10 Reasons I Gave Up Fantasy Sports [OPINION]

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It’s that time of year when sports widows don their lace veils and call a priest to administer last rights to their relationships. From now until the end of the year their men (and even some of their girlfriends) will become immersed in the world of Football and Basketball. For an increasing number of them that loss is not just on Sunday or Monday Nights. Thanks to Fantasy Sports, what is normally a once or twice a week obsession becomes a daily operation wrought with roster changes, status updates and injury alerts pinging phones at all hours of the night. Everything that happens on the field (or off in some cases) has real life implications to a carefully assembled super team that you hope to lead to glory and a year of bragging rights.

However, at this time last year I took a sabbatical from Fantasy Sports. Since 2004 I’d been part of fifteen different Basketball leagues and seven Football leagues. Prior to participating in Fantasy I was a casual sports watcher, catching the primetime games on weekends and the playoffs. But that all changed when I participated in my first draft and became part of the trash-talking, stat tracking disciples of the digital duels. I needed to watch every game. I signed up for NBA League Pass and streamed NFL games when I was away from home. Not because I cared about which team won, but who had put up the most stats for my fantasy team and whoever I was playing against that week. I was obsessed and it paid off in wins. I wasn’t a fantasy god but my trophy case was respectable and winning fueled the desire to play. Why? Because before we had Twitter we humiliated each other in the message boards in the most imaginable ways possible. It was great.

But then it stopped being fun and I had to take a break.  A break that I think will be permanent. Why? Here are 10 reasons I am saying good-bye to Fantasy Sports.

10) The draft.

Anyone familiar with fantasy sports knows how hard it is to schedule a draft in the first place. Then there is that last minute scramble to fill slots because someone dropped out or you have an odd number of managers/teams. This leads to the inevitable noob coming on board who not only misses the draft and makes us all suffer through his/her auto picks,  but then doesn’t bother to set their rosters for half the season. “Why the hell is Tom Brady/Kobe Bryant on the bench??” Yeah, you know the type.

9) Waiver Wire Vultures

In my first year of playing Fantasy Football in 2006 I was that noob that let the computer pick his squad and had Drew Bledsoe, then QB for the Dallas Cowboys, as my starting quarterback. Since I wasn’t home glued to my television when he was knocked out of the game against the Giants, I was not able to swoop in and grab Tony Romo off of waivers, but someone else in the league did. Oh, I did have another QB though. Donovan McNabb. And you know what his 2006 season was like. It’s hard to imagine now that someone was in a place where they wanted Tony Romo as a QB, but that did happen.

8) Stat Tracker

Yahoo! Fantasy sports has a feature that updates you on stats in real time. Once upon a time we had to pay for it but it’s now a free tool. It’s a gift and a curse. After every damn play, every completion, pass, kick, fumble, TD, recovery…you name it I was looking at that screen to see if I’d gained any ground on my opponent (or them on me). And I can’t remember how many times I would think I was ahead in points only to wake up the next morning when stats were revised to find that I’d lost by one tackle, free throw or blocked kick.

But the worst is when you look at Roddy White of The Falcons on Stat Tracker because the game isn’t broadcast in your city and he hasn’t had a reception the whole game, so you wonder if he was a late scratch. Nope, he was just being covered by Darrelle Revis.

7) NBA League Pass

Before I stayed up all night on Twitter and Instagram I was watching Basketball. Lots of it. No one on the East coast would normally give a damn about a West Coast game between The Golden State Warriros and Minnesota Timberwolves, but when you’re a Fantasy nut with Kevin Love or Monte Ellis (back then) in your line up you will lose sleep to see how many buckets they drop around 1 am in the morning.

6) The Hype Beast aka Michael Vick

In 2011, the last time I played Fantasy Football, I drafted Michael Vick way too early based on a few of the outstanding games he’d had in his return to football the year before. Here I was thinking I was getting a QB/RB who would get me passing and rushing yards. And I picked up his favorite target DeSean Jackson to boot! I was gonna beast! Not. It was my worst finish ever. Vick threw for 3300 yards but got sacked 23 times with 14 interceptions. DeSean didn’t even have a thousand receiving yards that season.

5) The Flash In The Pan aka Linsanity

By 2011 I was in my Fantasy basketball groove. I had four first-place trophies on my virtual mantle and could probably regurgitate stats of a second string point guard at will (there was a time when Chris Duhon was getting double digit assists, true story). I lovingly caressed my stat tracker apps on my phone and iPad and kept my eyes out on Twitter for any breaking news about a particular player. So when one Sunday folks started talking about some guy named Jeremy Lin on The Knicks going off I ran to the waiver wire to put in my claim. I had been sitting on Baron Davis in hopes that he’d come back but that was a reach. So on March 31st at 10:05 pm I dumped Baron Davis and picked up Lin. I rode that Linsanity wave until the wheels fell off. And they did.  Lin injured his knee in a game against the Pistons. The Pistons.  The Knicks playoff hopes were gone as were my Fantasy team’s.

