Faithful readers of the Cavalier Daily, I have a confession to make. In the several hours a day I spend down here in the basement of Newcomb Hall, most of the time I'm not doing work on the newspaper. No, I'm dealing with a time-consumer more insidious, more afflicting and much, much more addictive than anything this newspaper has to offer. That's right, I'm talking about fantasy football.
Fantasy football. The activity that turns grown men into small children, squabbling over who can make the better offer for Lamar Smith. The pastime that can turn a man against the most holy of alliances, his favorite football team, at least for a couple of quarters, or more if he's a Bengals fan. It's the game that keeps players awake into the wee hours of the morning, trying to find out just how long Edgerrin James is going to be out of the lineup.
Yes, my friends, I am a fantasy football addict. From draft night to playoff time, I am hopelessly consumed with whether or not Plaxico Burress or Mikhael Ricks gets into the end zone. I'm telling you this not because I want help with this addiction -- on the contrary, it keeps me busy late at night when I'm waiting to make corrections on my pages. It's more fun than schoolwork, and it takes little to no actual effort. If fantasy football is a problem, I don't want to know the solution.
Why am I writing this column, then? For several reasons. One, I know that many of you out there will read this column just to try to figure out if your team is better than mine. (Answer: no.) Two, for those of you that don't play, maybe you'll come away with a better understanding of what makes otherwise sane people pour so much time into a seemingly meaningless activity. And three, my team is tied for first place, and I want to brag.
The greatest night of the fantasy football season is, of course, draft night. There's no more macho display of camaraderie than sitting around with your buddies, drinking a few beers and pretending to be general managers. Add in the comedy factor of making fun of the guy who picks, say, Marcus Robinson, as well as the guy who has to leave early to attend to his girlfriend, and you have all the makings of the ultimate guy's night out.
But as any fantasy owner worth his salt knows, draft night is but a small part of the fun of fantasy football. If you want to win your league, you have to watch the waiver wire every Sunday to pick up backups to running backs -- everyone needs running backs -- who get injured during the day's games. Of course, this could mean that you wind up with guys like Rondell Mealey, Trung Canidate or the dreaded Other Ricky Williams on your roster. But that's the price you pay for having quality backs. If you don't have at least six or seven running backs on a 20-man roster, you're just not trying.
That brings me to the next wrinkle in a fantasy season: the dreaded injury. This is an especially painful topic for me, because until Sunday night my quarterback and the linchpin of my fantasy squad was one Donovan McNabb. While D-Mac will forever be known as one of the toughest players in the league after playing the entire game on a broken ankle, his absence for the rest of the season has left me scrambling for a new quarterback. Thank God the trade deadline hasn't passed.
Not that I'm alone in fighting the injury bug this season. Anyone who owns James, Kurt Warner, Stephen Davis or Jay Fiedler knows what I'm talking about. The fact that three of those players are owned by the same player in my league makes me wonder how the poor guy hasn't had a breakdown. Then again, the fact that I traded Fiedler to him makes me feel a little bit giddy about things. After all, it's that one fractured thumb that has kept my Fiedler-and-Peerless Price for Randy Moss-and-Kordell Stewart deal from going down as one of the worst of all time. The fact that the trade was processed mere hours before Moss was arrested for pushing a policewoman with his car makes the deal even funnier. But that's half the fun of fantasy football. Whether your players get three touchdowns a week, break their ankles or take cops on joyrides, all you can ever do is laugh -- and brag -- about it. And if I can swing a trade for a decent quarterback, you can bet I'll be doing both of those throughout the offseason.
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