My other life as a Fantasy Guru

Fans of comics understand the concept of a metaverse. Back in the Golden Age, there was just Superman. Then came Captain Marvel and Batman and a host of others. They formed Societies and Leagues. They got sidekicks. Eventually, though, a new era of writers started to iterate the initial characters and some continuity problems emerged. Their collective solution was to imagine lots of different universes sitting on top of each other and occasionally overlapping. Although a complicated plot device a generation later tried to consolidate all of the possible realities, it was too late to stop it from becoming a metaphor for my relationship to Fantasy Sports.

My other lives
Once upon a time, I was in the process of leveraging my decade of active experience in fantasy football to write a book. I was the Commissioner for Reality Sports, a multi-sport conglomerate that began as a time-killing device in Pre-Calc in high school and evolved into a weekly newsletter for some 40 or 50 owners. I had typed out a few chapters of the book, Fantasy is Reality, that was meant to be the uber-resource for wannabe commissioners … and my fortune maker. By the time the Web surfaced as a viable tool for such leagues, I set my sights on building a suite of online tools for this budding industry.

Fast-forward another decade. Fantasy Sports is no longer the subject of angry complaints from sports journalists, tired of fielding random calls asking for advice on who to start that week in some imaginary game. Now, it is a billion dollar industry endorsed by ESPN, CBS Sportsline and dozens of other web sites catering to the information or organization that make fantasy leagues run. Yet, there is still no definitive book, nor is there a killer app that does the things I want. Matthew Berry, whose first league came just two years before I started playing, is now ESPN.com’s Senior Director of Fantasy Gaming. (How cool is that?) In some other metaverse dimension, I am the Mark Zuckerberg of fantasy sports.

In this one, though, I’m just an owner working on a different career track. Even in academia, the metaverse taunts me with news that professors are starting to study fantasy sports. Two UW-Madison academics are looking at “competitive fandom” as bona-fide research projects. Although part of me wants to jump into that dimension—the same part that earlier emailed Erica Halverson to offer my personal archive of Reality newsletters—there are other callings consuming my time.

So as I get ready for my 23rd Reality Fantasy Sports football draft—with the fourth pick, I’m angling for Adrian Petersen—I have to merely enjoy the innovations that are starting to pop up in the industry. One of those surfaced on a tip from Joel Price. Tuesday, ESPN announced the release of Fantasy Football 101, a tutorial on how to play the game.

ESPN’s Trey Wingo hosts an online tutorial about Fantasy Football.

Fantasy 101
Hosted by Trey Wingo and supported by The Talented Mr. Roto, a.k.a. Matthew Berry, this site breaks down the game into its four main phases of the season—Pre-Draft, Draft, Regular Season, and Playoffs—to provide detailed explanations and strategies to get new owners through their first season. The content and presentation is first rate, good enough to warrant some surfing time from veteran owners. It is the modern Internet version of the kind of book I wanted to write all those years ago.

The advice is sound, for the most part. Plan smartly for byes. Target handcuff players (backups to new or fragile stars) who could be valuable later in the season. Avoid rookie wide receivers, or more correctly: don’t count on much fantasy production from them in their first year. Pay attention to free agents during the season. Double-check injury reports. Play your superstars always, but always play the matchups for everyone else. Be patient with draft picks before trading. Understand that the playoffs bring new considerations (inclement weather, benched stars, sudden injuries) that weren’t critical factors earlier in the season.

Other advice is targeted as the version of fantasy football ESPN offers through their site. In our league, kicking is valuable enough to take in early rounds and defense is focused on a single player who scores points individually as well as the ones his NFL team earns. Quarterbacks are key to winning, whereas the advice in many performance-laden leagues is to avoid drafting the top QBs until the end of the first round. LaDaimian Tomlinson goes well before Peyton Manning, the 7th player in the default player rankings (even behind second-year teammate Joseph Addai). The biggest difference is that Reality has always been a keeper league, meaning the top veterans are never draftable. With a twenty-team league, up to 200 players may be off the boards before the first selection. That gives rookies a premium value and makes many of the canned draft lists largely meaningless. Keeper leagues are the better way to play since equal value is given to smart trading and player development as it is to winning that season.

Clearly, the voice of experience has been heard in the details this site provides. Any veteran owner is likely to have recent memories of online drafts where several computer applications and numerous windows are launched to support last-minute scouting. Fantasy 101 offers three desktop images that contain images for top players, sleepers and best value stars. Once installed, that key information is just a button click away from being visible under the mass of windows. There is even a “Boss Button” that quickly pulls up a new blank browser window to mask your unproductive moments on the job. The quiz is a bit bogus, however, since it assumes that only one of the four multiple choice answers can be correct. Winning strategies run the gamut, so definitively saying that a 10th round pick shouldn’t be spent on the top kicker on your pre-draft list is ridiculous without more context.

While this clearly is primarily a marketing tool to get people to play their disposable fantasy football game this season, ESPN packs a lot of good information in their flash interface. In another reality, someone is paying me royalties.