Fantasy Football: Five ways to instantly regret your draft
“This is my year. It has to be,” you think, as you purchase four different fantasy football preview magazines, in between your constant perusal of every website’s player rankings.
You’ve dedicated an entire year – since your last disappointment – to developing your new strategy, one that will come as a shocking, crushing blow to your opponents.
You know all the sleepers, you know every team’s bye week and you’ve got every impact rookie burned into your memory.
You poor, helpless fool.
Don’t you know your brother-in-law, the guy you didn’t want in the league in the first place and was only there to fill a spot left vacant and was only considered because your wife told you to include him, yet knows little-to-nothing about football, is going to win the championship?
Regardless, your spirits are high before the season starts – or at least they should be.
Which is why there are five ways to easily place upon yourself a crushing reality and realization that fantasy football is no fun, left completely to luck and, in general, a nauseating experience.
1. You have no idea how an auction draft works: It happens to the best of us. You get embroiled in an immediate bidding war for a few players you covet and, before you know it, you’ve spent three-quarters of your budget on your first three picks. The rest of your draft is a painful exercise in rounding out your roster with cheap bargains, players with “upside,” and the occasionally free-falling veteran. Your season is over by now; actually having to endure your team getting its brains bashed in on a weekly basis is just a formality.
2. You draft a player who is perpetually ready to “break out”: DeMarco Murray owners of the world, unite, for this is our eternal crutch. Drafting a player who is primed for a big season, only to watch him fizzle out, is a blunder we’ve all experienced. But it isn’t until you keep coming back to that player, hoping against hope that he finally realizes what he has put your fantasy team through and puts it all together on the field that you are truly sick.
3. You aren’t paying attention to the preseason: Fantasy football players are really the only people in the country who need to pay attention to preseason games, because for them, they’re anything but completely meaningless, tiresome affairs. If you aren’t doing the proper research, painfully reading write-ups on games no one wants to be at or compete in, you’ll be spending a high draft pick on someone who just started experiencing concussion-like symptoms and isn’t expected to touch a field anytime soon.
4. You’re in too many fantasy football drafts to begin with: The thought of being in ten fantasy football leagues might be great, as you envision yourself wheeling and dealing your way to glory across different formats and against opponents who have no idea what hit them. In reality, after two drafts, you’re a shell of the All-Powerful Fantasy Annihilator you thought you were. Your brain is fried, you’ve lost a step. You’re either left with a mediocre team built out of indifference or one that looks exactly like your other rosters (also mediocre).
5. You let someone who knows nothing about football into your league: It is a proven scientific fact that the person who knows the least about fantasy football (like your brother-in-law), will never truly grasp it and spends most of his time just making fun of the entire thing will no doubt win the entire league. This will most likely happen without him noticing.
However, “Dude, can you believe Blaine Gabbert threw four touchdowns in our matchup this week?” is likely something you will hear during the one week this person checks his team.