Are you ready for some football?
By Neal Pollack
Though my taste in favorite athletes tends to run toward shuck-and-jive fun-loving types like Charles Barkley, Manny Ramirez, and Steve Nash, I was still among the legion of doughy mourners when Tom Brady snapped every ligament in his left knee a couple of Sundays ago. I’d overcome my sexual jealousy of Brady, not to mention my loathing of his emotionless, mendacity-laded martinet of a coach, and had chosen him, for the second season in a row, to anchor my fantasy-football team. Now I found myself staring numbly at various screens, trying to figure out what to do.
So, yes, I’m admitting in public for the first time that I play fantasy football. I came to my league out of loneliness. When I moved to L.A. nearly three years ago, I knew almost no one. It rained a lot that season, and I stared mopily out my front window in Highland Park, watching various Avenues initiates try to murder rival gang members for sport. An e-mail from Ed, a high-school principal I’d met at a secret camp for Jewish hipster intellectuals, rescued me for an evening.
Ed invited me to his monthly chicken-wing eating group, which had coalesced around a fantasy-football league. Since it was February, the football lay dormant, but the munch of wings continued. After my first meeting at Hot Wings Melrose, even though I couldn’t get off the john for almost 24 hours afterward, I had some sort-of friends. We ate wings almost every month; Regina and Elijah and I even got invited to a seder out of the deal. Though my neighborhood was hot, dangerous, and ugly, at least I got to leave it about once a month.
Gradually, as summer lurched into fall, the guys started nudging me toward their Mighty Men of Wings fantasy-football league. No way, I said. Fantasy football is for dorks. Besides, I already play fantasy baseball, and it’s just about ruined my marriage. But then I started realizing that I was lonely and old and no one else wanted to hang out with me. So to Hot Wings Glendale I went, with 25 bucks and 150 milligrams of Zantac, and endured my first fantasy-football league draft.
The team I chose, predictably, sucked jockstrap sweat, and I finished far out of the money ($40 and a plastic belt from a kid’s WWF Halloween costume). To this day, I blame a scoring system that overemphasized the achievements of individual defensive players, though that was also the season I drank the Matt Hasselbeck Kool-Aid. I missed the draft the following year because my parents were in town and wouldn’t have understood my ditching them so I could assemble a pretend football team. I sent a proxy, with a brilliant, detailed plan, and my team proceeded to skip merrily through the regular season with a 12-2 record, with most of those wins massive routs. Then, in a perfect storm of bad fantasy-sports luck, Brady and Randy Moss got snowbound, Tony Romo had his worst game of the year, and Brian Westbrook, that lazy fucker, sat down at the goal line, causing me to lose to an under .500 team in the first round of the playoffs.
This year, I went into the draft with a far inferior plan, and left Hot Wings Glendale with a starting backfield of Steven Jackson and Willis McGahee and a bench that included Jerious Norwood. When Mr. Wimpy Ligament went down, leaving no one outside of a 50-mile radius feeling sorry for Bill Simmons, I lost my one reliable veteran point-generator, fell behind by a few points, and found myself praying on Monday night that Gibril Wilson would return an errant Jay Cutler pass for a touchdown. But if we’ve learned anything from the early days of NFL 2008-09, it’s that there won’t be a lot of errant Jay Cutler passes, and I lost.
Still, some tasty morsels lurked on my bench last week, with names like Aaron Rodgers and Matt Forte, and before the day was over, I’d pulled DeSean Jackson and Chris Johnson out of the free-agent pool. Basically, there are two ways to win at fantasy football. The first is to field a team of superstars who never get hurt, what I stumbled into last year. Most players don’t get that privilege, though. Usually, you win if you own the freshest ponies.
Unlike other professional sports, where players undergo a trial-by-fire maturation, football players, with the exception of quarterbacks, are most effective at the beginning of their careers, before their bodies have been mercilessly and repeatedly pummeled by competing 295-pound circus acts. This is especially true of running backs, and running backs consistently score the most fantasy points. Last season’s stud is often this season’s steak. So I say this to Domi, the founder of Mighty Men of Wings, whose life appears to revolve entirely around fantasy sports: You can keep your cynically claimed Matt Cassel. I’ll survive with Aaron Rodgers and Matt Schaub, and I decline your trade offer for the sexy smooth DeSean Jackson with great scorn.
This season, nothing can stop the Los Feliz Yogis.
Published: 09/17/2008
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