Why I Quit Fantasy Football

What was once my favorite perk of the football season became too incomplete, hyperfocused, and, frankly, overbearing.

We’re a quarter of the way through the season, and, for the first time in about eight years, I haven’t set a single fantasy lineup. No season-long teams on NFL.com, Yahoo!, CBSSports, or ESPN and definitely no promo code 54–54 for price matching up to $200 on DraftKings or FanDuel. Though I still have compulsions to convert any numbers or plays into fantasy points, I’m out. Quitting fantasy is like saying you’ll stop chewing pen caps or cracking your knuckles. You didn’t understand it was a habit until you stopped doing it.

I’ve always been a huge football fan, but if you asked me around 2009 for the best part of Sunday, I would’ve answered fantasy football. Really, if you asked me four years ago what the best part of football Sunday was, I probably would’ve said fantasy.

As Charlie Pierce wrote for Grantland last October, fantasy was one of the ways football fandom had increased and sustained.

Some people stayed or became fans through memorabilia collecting, staying close to The Game through its most basic accoutrements. Some people stayed or became fans because of the explosion in advanced analytics, through which you could get closer to the truth of what was happening on the field. And some people stayed or became fans through the phenomenon of fantasy leagues.

Since I’ve never been into the whole memorabilia or autographs thing, and I already had a fill of advanced analytics from writers like Bill Barnwell and websites like Football Outsiders, fantasy was the next step of football fandom. I was sold. I could invest in football more than just the game and my favorite team, the Philadelphia Eagles.

So, after every Super Bowl since 2009, when I exited my awkward teens and entered my awkward 20s, I would begin a countdown toward my fantasy drafts. I couldn’t get enough of them. I was so gung-ho about fantasy football that I remember posting on Facebook that a fantasy draft, after the age of 21, was the best day of the year because birthdays and holidays just don’t have the same oomph anymore.

And, to add the cherry on top of my weekly fantasy sundae, the RedZone channel debuted in 2009 and became the superhighway toward fantasy football paradiso. RedZone proved that football — arguably the most chess-matchiest of all sports — could be presented as checkers, after you’ve kinged your pieces. RedZone mostly ditched games between the 20s (or boring parts depending on who you’re talking to) for the sake of only what we fantasy footballers cared about, big plays and touchdowns, especially touchdowns. It was perfect for your typical 19-year-old whose attention span needed every game instantaneously.

I was hooked. Fantasy enhanced the football experience. Bad teams were watchable. I had connections to teams I otherwise would not. It didn’t matter who had a poor season, or which team was getting blown out one week because I was worried about the numbers within the game only. In his piece, Pierce mentions the spread of the fantasy contagion.

On rare occasions, the rule about “no cheering in the press box” would be lit completely on fire because the running back on a team losing 38–0 scored a touchdown to make the game 38–7 but saved someone’s bacon in one of the 23 fantasy leagues in which he or she was involved.

Despite his hyperbole with the number of fantasy leagues, and his disdain for fantasy sports in general, Pierce is right about the effect of them. A 38–0 game, unremarkable as it may be after a certain point, now has a full 60 minutes of worth. Even if you’re like me and don’t agree with cheering in the press box, you can see fantasy’s value in the football community.

Everyone remembers DraftKings and FanDuel’s advertisement barrage last year. Despite their similar missions to outdo the other, which is part of the reason for their massive spending (and tests of the depths of our sanity), they could get away with it because the market is so large. Year-long fantasy has evolved into week-long. I get why. Fantasy has captured the teetering fans and firmly put them on the side of football. It’s a simplified version of a complicated game that gets everyone involved. It’s given gamblers more things to bet on.

And as you get older, the opportunities to meet up with friends hit the normal adulthood snags: kids, work, significant others, errands, etc. The annual anticipation to get everyone in the same room at the same time is a great reason why fantasy football has become so popular. At worst, you get to hang out with people you may not see too often. At best, you get to hang out with them and then kick their asses week-to-week.

But as my years of playing went on, and fantasy approached and reached ubiquity, and Sunday shifted further and further from my favorite parts of the sport— where you watched games, gobbled up trends, numbers, adjustments, and other football-football stuff — I became jaded.

To be fair, most fantasy players do love football, too, and love and appreciate the game on deeper levels. And there is analysis in fantasy. The rankings and picks don’t just appear. The writers and analysts create them from long, painstaking hours of research and trend spotting. But their research is football in relation to fantasy. And it’s the community’s full-on embracing of the fantasy over the football that’s turned me off to it. There are podcasts, TV shows, radio segments, and 28-hour marathons strictly dedicated to fantasy football. I simply prefer football in relation to football.

Perhaps you’re thinking I retired (as I call it in an attempt to exalt my value to the fantasy community) because I didn’t win enough. Or you think I’m acting as some cranky old man waving his freshly printed top-200 cheat sheet, screaming, “We didn’t have Matthew Berry back in my day!” (Or you’re thinking I’m a hipster trying to escape to the mainstream.)

