Fantasy Football
Draft night in somebody's basement, the waiver wire, and a running back you'd never heard of deciding whether you'd speak to your brother-in-law that week. The office league that turned every Sunday into every game at once.
The game is older than most of the people playing it. In 1962, on a Raiders road trip, an Oakland businessman and Raiders limited partner named Wilfred "Bill" Winkenbach sat in a New York hotel room with a team PR man and an Oakland Tribune reporter and wrote the rules; the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League held its first draft in Winkenbach's house in August 1963, eight teams, 25 points for a touchdown. It was still running in 2015. In 1969 a founding member brought it to his Oakland sports bar, the King's X, the first public league, and it spread by word of mouth to other bars and then to college friends in Chicago, Cleveland, and Atlanta over the following decades. By the late 1980s there was a national magazine, Fantasy Football Index, and a phone-in newspaper game that gave the week's top scorer a trip to Hawaii.
What made it a Sunday institution was the internet. Scores that once had to be tallied by hand from Monday's box scores updated themselves; CBS launched an online game in 1997, Yahoo was first with a free one, and every sports site followed. By 2008 an estimated 17 million people were playing fantasy football and spending an average of $500 a year on it, and the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas was putting the cost in lost office productivity at $615 million a week during the season, a number it kept recalculating in later years. The NFL launched its own game in 2010; by 2012 fantasy players were spending six times as long on NFL.com as everyone else.
The culture grew around the mechanics: the draft party, the trash-talk email chain, the last-place punishment that ranges from a costume to the 24-hour Waffle House challenge, the FX sitcom The League (2009–2015) built entirely on one. Players who had never watched a Jaguars–Texans game found themselves locked in on one, and the trade group that tracks the hobby from 500,000 players in 1988 counted 62.5 million across all sports in 2022, four in five of them playing football. In 2022 a major-league baseball player slapped another in the face over a fantasy football dispute, took a three-game suspension, and said it was "a matter of principle, man."
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