4) The Rookie Hype aka Ryan Mathews

In 2010 I drafted the San Diego Chargers rookie Running Back thinking that he was going to fill the void left by LaDainian Tomlinson’s departure. BOY was I wrong. That season Mathews only rushed for 678 yards and 7 touchdowns. My team the 9th Wonders (sorry Pat) finished a dismal 7-7.

3) The Disappearing All-Star aka LeBron James

In Fantasy Basketball having a stat stuffer like LeBron James on your squad is a gift that keeps on giving. One player gives you points, assists, steals, rebounds, etc while not giving you too many garbage stats like turnovers or a horrible field goal percentage. Depending on the way your league is set up King James is almost always going to be the first pick (second only to Kevin Durant). However, the problem with having someone of James’ caliber throughout the regular season is that when playoff time comes in Fantasy, coaches are resting their super stars in the real world to prepare for the real life playoff runs. So remember that time Greg Popovich sat the San Antonio starters against the Heat, pissed off the fans and got fined? Imagine that happening EVERY FANTASY SEASON like clockwork and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.  The only thing you could do was draft star players on bad teams who wouldn’t make the playoffs but would still play for pride. But how many John Walls are there?  And can they stay healthy?

2) The Injured super star aka Al Horford

The only thing worse than a disappearing super star late in the season is losing a high draft pick to injury near the start. No matter how many bench players you grab off waivers, or how good the person who steps in MIGHT be, nothing is going to replace the production of a first round pick. In fantasy basketball, as in real basketball, there is a dearth of great players at the Center position that can score and rebound with efficiency. There are a lot of turnover prone, rebounding bricklayers with ham hands in the league to pick from to fill some stats, but you’ll probably need two pick-ups to replace someone of Tim Duncan’s caliber. So in 2011 when I drafted Al Horford in the third round (after LeBron and Rajon Rondo) I was ready to sit back and let the stats pile up. Unfortunately, he tore his pectoral muscle in January and was out for the rest of the Fantasy season.

Oh, incase you were wondering who else I had on my bench that year at the center spot, it was Brook Lopez, who I’d been hanging on to as a back up incase he returned from broken foot he sustained in preseason. He did come back, dropping 38 points on the Dallas Mavericks in one game, but then injured his right ankle after only 5 games and was shut down for the season.

Injuries had become such a common part of the Fantasy landscape that I’d taken to naming my teams “RUN DNP” for all of the “did not plays” my squad would rack up.

1) Tough Luck aka Tom Brady and Randy Moss

While I was not a personal victim of this last scenario it is one of the most deflating moments in Fantasy Football history that I can recall. In 2007 Tom Brady and Randy Moss were putting up record numbers during the Patriots historic unbeaten streak. They stomped on real life opponents and were decimating fantasy teams across the web. Managers practically coasted into the playoffs on the back of Brady’s 4800 passing yards and 50 TDs. Moss caught almost half of those TDs, so the championships were all but conceded to anyone smart enough to draft this tandem.

But on December 16th 2007 things changed. The Patriots ended up beating the Jets 20 to 10 but Tom Brady put up an anemic 140 passing yards with no TDs and Moss only caught 76 yards worth of passes. All of New England’s offense came from special teams and the kicker. While this was the second to last week of the regular season and the Patriots would remain unbeaten, this was SMACK DAB in the middle of the Fantasy Football playoffs! The timing couldn’t have been worse. You could hear the collective crash of TVs and laptops being thrown against the walls as someone who was almost counting their winnings got bounced to the consolation tournament.

Then there is the kind of bad luck where your fantasy player effs up off the field…like this…

Scenarios like this were too common in Fantasy Sports and it just started taking the fun out of it. Sure a little bit of bad luck is part of the sport but in real life athletes get paid even when they’re injured or play like ass. We just get headaches and blurred vision from staring at rows and rows of stats. So I took a break and it felt GREAT.

For the first time in years I watched the games I actually wanted to see and gave a rats ass about how many solo tackles London Fletcher had. I wasn’t listening to sports radio for injury reports or combing through depth charts. I was just a fan.

This season my goal is to click my mouse on over to Stub Hub to buy some tickets and actually attend a game. How is that for fantasy?

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