A Little Self Promotion: My Fantasy Football League

TheSportsWatchers.com: This post was published 3 years 8 months 15 days ago which may make it irrelevant to your fantasy football inquiry. For up to date fantasy football projections and predictions, go to our homepage at TSW Fantasy Football.

This week, my Fantasy Football League will officially begin. I’m not referencing the start of the NFL season, but my actual league gets started on Wednesday night with our fantasy draft at 10:00pm EST.

I know, many of you had your fantasy football drafts way back in August, and even if you did have it late, you took advantage of the long Labor Day Weekend to get it done.

I’m just one of those who loves to wait as long as humanly possible to have fantasy football draft. Afterall, so much happens in the preseason and we depend on those first round picks so much that to have a draft anytime before the 3rd preseason game is just ridiculous.

But I won’t lie, I did have a little bit of trouble getting everyone in line with the draft this year. You see, my fantasy football league goes back. Way back. All the way to 2004 when me and dawg from my college football team at Columbia had our own 2-man fantasy football draft. The next year, our senior year, we would go on to include everyone on the team, and we have continued to tradition, although in dwindling numbers, up until now, with a Fantasy Football League we have now labeled “Gold Dinner,” in reference to our alma mater’s annual celebration of the graduating of our college football seniors.

Of course, my roots in fantasy football go back way further than that. Outside of the ice cream man, fantasy football was one of the first things I ever saved money for. It was around 1994 where I began to notice ads in the newspaper and magazines for fantasy football players. You remember those. The leagues where you mailed in money and picked a team in salary cap league format and then you competed against the rest of the nation to win weekly and seasonal prices. Needless to say, I was only 11 in my first league, and so I sucked at it. Plus, if I recall correctly, the more money you had, the more points you could put toward buying players, so they weren’t exactly competition friendly to the annual salary of a 7th grader.

Still before the age of internet fantasy football kicked in, I turned toward fantasy football league’s I could win…the kind I started my own. So in 1996 at the age of 12, I started my own league where I listed off a series of 20 possibilities in fantasy football. Those possibilities would go something like, “Marshall Faulk will score 1 touchdown,” or “the Dallas Cowboys will beat the San Francisco 49ers.” Each possibility would have a certain number of points rewarded if correct and a certain number of points deducted if wrong, all based on the likelihood of that possibility. For example, you could gain more points and risk more points being deducted for predicting that Brad Johnson would throw 4 touchdown passes, but the risk/reward was much lower if you predicted Kurt Warner would throw 1 touchdown pass. The possible points rewarded and possible points lost equaled the same total every week.

My participants would sign their initials next to the things they thought would happen, and each Sunday night I would calculate the points won and loss by each person and add their overall points gained to their yearly total using an Excel spreadsheet. I did this all the way through my freshman year in high school. It was a marvelous success, and in the 3 years I did it, I won 2 of them—without cheating. I did, however, play to some of the biases and favoritism of my opponents/friends with the possibilities I would propose, but I was probably even at bigger advantage because I loved to see my favorite players reach lofty goals and produce a severe amount of points.

By my sophomore year in 1999, the internet had caught up to fantasy football and Sandbox.com came up with one of the first free fantasy football leagues. My friends and I joined that, and I’ve been playing fantasy football leagues with them online every year since.

Fast-forward to the present, and the impending draft of my Gold Dinner Fantasy Football League. There are 9 football alumni on the team, and 1 former member, who make up this year’s 10 teams. It’s divided into 2 divisions, one for the offense, and one for the defense, which really has no significance at the end of the day. This year’s version of the Gold Dinner league is titled Gold Dinner II, despite the fact that I’ll be going to my 3rd post graduation Gold Dinner (my first post-grad fantasy league was called Lions forever…doesn’t have the same ring to it).

Last year, in Gold Dinner I, the message boards were a frienzy. People talked trash to the high-heavens. Peoples characters were questioned, people abandoned their teams, and others refused to pay the league fee. I had a rough start to the season, starting 0-3, despite having scored the 4th most points in the league after 3 weeks. I am the commissioner of the league, so people began to make fun of me “The Sports Watcher,” for not living up to my moniker. But I knew my team was good and that my record did not reflect my team’s ability. So I made a few trades, and needless to say, I went on to win every single game for the rest of the season in route to the first Gold Dinner championship ever.

Did I brag in the message boards?

Nope!

All I wrote in the message boards after Week 3, was “1,” “2,” “3,” “4,” “5,” and all the way up to “12,” after my championship victory.

And so with Week 1 of the NFL and fantasy football season upon us, my counting begins again this week. I’ll be using my own quarterback, running back, wide receiver and tight end rankings to determine just which players I’ll be drafting in my Gold Dinner II draft this Wednesday night. I’ll be live-blogging the draft, so come join me and a couple of my friends on the “Internets,” as we talk up the biggest night of the fantasy football season on the eve of the start of yet another well-anticipated year in the NFL. The draft starts at 10:00pm EST, so the live-blog will start a little bit before that. Come join the fun, and if you’re in a draft of your own, you can read the live commentary at another time at FantasyFootball.TheSportsWatchers.com.

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