream since its humble beginnings. ESPN and the NFL Network now display stats of “fantasy” performances alongside the actual numbers. Some broadcasters even have programming dedicated to the fantasy prospects of various players. Podcasts and YouTube channels mulling weekly fantasy fortunes abound. I like to imagine the real pundits paid to talk about actual football treat their fantasy counterparts much as jocks treat dweebs in high school movies: jamming them into lockers, holding them upside down by their ankles and shaking them for lunch money, administering swirlies in the ESPN men’s room, etc.
Nevertheless, a 2021 survey showed that some forty million Americans play in fantasy football leagues. And this season, I joined their ranks. (...)
For me, this knowledge translated into a deeper appreciation of the game itself. I went from watching one or two matchups to half the calendar. Players I was previously glad to ignore demanded my attention, as they were now members of my fantasy squad. (...)
I became, in due course, a legitimate, even an obsessive, football fan. Meaning that I could more-or-less capably keep up a conversation with other barflies during games without having to excuse myself to men’s room to Google stuff on my telephone. But I still found myself glued to this second screen: impatiently fiddling with the fantasy sports app that was forever open, awaiting a telltale vibration announcing the latest BIG PLAY. Scores became less important to me than moonshot passes, long yardage receptions, forced fumbles and, especially, injuries. Indeed, few things can make or break a fantasy season like the real-world health of your players.
Fantasy football is something of a misnomer. As a cinematic or literary category, fantasy is typically a highly imaginative affair: the province of faeries, dragons, elves, orcs, hobbits, and all manner of goofs and snarks. It is, in other words, unreal, and altogether separate from reality, as it is commonly experienced.
Fantasy sports, however, deal not with the imaginary, but the real. Specifically, the measurable, statistical real. Watch a football game, and you’ll see athletes performing at the apex of human ability, routinely performing physical feats that beggar the belief of the average couch potato. Open your fantasy app, and, in place of such displays, you’ll see a procession of numbers: +0.04 points per yard, +6 for a TD, -1 for an interception. In a given fantasy league, the player who has accumulated the most points at the end of a match wins the week, and the player with the most weekly wins takes the whole season. In their triumph, the multidimensional exploits of professional athletes are flattened into datasets. So: Where’s the “fantasy,” exactly? (...)
It also feels like training wheels for gambling, and many of the early fantasy football concerns—like Draftkings and FanDuel—have since moved into the legal sports betting space, blanketing networks with ads that have successfully normalized what was until recently regarded mostly as a degenerate hobby. The two pastimes have become so entwined that users can now wager specifically on fantasy outcomes: betting not on actual stats or scores, but on the accumulation of points awarded by the fantasy football algorithm. It’s a weird, super-mediation on an already mediated experience, which pushes the viewer further away from the action on the field and rewards them, now even financially, for conceiving of the game and its players as numbers running down a ledger.
For the purveyors of such entertainment, the reward is obvious. Fantasy football alone is valued as a $70 billion industry: that’s more than the GDP of Panama, and puts it not too far behind the global sports betting industry, which has an estimated annual take of nearly $84 billion. For Draftkings, FanDuel, ESPN, other entrants of the Big Play industry, and the NFL itself, keeping viewers locked in stat-land is serious business.
But fantasy is more than just a revenue stream. It practically constitutes its own psychology of football fandom. Participants are asked at once to over-identify with players and to regard them at an even further distance. This strange combination of detachment and hyper-involvement no doubt redounds to the benefit of a league that is increasingly also in the business of rebuffing legitimate criticism.
Because in forcing you to regard these athletes as objects—datasets to be swapped in and out, based on ever-evolving projections and statistical tweaks—fantasy captures precisely how NFL commissioners and owners think of their players.
by John Semley, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Kelsey Wroten
