August 13, 2006

Are you ready for some FOOTBALL?!?

It was the end of August last year when my cousin called and asked if I wanted to play Fantasy Football in her league.

What?

What the hell is that? How could you possibly combine the words fantasy and football? (I’ve always been more of an ice hockey girl, so it was even more confusing to me). How could fantasy football possibly be any fun? I had no clue. I said something to my husband about it, and he was into it so we signed up. We had no clue how our lives would change.

We created a team name and logo combining our two favorite teams, Steelers and Eagles, and created Team Steagles. Because we only had four teams in our league last year, our team was stacked. We had Ladainian Tomlinson, Edgerrin James, Jeremy Shockey, Torry Holt, Larry Fitzgerald, Hines Ward and the Bears defense. At first I was disappointed when I saw who the auto-draft gave us. I had no clue who any of these players were and thought we got the short end of the stick. My husband was excited about our picks, and I soon learned that we had quite a team.

Sunday mornings became less about political talk shows and more about getting grocery shopping done so that we could be home for the first kick-off. We spent every Sunday entrenched in each and every football game on TV, watching the Live Scoring with excitement and anticipation. We spent a lot of time cursing Shaun Alexander, Santana Moss, and Larry Johnson. We spent even more time trying to convince Big I that football was infinitely more exciting than the Disney Channel. Monday nights were the same. We found ourselves staying up entirely too late to watch the end of each and every game (O.k. I lie there. It wasn’t "we". It was more like me, and me alone watching football into the early morning hours.). If we won, I figured it was worthy of waking my husband and whispering the results. If we lost, I’d get started looking at our line-up for the following week.

Because I was extremely pregnant when the whole fantasy football thing kicked off, I wasn’t sure how into it I would be. However, my due date was on a Monday and as the season continued, I was very upset that I would be in the hospital for Monday night football due to my scheduled induction. During the worst of the contractions, the football game was on. As the contractions became really painful I had my husband turn down the volume so that I could concentrate; but I didn’t want him to turn the TV off entirely. I had to see how bad the damage was going to be from our opponent’s star running back, Larry Johnson. I think the nurses and my midwife were a little shocked by my insistence that the game stay ON. I think my husband was grateful for the distraction from my moaning in agony during the contractions.

I thought that after the baby was born, I wouldn’t have time to adjust my roster each week. But there I was, nursing an infant and yelling upstairs to my husband, inquiring as to who we should "play" each week.

When playoffs rolled around, our formerly stellar players were sitting the bench or producing next to nothing. I was very disappointed and that is putting it nicely. We ended up losing in the first round (Thanks a lot Larry Johnson) and then losing the second round as well. We went from being the top scorer to last place in the standings. I was a little bit upset and spiraled into a fantasy football induced depression, or something like that.

This year my cousin told me she’s too busy to run the league. So, we called ESPN, where we run our league, and had them give me "the power." My cousin and I were both on the phone and the guy was helping us set things up. He was drafting his team while talking to us and when he asked us to hold for a minute, my cousin called him on it. "You’re putting us on hold to do your draft pick, aren’t you?" He tried to deny it, but then laughed and admitted to it. Then we started hounding him about his draft choices, and my cousin and I started talking trash amongst ourselves while he was setting things up. The customer service guy stopped in his tracks after listening to our little exchange and said, "Are you girls married?". "Yeah," we responded back. "Your husbands are some lucky guys," he said. I would have to agree with that completely.

After being given "the powers," I have now gone from last place to League Commissioner. That means I get to set the draft order (rubs hands together and evil laugh ensues), set the rules (evil laugh gets louder), and have veto power (throws head back in evil laugh crescendo).

But my fellow team owners shouldn’t be worried. I’ll be fair. . . sure I will.

Oh, and if you happen to be reading this and you are one of the teams
in my league. . . you didn’t see that last paragraph. You will forget
that there ever was a last paragraph. You do not know what evil laughs
are, and know that your league commissioner is a fair and decent
person. One thing you do know though. . . you’re goin’ DOWN!

If you have any fantasy football draft advice you’d like to pass along, please, help a girl out. . .