Fantasy Football is Not a Game Played in Middle Earth

In August my brother-in-law got his dad to be in a Fantasy Football league with him. Then Dad decided he didn't have the time and asked me if I'd like to take his place in their league. I like football every now and then, but I've never been one to follow it closely. I played in a Fantasy Football league once before in college. I don't remember much about it. Regardless, I took the opportunity to do something new and hopefully fun. I figured it would at least make watching the games more interesting, and the CBS Sports web site for the league looked like it would make it all pretty simple for a newbie such as myself.

So the season started, we held our draft, I put a team together, and it's been a lot of fun.  For the uninitiated, here's a brief summary of how fantasy football works.  Everyone in the league picks players for their team from all of the players in the NFL. Each week you pit a team of miscellaneous players against another person's team and see who does better.  How well you do is dependent on how well all of our chosen players do in their actual games each week.  The idea is to get a team of elite players that will always perform well, giving you the best chance to win each week.  So premier quarterbacks, running backs, and wide receivers are highly valued, where as second string players are often left on the bench.

If you don't get it, don't worry about it.  It's hard to really understand unless you get involved with it, but the basic idea is that your score is based on the real life statistics of the people you have in your team. If you play people that score touchdowns and run a lot of yards, you'll be doing well.

Why am I talking about fantasy football though? Two reasons.  The first is that I'm surprised how quickly I've gotten into it. I check reports on the players, and read articles on CBS Sports about who to play, who to not play, who is a sleeper pick that people may not know about.  If you want to do well, you have to keep up on this stuff or else you'll end up playing people who may be injured or out of a game for some other reason giving you a big fat goose egg for your score that week. And because I've got some vested interest in how well these football players do, I've been watching more football on the weekends. Especially the games where I have someone on my team playing.

The second reason is that growing up I wasn't really into sports that much. I did play little league baseball, though not very well. I was a gamer through and through, and I didn't even let the two mix by playing sports video games. Well, I did have a baseball game, but there was a fantasy element to it in that you could super jump and stuff.  Anyway, not only was I a gamer, not a jock, but I played role playing games, or RPGs.  Fantasy RPGs like Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, Lufia, Secret of Mana, Zelda, etc. And you know what most of those games had in them? A roster of people you had to select to create a team.  The team with the better stats would generally do better in the game.  If you look to pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons you can start to see an even greater correlation to fantasy football.  I never played Dungeons and Dragons, but I understand all of the concepts involved from the games I did play.

The point I'm getting at is that even though I've never been much of a sports person, fantasy football may not be as big of a jump in hobbies as I might have suspected.  Every week I'm looking at a roster of players and choosing those with the more desirable statistics. I'm analyzing their match ups against other teams like I might analyze which character class would be better against a certain boss. And just like in all RPGs, whether it's a computer or a dice roll, there's a large factor of what is known as the RNG, or Random Number Generator.  In a video game you might have a really strong character, but the RNG comes up low and all you get are misses instead of hits.  In fantasy football you might think your stud quarterback can't possibly let you down, but then he breaks his knee in the first quarter of the first game of the season, and suddenly you're scrounging for a replacement.  

In fact, I would say it's worse in football.  Capable players often have bad games, or they get double covered because of their value which makes them less likely to make plays.  You pretty much just have to go with the averages and your best guesses and hope for the best.  This makes it interesting, and frustrating.  Probably more of the latter.  Especially when someone who you have available to you, but you didn't play in particular week, decides to have a really great game. (I'm looking at you, Dwayne Bowe.) Overall though, it's been a great experience.  It gives me a lot to talk about with my brother-in-law and future sister-in-law. She's also in the league and actually was the winner from last year.  When I hear people talk about football statistics and players, I don't feel so out of the loop now because, well, I'm actually in the loop.  And because of the RPG connection, I don't necessarily feel like I have to give up any of my nerd or geek cred because I'm in a fantasy football league.

So how am I doing with my team? Glad you asked.  It started off rough, but I'm currently up seven wins to three losses.  Not bad for being relatively new to this whole fantasy football thing.  But then again, I may not be as inexperienced at this as I first thought.

On the Topic of Video Games

Let's just lay it out on the table. I love to play video games. I've played them since I was about 5, starting with the mighty Atari 2600 system and graduating to a Nintendo Entertainment System when I was about 6 or 7 (courtesy of my grandparents who had bought if for themselves and felt that it sat unused too much of the time). I was hooked on Mario, Zelda, and a slew of other fun games with not so recognizable heroes. I considered myself a Nintendo person. When the Super NES came out, I saved my allowance until I could buy it. On this system I was introduced to the Final Fantasy Series, and RPG type games, with Final Fantasy II. Along with the Super Nintendo Zelda, it quickly became one of my favorite games. I played a lot growing up. Probably more than my parents should have allowed. I would rent games on the weekends and play them for hours, usually only stopping for meals and when I went to bed. When I would usually be sleeping in on a weekend, I would find I had the uncanny ability to wake up really early without an alarm because I anticipated being able to play a game in the morning. I proudly returned many rented games which I had completed within the 3 day rental period.

