This is a bit of the dead season for fantasy football, worse than the pro dead season (post-Pro Bowl to pre-draft) because the pros are still playing. A few of my top players — QB Peyton Manning, RB Cedric Benson, WR Reche Caldwell — are suiting up and scoring points this weekend (and at least one of them will do so in the biggest game on Feb 4), but I have no fantasy games that can benefit from their production. I console myself with a little research on the ongoing battle between real leagues and fake ones.
Fantasy sports is big business, particularly football. Had I followed my interests in the mid 1990s, I would have develope sites like RotoWorld and be writing for blogs like Statsology. I’d also be a regular at the Fantasy Sports Trade Conference, which is meeting in mid-February in Chicago this year. One of the presentations is on GOPPPL rules — Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League — considered the first fantasy football league in history. In those days, George Blanda, a quarterback-kicker, dominated the game. This birth of fantasy football was documented in 1994 by Luke Esser, a writer for Fantasy Football Index, and is now on record in places like Wikipedia and How Stuff Works.
Forty-three drafts is a record that will take some doing to break. My Reality leagues have their origins dating back to 1985, coincidently the last time the Chicago Bears when to the Super Bowl. I recruited a bunch of high school friends during my senior year at Woodstock High School to play a 14-team league, the NFBL (National Football Bettors League). It was so popular, we added a second league, the AFBL, with ten teams. My inspiration originally came from a communications professor at Indiana State University, who described the game to a few of the summer session students camping in Terre Haute for a two-week course in radio, television and film. It was almost on a whim that we continued to play in 1986 as a keeper league, protecting seven players and drafting the rest of the roster.
This past year saw Seattle beat Chicago in Super Bowl XXII, pitting two of the storied franchises in our history. It was all the more special given the long-time owner of the Chicago Egotistical Pigs died last fall. But I digress.
The power of fantasy sports is currently being felt in the battle between the real and fake industries. Over the last two years, professional leagues like Major League Baseball and the National Football League have been fighting fantasy sports sites over the use of player names in online games. For a while, companies like WhatIfSports.com had to artificially rename their players in their simulation games to remove references to current players. So, Barry Bonds became Player 9DD, or something similar. The statistics themselves had already been through a legal battle at the turn of the century and survived to feed fantasy sites. The names are a new boundary. Courts decided last year, though, in favor of the fantasy sports industry, and Barry Bonds was reinstated on WhatIfSports rosters. That’s a lot of muscle for a 43-year-old, particularly one that really didn’t bloom until reaching thirty.
The Fantasy Informant, a regular newsletter published by the FSTC (old archives are available online), has been following a recent appeal by the MLBPA that has now been joined by NFLPA, PGA Tour, WNBA Enterprises, NASCAR, NHL Properties and NBA Properties. In their appeal, the pros make this contention:
… no one would be interested in playing fantasy sports if they “owned†Player A or Player B. The interest in fantasy-sports games is derived, in large part, from the opportunity to “own†famous players like Albert Pujols, Justin Morneau, or Torry Holt and have them on one’s team.
This is sticky footing. On the one hand, this is written by someone who doesn’t understand that fantasy sports is less about having Pujols on your team than telling other owners in your community that you have Pujols hitting homeruns and he doesn’t. Even if the appeal holds — it won’t — and CBSSportsline has to use pig-latin to reference players, that same owner will be just as delighted to tell his buddy that Lbert-ay Ujols-pay hits homeruns for his team. On the other hand, defending that argument opens up the possibility that names aren’t crucial to the industry and therefore the player’s identities can be protected.
The bigger miss for the pro leagues is the value added to their game by fantasy sports. This isn’t an industry they should be fighting to squeeze out more control or money. This is a community they should be actively helping to expand. Playing fantasy games increases investment in the real sport, knowledge of more players, and a reason to go to games that are otherwise meaningless. Street & Smith’s SportsBusiness Journal sounded off on the CBC Distribution (the parent company of CDM Fantasy Sports) vs. MLBAM lawsuit last month, with writer and Wharton School director Scott Rosner arguing the same thing — baseball has more to lose from fan support and long-term growth of its fan base than from the revenue that is generated now from statistics:
While it should obviously be concerned about the protection of its intellectual property, it has chosen a path that is fraught with long-term danger. The company may well increase its revenue and gain greater control over the fantasy product by reducing its licensee roster. But MLBAM needs to be long-term greedy, not short-term. By fighting with companies that provide the fantasy leagues that have become so much a part of fandom, it risks alienating the approximately 6 million participants in fantasy baseball.
It is undeniable (and duly noted by the court) that participation in fantasy sports leads to increased interest and engagement in the sport. Casual fans become more avid, and avid fans become proselytizers as a result of participation in fantasy leagues. In turn, they are likely to attend more games, watch more games on television (including on out-of-market packages) and purchase more licensed products than they would in the absence of a fantasy league. This only increases the players’ marketability in both the short and long run.
Good luck this weekend, Eeyton-pay and Edric-cay.
