Fantasy Football Stories

[Anders]

Hi guys (and gals).

I'm doing a feature story this week for the paper on Fantasy Football.
It will examine why us sad bunch of anorak trainspotters spend so much time and resources on these chiefly fruitless pursuits.
And I want your tales of excess

Lemme know the best stories of - how much time people spend on these things, the lengths they will go to in pursuit of the perfect team (even if there's no prizemoney up for grabs

), the ego-driven reasons of playing, the most bizarre stories associated with the whole shebang.
If you could fill me in over the next two days it would be truly appreciated.
Best tales - must be true of course

should get their escapades published.

Cheers

 

[Bonovox]

Anders, my man, I have a pathetic story for you. However, this is more pathetic than fantasy football. When my friends and I were about 14 we got into Micro League baseball. Anyone remember that? It was a computer simulation game of baseball. You picked teams and based on the prior year's stats, the game simulated the outcome.

Well, here we are, 14 years later, and we still play. But now we have baseball, football, hockey, MLS soccer and world soccer and basketball. We have our own webpage www.oxbowdesign.com/mlsa and we run all the leagues. There are 14 of us and we are absolutely ridiculous. We spend HOURS contemplating strategy and teams for games we don't even play. What's worse, you can't even watch tv and say "Sweet, Marshall Faulk just got me 4 points."

Every season we purchase the new EA Sports game, except we use High Heat Baseball. We have the same franchises we've had for 14 years and they are all keeper leagues. You draft new players and free agents. We then load the game on the PC with our teams and let the computer simulate them. We are lame enough to sit and watch the computer play the game!! I think we must have 9 copies of Madden football that hasn't been played, only simulated!

We are looking into starting rugby and maybe golf if we can figure it out.

The worst is world soccer. We each have a team from the following countries: England, Spain, France, Holland, Italy and Germany. Each country plays games, we play league cups and a World Championship. A total of over 150 games. We do watch most of them.

We're talking hundreds of hours watching a computer simulate games.

Here's the kicker, IT'S ALL FOR FREE!!!!

I know, my girlfriend thinks we're absolutely insane!!

 

[Bonovox]

If anyone does go to the webpage, click on News/Stories, etc.

We do newspaper write-ups of all the games. My Spanish soccer team, Basque ETA, just lost in the world championship. The whole world soccer season lasted 7 months!

And read the message board, there are some hilarious postings of one our member's unfortunate incident in a bar after eating at a NYC steak house!

 

[casper]

one of the guys in my fantasy football league from years past moved to calif. about 4 months ago (we live in new jersey). he still wanted to be in the league but we do the draft every year at a local sports bar, so we had him on the phone from the bar for about 3 hours the afternoon of the draft. i hope he had free long distance on his cell phone plan. even if he didn't he would have no problem paying the bill he is a fanatic.

bonovox, i remember that game very well and spent many many hours playing it. it was great. i think i stopped playing it when i hit puberty, though

 

[Bonovox]

Yeah, we're lame like that. We have four people in NYC, two in Boston, one in Tampa, one in Vegas, 2 in Wash DC, 2 in Europe and one in Korea. The Web is an amazing thing, saves us lots of phone bills that we used to have.

 

[TAZ]

Ah, my favorite time of year.

In general I run a league which started out as the old 28 team league head to head about 6 years ago. I turned it into a salary based league and then back to head to head. Grew it to 120 teams last year, 10 divisions of 12. This year I have only 9 divisions with 108 teams total. We play mostly for pride but everyone puts in $20 and I pay about 20 places, winner about $400.

As far as excess, I usually play in all divisions. I put up the most to start but I have made money every year. Never win but have 2 of the top 5, etc.

Funny stories, too many to name but a few that come to mind:

The year Emmitt held out, no one drafted him for about 4 rounds (no keepers). We were at a sportsbar and about 1 minute after the guy drafted him they ran the story he signed!

About 5-6 years ago in a very important game I was down 11 points going into Monday night. I had Dwight "Hands of" Stone going and he was done. Watched the 1st half and the Steelers were getting killed and he had 0 receptions. Set up the vcr and went to bed. Woke in the morning and heard they scored 14, rewound the tape and sure enough 2TD's (12 points) for Stone.

Almost once a year a team will get shut out. We have - points for int's. One year we even had a team have -2 as their total. QB had 4 INT's, K had 1xp, and a receiver had 1 yardage point.

Good Stuff