You‘d be right, I didn’t win that often — truthfully I didn’t win enough to even call it “that often” — which is part of the reason I’ll never forgive 2012-Philip Rivers or 2011-Darren McFadden or Week 17, 2015-Cam Newton, but my winning ineptitude isn’t the reason. Fantasy stopped being fun because it stopped being about football. There were times of unnecessary stressing that a player on my team in one league would play too well so as to hurt me in another, simultaneously pushing and pulling my overly-competitive strings. Fantasy, as meta as its name is, became more about my fake team and less about the games. It pigeonholed the NFL into a numbers game for skill positions, neglecting those that don’t get the glory of rushing or receiving yards or touchdown passes.

Type in a offensive player’s name into Google and check the first or second autocomplete option. Let’s start with Antonio Brown. How about Ezekiel Elliot? Allen Robinson. DeAndre Hopkins. C.J. Prosise. Devontae Booker. Rob Gronkowski. Dak Prescott. Philip Rivers. C.J. Anderson. Emmanuel Sanders. Markus Wheaton. Le’Veon Bell. Odell Beckham Jr. Tyrod Taylor. Andrew Luck. Rishard Matthews, Ryan Mathews, or Jordan Matthews. Josh Gordon. Robert Griffin III. Try Martavis Bryant — who isn’t playing in 2016.

Now Google Marshal Yanda. Or Kawann Short, Aaron Donald, Leonard Williams, or J.J. Watt. Try Tyron Smith or even Joe Thomas. Travis Frederick. Reshad Jones. Earl Thomas. Bruce Irvin. Khalil Mack. Justin Houston. Fletcher Cox. Marcell Dareus.

You get the idea. The nuances of the game and an entire side of it, which completes the other end of the chessboard, have been abandoned. Defensive players don’t matter and are instead grouped as one entity. Houston is as amorphous as Marcus Peters because they’re only part of the Chiefs D/ST, despite the former’s 22 sacks in 2014, and the latter’s eight interceptions and two touchdowns as a rookie in 2015. Offensive lines don’t matter — unless they’re blocking for the running back or quarterback someone drafted.

Even team fandom has cheapened. The investment has made fans loyal to their fantasy teams, regardless if they are in 23 leagues. Wins and losses, the true goal of sports, feel less satisfying, as if they don’t matter as much as fantasy wins and losses. How many times have you heard, or said, “I hope Player X gets 250 yards and two touchdowns, but I hope Team Y wins”? I’ve said it. I didn’t mind if Dez Bryant torched the Eagles as long as the Eagles won.

And the immense popularity of fantasy has become the only the fodder for most football talk. Fantasy is in your face or smashed over your head now. Around this time of year, there are countless social media posts of people’s draft boards asking, “Who won?” Or they force-feed the magnificence of their drafts into conversations. “I got Antonio Brown in the second round! What a steal, right?” someone will say after Brown makes a three-yard catch. Fantasy has become the guy from Family Guy showing people his family photos. A conversation about football averages 1.83 sentences before there’s mention of You-Know-What.

Then there’s the population of the community who resort to death threats sent to players on Twitter. This doesn’t entail the majority of fantasy players, and it would be unfair to even assume so, particularly with knowledge of the reactions of fans when their favorite teams lose a game. Still, the threats happen because of fantasy. Two of the most famous cases are Brandon Jacobs — who said fantasy-related threats are something players deal with all the time — and Brandon Marshall … the other Brandon Marshall. The linebacker who plays in Denver. The one whom fantasy players constantly confuse for Brandon Marshall, the New York Jets wide receiver. Even Snoop Dogg vented about his fantasy team last season, going so far as telling Chip Kelly to kill himself.

More, my once beloved RedZone became my least favorite channel on Sunday. It’s great for big plays and seeing the important parts of games that are out of the region if you don’t want to dish out the cash for Sunday Ticket (and its being commercial free helps), but it’s a reactive broadcast with little build up that rarely captures the flow of any game. They’re shifting between contests so often that you never settle in and appreciate what’s happening. I admit there are boring and sloppy games. There are games that mean nothing in the way of division races or playoff seeding or fandom. But, with only 16 in a season, each game’s cost is about six times more than an NBA or NHL game and 10 times more than an MLB win.

And, that’s not including the games within the games. Adjustments made from half to half or drive to drive. What worked in the first and second quarters may not work in the third and fourth. Take Thursday’s Super Bowl 50 rematch. In the first half, Newton went 11-for-17 for 111 yards while throwing for a touchdown and rushing for another. In the second half, he went 7-for-16 for 83 yards and an interception. In fantasy, Cam still accounted for a good game, racking up about 20 points, but, in football, Wade Phillips and the Broncos defense made their adjustments, shutting down the Panthers’ offense seven months after they did it the first time.

Fantasy football has its benefits. It’s a good community builder and can be attractive to middling fans or those who want to get into football. But it’s limited. If it can’t be quantified on a stats sheet and points system, it’s most times not important. Houston ended up with 35 quarterback hurries last season in only 11 games. Peters finished with eight picks, but how many of those interceptions were caused by Houston’s pressure? How many hurries from Houston were a product of Peters’ coverage ability? There are as many great plays that don’t end up on stat sheets or fantasy scores as plays that do. I just prefer never having to worry about separating them anymore.