Enjoying Football: Fantasy turned reality, part II
I am your worse nightmare. I appear at the fringe of your reality and haunt your dreams. I demoralize and emasculate you. I am ruthless, and I trash-talk. I am the girl in your fantasy pick ’ems league that knows nothing about football and is flogging you. Punishing you. Beating the athletic tear-away pants off you.
I am dangerous because I know your weakness, your Achilles heel: you are invested. After all, they call it “fantasy” football for a reason. This is you living out your childhood dream; this is you holding onto your glory days; this is your 150 pound, 5′ 6″ frame running with The Fridge; this is your hopelessly Protestant name assuming an alias, and Cadillac Williams approving.
Recently the Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling found that in Wisconsin, “Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is viewed favorably by 89 percent of voters in his state. And at the time, that was the highest level of favorability…found for anyone in any poll [they’d] ever done, anywhere.” The only two people nationally to score higher? Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ. And last time I checked they weren’t out back tossing around the pigskin.
What does this mean? Your emotional attachment to this pack of bros clouds your judgment. Rather than see the plain and simple math that picking the winning team is a 50-50 chance, (and therefore a two-second decision), you see into teams with a cast of players. If I take more than 45 seconds to make my picks it’s either because my cat has walked over the keyboard, resetting the browser, or my father has decided to call me at work to ensure I know about the upcoming lunar eclipse.
You, however, introduce variables that lead you to think the chances skew in favor of one team over the other and that you can discern the winner by scouring ESPN, checking injuries, reviewing the weather, and consulting the blotter for any news of self-inflected Glock-pistol wounds to the thigh.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your tenacity. It’s cute – like Domata Peko’s flowing locks. And that unwavering resoluteness makes it damn funny when you attempt to ignore my trash-talking. When I “innocently” point out that you actually get more points when you don’t make your picks and get assigned the lowest week’s score than when you actively engage your brain to make picks, a thin fake smile spreads across your face and a nonchalant chuckle hopes to turn the conversation. Or when I copy/paste, “This player has not yet submitted picks for this week” onto your Facebook profile and you “Like” it. I bet you like it. Like Peyton Manning has liked the 2011 season. Or when I assert the stupidity of picking your favorite team every week regardless of their opponent and you remain a champion of blind allegiance.
The worse part is? I don’t even really care if I win or not. As long as I’m pissing you off, I’m enjoying this merry little game we Americans call football.