Why Guys Play Fantasy Football

As the NFL season creeps ever so closer, men across America are congregating in rec rooms, basements, and Hooters restaurants, all to draft their fantasy football teams. 99.9% of women (basically, all who don't play fantasy football themselves), and the men who aren't part of this particular cult, probably wonder what the allure is about pretending to own a team of professional football players.

Well, as an experienced fantasy football player, I am here to help explain this phenomenon to you. Some guys have been playing so long, they don't remember not playing. I'm not one of those guys... at least, not yet. I started about five years ago and can still remember my life before fantasy football. But it is getting a little fuzzier every season.

So why do guys play fantasy football?

Fantasy football provides camaraderie. A lot of the men who are involved with fantasy football are actually grown-ups. It doesn't require going out on a limb to suggest that the average fantasy football owner is married and probably has a child or children. Getting together to draft is a male-bonding ritual. At the draft, we drink beer, give each other a hard time, and talk about our feelings. Okay, maybe not one of those, but I'll let you guess which one (hint: it's not the first two).

Women are the mature sex. No two ways about that (unless you've heard about any who've tried to light a fart... at age thirty) and, generally, men try to live up to the standards when women are around (we're actually a rather decent lot, on the whole...). At a typical fantasy football draft -- no women. We can be who we are. And who we are, is a bunch of guys who just want to bust on each other and enjoy brewed hops and malted barley. It's part of the beloved "y chromosome" and we can't possibly fight it.

Mine are drawn to competitive endeavors. Women can be competitive (if you don't believe this, wake up early the morning after Thanksgiving and position yourself in the toy department, preferably close to the hottest toy of the season), but men almost depend on it. It isn't "when needed" (like trying to land the coveted toy...), rather it is a driving force.

Fantasy football is competition. Plain and simple. It provides one man the right to say "I picked a better team than all you chumps. Now give me my money."

We are going to watch the NFL anyhow. The games are on television and we are going to view them, preferably on the largest, flattest screen possible and with a frosty beverage in hand. Since we are already there, it's easy and doesn't require that much effort. Just watch the games. Can it get simpler than that?

Actually it has gotten simpler and this is a genius segue (if I must say so myself) into the next point...

The internet has turned a hobby which used to, "back in the day" (as all the hip kids are saying), require a league manager manually calculating and updating the box scores from the Monday and Tuesday newspapers (remember those?), into an entity which is updated in real-time. If a player scores a touchdown, the various tracking devices know about it five seconds before it even happens. And people wonder why our need-to-know-it-now society has a collective case of ADD. Hey, look a squirrel!

Additionally, the internet has made fantasy football ubiquitous. I believe it is now possible to spend all twenty-four hours of your day reading fantasy football advice, recommendations, and predictions. There are articles on strategies, specific players, specific teams, injuries, rumors, which trainers help the best players, etc. With the advent of smart phones, one can read these articles anywhere: on the subway, in church, while wrangling kittens in an open prairie (which is simply ridiculous because we all know there isn't any reception in an open prairie).

We, as society, have managed to save all sorts of time. It used to take a whole month to travel from Michigan to Wisconsin. I can make the trip in four hours. So now we have a lot of leftover time and we need to fill it somehow. Thankfully, Al Gore invented the internet, where we are fed a constant stream of information, ninety-percent which is about fantasy football. The fantasy football articles make for a great way to kill time and fantasy football articles provide plenty of ammo.

In case my side-tracking got you lost, the reasons men play fantasy football come down to camaraderie, competitiveness, the already-there interest in football, and the internet. Remember, if you are looking for a scapegoat for anything in life; always go with "the internet."