Final Fantasy III came out on the Super Nintendo and blew me away. It's still one of my all time favorite games and probably my favorite of the series. I played it to death, even after I beat it, just to find all of the little secrets and max out my character stats. Soon came the N64 and once again I saved my earnings and bought it myself. Top priorities were Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda, and Starfox 64. Sadly, it was announced that the Final Fantasy games were moving to the PlayStation. So what did I do? That's right. I saved and bought myself a PlayStation, almost solely so I could continue playing Final Fantasy. When I got Final Fantasy 7, I played it for about 30 hours in the first week, which was a regular school week. My mom was sort of taken aback and said to me that's nearly a full time job. When I went to college, I didn't have a TV, so I left my game systems at home. But I did take a brand new laptop which I had bought for school.

A friend of mine had introduced me to StarCraft in the last year or so of High School. I played it on our home computer quite a bit, but didn't do too much of the online gaming with it. In college, I was among a lot of fellow gamers my freshman year. I played Half-Life and we often played Counter-Strike on the dorm LAN. My RA also introduced me to Everquest which had come out earlier that year. RPG games really appealed to me, and this one seemed like the ultimate RPG, but I didn't have the time or money for it then. Half way through the year, I bought a small TV and brought my systems down to college with me. We played a lot of Final Fantasy VIII, Mario Kart 64, and Mario Party 2.

Next year, I switched schools, took my systems with me and a little game called Goldeneye 64, arguably one of the best N64 games, and the only first person shooter I've ever had any proficiency at. I got into a competition with a guy across the hall. He was really good. So good, he had mapped out where you re-spawn after a death and he could just continuously kill you. By the end of the year, I had managed to catch up to him though and was able to match him pretty evenly. I was pretty proud of that. After that year, I was going through some tough times, and while home for the Summer I finally picked up Everquest. It pretty much took over my life. I was working as a stock boy for a retail store, so I worked 12 AM to 8:30 AM. My schedule, for pretty much 3 months straight, was go to work, come home and go to bed, get up around 4 PM and play Everquest until it was time to go to work. Insane. When I got back to school, I sort of saw what a waste my summer had been and gave up the game completely, destroying the CD and game box so as not to tempt myself.

But I wasn't giving up gaming completely. Final Fantasy X and the Playstation 2 were on the horizon, and I spent hard earned money on both. Oddly enough, while long identifying myself with Nintendo, I had no inclination to get a Gamecube. As college came to a close, I actually sold off a lot of my gaming stuff to purchase an XBOX and play the Star Wars RPG, Knights of the Old Republic and a few other games. But a year or so down the road I got married, and video games took a back seat for awhile. The XBOX pretty much became a DVD player, and all the other systems got put in the closet. I had sold my PS2 and all my games to get the XBOX, so I didn't even have that when Final Fantasy XII was released. My desire to play the game was so great that I re-purchased a PS2 on eBay and got back into it. I bought a couple other games, Okami is worth mentioning, and every now and then I got a chance to play. Around December, 2006 I picked up the Sims 2 and even got my wife to play, and she didn't really play a lot of games at the time. She's still hooked. I got her the expansions this Christmas.

Around April of 2007 I decided to try out World of Warcraft. I had put off trying another online Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) ever since the Everquest fiasco that had sucked away that one Summer, but I had heard good things about WoW, one of which was that you didn't have to devote nearly as much time to it in order to enjoy it like some other MMORPGs. I was instantly hooked and am still playing it today. I could easily play it all day (and that's pretty much what I did one week when my wife was visiting family) but responsibilities and other hobbies keep me from losing myself to it like I did with Everquest. And similar to my elementary school days, I wake up early to play before I have to leave for work, though admittedly I have to use an alarm and I don't always get up. I plan to use this blog for a bit of writing on Warcraft, so look for that in the future if you're interested.

It doesn't end there though. Just recently we got a Nintendo Wii, we've already had a lot of fun with it. We played Wii Sports Bowling with practically everyone on my wife's side of the family during Christmas and had a blast. Then I got The Legend of Zelda for the Wii which I'm excited about because I haven't played a new Zelda game in so long.

So there you have it. I play video games. As far as I can remember, I always have. I like to think I keep it in moderation, but I do tend to obsess about them. When I'm not playing them, I might be thinking about them, looking stuff up about them on the Internet, or planning for when I get to play again. I have to watch out for that because then I don't get anything else done. It's my favorite form of entertainment, so be prepared to read posts about games if you read this blog.