The History of Fantasy Football
11–30–16, Brian
I recently crawled my way out of last place in our fantasy football league, which will hopefully prevent me from having to endure our brutal punishment for getting last place in the league — attending a WNBA game solo yolo. Midway through the season, I saw the very real possibility of getting last and having to FLY TO ANOTHER CITY just to watch middle school caliber basketball by myself. So I took on a mission to convince myself that although I had a bad record, I was not the worst team in the league, and eventually we would play more games and I would naturally float up in the rankings. I built spreadsheets that showed all types of statistics and trends, and eventually I made a case that I was going to recover that was strong enough to calm my nerves. After all that, I thought… Damn. Fantasy Football is pretty sweet. So then I thought… How did this all get started? And today, I bring you the fruits of my research.
The game was invented in 1962. Meet Wilfred “Bill” Winkerbach, Scotty Stirling, and George Ross. George and Scotty were newspaper writers for the Oakland Tribune, and Bill was a part owner of the Raiders. The three were all out in New York, following the Raiders on an east coast road trip. As with all ideas, this starts with friends shooting the shit over a few drinks. Bill talks about games he had made up that involved players selecting golfers before a PGA tour event and adding up all of their golfers’ stores at the end to see who do the best or picking a few hitters and pitchers in baseball and tallying up homeruns, earned runs, and strike outs.Bill was passionate about football, and wanted to make a similar game for it. He explained this concept to Scotty and George, who immediately realized what an awesome idea it was.They contributed some ideas for a scoring system, but agree that Bill was the true mastermind.
Soon they had a full set of rules and 5 more friends that had recruited to create the first ever fantasy football league: GOPPPL (Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League). The Raiders were in the AFL, so the game only included AFL teams. The scoring system wasn’t quite as sophisticated today, but it is awesome to see how it set the ground work: 50 for a rushing TD, 25 for passing or receiving, 25 for a field goal, 10 for an extra point, and 200 for a kick or punt return TD. The kicking is super interesting, because this was before we had specialized kickers. For example, the leading scorer in that first year had 1,430 points from 27 TD passes, 11 field goals, and 48 extra points.
Their system worked great from the start. It went smoothly the first season so they took it to their neighborhood bar to start showing their friends. They started leagues. People from other parts of town would come to the bar and hear about it, then take it back to their neighborhoods. Soon, all of the Bay Area was playing this GOPPPL game. Bill thought of everything — even in the first year they had a last place punishment. He made an ugly trophy with a football face and dunce cap, and the loser had to put it on his mantle until the next season. He would go over to their house throughout the year to make sure that it was still up.
This was almost a full-time job for Bill. At the time, gathering information from across the country took a lot of time. He spent hours every week calling people all over the country and putting a report together for the league members of what players were playing and other news about upcoming games. He then had to find a way to get a hard copy of every player’s lineup before Sunday. Then he had to rake up all the stats from all over the country and put together another report for all the players with the fantasy scores. In the end, the game became a huge success, but the men never benefited from it financially.
I can’t wait until we find ourselves stuck in a room all night, bending, but only because we’ve realized that we have an incredible idea. Something amazing, but we’ll make sure we capitalize on it and get that $$VC MONEY$$.
