Life in the league basement
As the susurrations of the crickets dwindle with summer surrendering to fall, there comes the call to take up one’s draft sheet and begin anew the agony of fantasy-football mediocrity. Fantasy football, the popular and byzantine game of LARPing as football general managers, commences today with the NFL’s season kickoff.
Office water-cooler chatter will convert from “Whadja do over the weekend?” to “Who’dja start? Oh really? You didn’t know he’d blow an ACL on the fourth play of the game?” Sunday morning, the back pews of churches are alive with last-minute roster changes — the priest’s homily drifting to higher spaces as clammy deliberation between starting a feast-or-famine Kirk Cousins or a consistently unexceptional Jimmy Garoppolo ensues. Thursday night arrives unexpectedly for many, with players having gained their best point totals when not in one’s starting lineup. Such is the life of a fantasy-football general manager.
The makeup of the average league imitates life, with an aristocracy of intensely informed and always-in-contention managers routinely composing the top 20 percent of the standings. In the middle dwell the interested but passive managers who occasionally wander over to the waiver wire, look at it bemusedly, and then search for which player has been most added in the past week — trusting that others did more homework and that following the crowd is wise, if not downright democratic.
Finally, there are the basement dwellers, the warm bodies that are the health of any league and the subject of both scorn and admiration from the higher classes. These managers were coerced into the league to get to an even number of teams, and their rosters will almost certainly be auto-picked and never deviate from the Week One assemblage. The moaning bodies of the bloodied and inactive reserve are dragged along throughout the season, never knowing rest in the lineup of the bottom tier.
But this walking-dead quality is what makes the basement dweller the most dangerous and horrifying foe. Losing to the top team in the league is a bummer, but that’s to be expected when the guy spends 38 hours of his 40-hour work week immersed in spreadsheets and premium fantasy-football programs. But losing to the guy who forgot his log-in ten weeks ago and has only three functioning players left? Oh, the mockery, the tribulation! Watching as your full roster lays egg after egg and your opponent’s Michael Vick hangs 49 points out of nowhere is a human-rights violation the equal of chemical warfare.
My friends and I have played since our sophomore year of high school, some twelve years ago. Our league follows the previous strata, with many in contention but a sufficient sample size to auspicate Bob’s eventual victory and my enduring ignominy. I populate the bottom of the mid tier, or the first few steps leading into the basement. While I was in the Navy — trying to make picks on the ship’s dial-up connection (that’s the excuse anyway) — no bilge would be deep enough to represent my paucity of wins. Ashore, a Browns-like 7–8 is the average, with a few years’ dabbling in the above-500 category.
Thankfully, I’ve narrowed down my issues: I’m either not making enough changes to my lineup or making altogether too many changes to my lineup. Also, I should draft better.
This week, we drafted once again, many joining the Google chat to yuk it up and reminisce about the deeply impolitic team names we’ve enjoyed over the years (such as “Favre Dollar Footlong,” eliciting a Beavis & Butthead snicker from the most sophomoric among us) as well as recollect some of the less inspired draft choices — for instance, my drafting of David Johnson first overall the year his wrist dislocated in Week One; he never returned, and there was but darkness from that day hence.
Yahoo! Sports suggests my draft was a B−, which neatly dovetails with my high-school GPA, so one could say I’m astonishingly consistent. No one can say whether this will be the year I Lambeau Leap into the winners’ circle, but as sure as the Good Lord’s sun shines brighter on Wisconsin than on Illinois, it will be a mighty fun diversion for the coming months; even a basement guy can see enough to know that.
One parting suggestion: Don’t take Pierre Thomas with your first pick.