COLUMN: Sports on the Internet isn’t a fantasy
How’d your fantasy team do this weekend?
If you’re lucky enough to have Aaron Rodgers on your team, probably pretty good. ESPN tweeted during the Packers 49-23 smashing of the Denver Broncos this weekend: “Owning Aaron Rodgers is looking like a fantasy cheat code”.
Until about two weeks ago, I couldn’t have cared less about how a player is doing in fantasy. Who were these people living vicariously through their favorite athletes? But it’s apparently pretty popular.
The truth is, the fantasy sports industry has grown into a $1 billion-per-year business. In the United States and Canada alone, upwards of 30 million people have signed to draft their favorite players. While it’s exploded in the last few years, the industry is far from new.
In the 1950s, a few devoted fans picked a golf foursome and followed them throughout tournaments, pitting each fantasy team against one another, and with that a revolution was born.
Though the makings of a phenomenon were there, they weren’t fully expanded upon for another 30 years.
Fueled by the Major League Baseball strike of 1981, baseball writers found themselves with a lack of material to write about. Enter, fantasy sports.
Many of the beat writers turned to fantasy baseball to fill the void.
Like I said, fantasy sports used to be nothing more to me than something that clogged up my ESPN feed. I didn’t care about how players were doing in fantasy, I cared about how they were doing in real life. In reality though, the two are synonymous.
When my uncle found out I wanted to go into sports reporting his only advice for me was to play fantasy. He said if I want to learn the stats of a lot of different players, I should play fantasy sports.
Granted, I haven’t played for very long, but from what I can see, he’s right.
I was allowed into a fantasy football league after the previous owner started Jamal Charles for two straight weeks after he suffered a season-ending ACL injury. Needless to say he was voted off the island, and I was in.
I’m not going to sit here and say how exciting it was to feel like a part of the game. That’s just cheesy.
This weekend my roommates and I sat around the TV cheering for my players to do well. The best part, they don’t even like football. Fantasy put each game into perspective, each player’s performance became more than just another athlete playing another game.
I will admit, when I realized I was cheering for the Ravens wide receiver but rooting against their quarterback, I was sold. Yes, I realize I was cheering against the quarterback who was throwing the ball to my player but that wasn’t a big deal.
I got my first team two weeks ago, now I have one football team and two hockey teams.
I would rather hear about players in terms of the number of goals they score or how many rushing yards they’ve racked up, instead of how many fantasy points their expected to get.
The game is strangely addicting, but I’m still going to complain about reading fantasy stories in my newspaper, even though I just wrote one.
– Meredith Kinney is a junior majoring in broadcast journalism, and she’s an avid hockey fan. She hopes to one day be a bigshot sideline reporter working for ESPN. Send any comments to meredith.kinney@aggiemail.usu.edu.