Genius In Progress

It’s that time of year again… as the Pro football season fires up in the US, grown men (and I’m sure some women too) will gather together, spreadsheets and statistics in hand, to spend hours participating in mock drafts, jockeying and strategizing to each outwit the others in creating the ultimate team for themselves. The stakes? Some cash, and bragging rights for the next year, if they win. This selection of players will either delight or haunt them for the next four months, as they are all glued to the TV and the computer, anxiously watching every game and tracking each stat to see which players succeed, which players fail, and which players get injured in the first game and are cut for the season, effectively ruining the lives of many unhappy guys who have no connection to the injured player other than an unfortunate pick in the mock draft.

I don’t think the NFL and the TV networks could have possibly even conceived of a better method of getting thousands upon thousands of fans to glue themselves to the TV, caught up so intently in a struggle between two teams that they would otherwise not give a rat’s ass about. The best comparison I can come up with is that it’s like D&D on steroids (or HGH or whatever football’s performance-enhancing drug of choice is). The only difference is, D&D actually requires imagination, and most D&D players leave the fantasy behind as they grow older and enter the work force. Meanwhile, while the D&D players have moved on with their lives and are probably doing something useful with their time, like watching Star Trek re-runs or starting multi-national, billion dollar corporations, the grown men who probably looked down on the D&D nerds in school, scoffing at their imaginary worlds and six-sided dice, now engross themselves utterly in the sports equivalent of the same exact thing.

Somehow, though, I’m sure that due to the fact that it’s the fate of highly paid professional athletes rather than druids and elf-lords (or whatever D&D characters are… I’ve never participated in a game), it’s much more socially acceptable. Now, none of this is to say that perfectly normal people don’t partake in Fantasy Football, and that utter and complete dorks don’t play D&D; I just find humorous the intensity and severity with which many people approach Fantasy Football. Perhaps I’m just grumpy at being faced with the prospect of another 4 months of Sunday afternoons and evenings and Monday evenings of the TV being constantly playing pro football.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 11:15 am and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.