Fantasy Football And Self-Righteous Sports Journalists Killed The NFL

Mitchell Blue
Sep 4, 2018 · 4 min read

When NFL ratings fell in 2016, everyone chalked it up to election fatigue. But when they declined even faster in 2017, NFL executives started to panic like Andy Reid trying to manage the clock in the fourth quarter of a playoff game.

There have been many theories as to why the ratings have dropped. Some commentators pretend to be concerned about concussions. Michelle Beadle, who is paid $5 million to talk about football, refuses to watch football because of the sport’s perceived issues with women (hopefully she’s similarly given up Hollywood movies and NBC news). Other possible causes for the decline include cord cutting and people realizing that America’s real number one contact sport is outrage tweeting.

But the most discussed reason for the ratings decline is the anthem protests. The right says viewers are turning off because of the disrespect to the anthem, and the left claims people are not watching football because the league is blackballing Nike’s newest spokesperson Colin Kaepernick (because why not pay money to associate your brand with a figure half the country hates). While surveys suggest the former is more accurate, it is more likely that no one really cares at all — they are just sick of hearing about it. Potential football watchers don’t want to spend their Sundays listening to a sports journalist, who usually covers whether or not a grown man has “turf toe”, pontificate about the interaction of the first amendment with employment law

Audiences just want to hear Chris Berman go “whoooop!” as a fat offensive lineman tries to pick up a fumble. They don’t want to watch Shannon Sharpe lisp his way through a prepared statement about how true patriotism is challenging America’s racist past. People tune in to see freak athletes ram into each other — not to audit a community college civics class where no one has actually done the reading.

But while the anthem protests have received the most attention for boring viewers, what is often not discussed is another reason football is dying — fantasy football. It is estimated that the NFL went from about 12 million fantasy players in 2005, to 32 million in 2010, to 56 million in 2015. The number of fantasy players were growing so fast it’s like the DNC figured out that they voted Democrat and started begging them to immigrate in as refugees.

Fantasy football exploded to the point where your great aunt Marie would tell you that she was in 3rd place in her league because she started Kim Kardashian’s ex-boyfriend at running back. This fantasy interest strengthened overall NFL viewership, but it weakened people’s actual allegiance to NFL teams. Who cares if your beloved Bears are losing so long as they’re being beaten by Aaron Rodgers since he’s starting on your fantasy team?

People started to care less about who won or lost, and more about how many receptions Pierre Garcon caught — which is an unsustainably stupid thing to care about. The NFL was no doubt ecstatic at the growth of fantasy football, but they forgot that the ratings boost was pure fantasy — because at the end of the day, fantasy football sucks.

Fantasy sports became popular because pre-internet people used their own judgments to select their favorite players. Teams were chosen based on a combination of fan allegiance, football acumen, and self-devised strategy. Fantasy sports was a game of strategy where you tried to outwit your friends.

Then fantasy sports became big business, and then that business ruined the game. Not only did experts pop up to rate every player and every match-up, that expert analysis became embedded into the league. So even though you may have had a gut feeling that you should bench Philip Rivers, ESPN has 100 experts running multivariate analysis to tell you that he’s going to score 3.23 more points than your other quarterback this week — so who are you to argue against that just because you don’t think someone can raise a litter of eight kids and still have the energy to quarterback?

This in-your-face information changed fantasy football from a game of skill to a game solely of chance, where the person who wins is whoever’s running back doesn’t get injured or arrested for domestic violence. You’re basically scouting not based on talent, but on who you think is least likely to be at Scores at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night.

So it should come as no surprise that NFL ratings are down. A large portion of the prior audience was just their to watch their imaginary team play — and they left when they realized that the imaginary game wasn’t enjoyable. And the people who actually did enjoy watching football were forced to sit through lectures on social justice, domestic violence, and racism between punts — which is a far cry from hearing about drinking beer, hanging with friends, and twins.

Sports journalists think that these forced moral lessons are necessary because football is important. But football is not important, it’s a frivolous game that is supposed to be fun. And if it’s not fun, people will choose to spend their Sundays doing something that is.