Why I stopped playing fantasy football.

To the shock of many of my friends, I "retired" from fantasy football after the 2005 season -- citing "fatigue" as the main reason, followed closely by "wanting to get my life back during the fall."  Last week, Bill Simmons wrote a section in his column that perfectly illustrates why I stopped playing:

"But as the game kept going and the score kept climbing, I found myself becoming more and more bitter about the seemingly preordained screw job that hadn't happened yet. Sometimes you just know with this stuff. Since I controlled the tiebreaker because my best bench guy (Darren McFadden) had more points than anyone on my opponent's bench, I needed only a tie to win. Everything came down to Philly's last drive, with me trailing by eight and needing a McNabb TD and/or some passing yards, an Akers extra point (I have him, too) and maybe even a Dallas sack or a touchdown (that's my defense). If it had been a roulette wheel, I would have had more than half the numbers covered. Of course, McNabb went into Super Bowl XXXIX Mode -- as my Philly friend Mike said later, "As good as he is, no real Iggs fan really believes he will get us there, [but] at least he didn't puke on the field" -- took a couple of bad sacks and couldn't get Philly across midfield. Game over.

My final fantasy score for Week 2: 101-97. I lost by the difference of a half-foot -- either the extra distance Jackson needed to travel to score or the amount of empty space in his head. You can't make this stuff up.

Only later did I realize I had spent infinite more time biting my nails, e-mailing friends, throwing my remote, refreshing my league's "Live Scoring" browser, piecing together different miracle comeback scenarios and basically fretting about the Eagles-Cowboys game than I had enjoying the game itself."

That's all you really have to read to understand why I stopped playing.  Fantasy football's biggest strength is that it gets you to care about the outcome and flow of EVERY game in a way that the casual fan would never bother to engage in.  But it's also fantasy's biggest curse: once you start playing fantasy and really get into it, you can't just sit down and enjoy a football game anymore.  Everything has fantasy implications.  Every play could determine whether you win your game, lose your game or feel compelled to make a roster move that could decide your season. 

This feeling doesn't take hold if you just do fantasy "for fun" -- in other words, if you don't have a competitive bone in your body.  Unfortunately, I have lots of those bones.  And once I realized that the spirit of competition and the sheer randomness of football was killing my ability to just sit down and enjoy a football game on its merits, I realized I had to walk away for my own sanity. 

You could say that since I know most outcomes are decided by luck, I don't have to be so obsessive about it.  I know myself well enough to know that won't happen, so I deserve some self-awareness credit.

I do miss the most fun part of the fantasy season: the draft.  I loved the fantasy draft.  It's so much fun to have everyone in the league together (either in person or on the Internet) joking and talking trash about each other's picks.  For the draft alone, I might come back to fantasy someday. 

But not this year.   

 

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