Draft Day Approaching!

For many years (so many that I can't remember how many) I have enjoyed football season more because I have been the owner of a Fantasy Football team. I first heard about Fantasy Football when I was working at Kings Dominion (thank you Bill Fecke). The concept is easy: you and several of your friends sit around and "draft" NFL players for your teams (a player can only be owned by one team in a league). Then during each week's games you create a starting lineup from your roster. How the player performs in the NFL game determines the number of points that he scores for your team. So - if Peyton Manning throws a touchdown, you get 2 points for your fantasy team, if Emmitt Smith runs in a touchdown then you get 6 points for your team. (yeah, I know that Emmitt will have to run it in from the announcers' booth).

Way back in the day - our Commissioner Bill Fecke had to spend every Monday morning looking at the box scores in the newspaper to add up our scores. Now there are websites to take all the hard work out of being a commissioner. I remember the days of adding scores when I started a fantasy league in my family. Sometimes I even had to call the newspaper's sports desk to get an obscure player's stats. My sister Susan loved drafting very obscure players. One year she even drafted Boomer Esiason - the year he began as color commentator for ABC's Monday Night Football. If memory serves...it took her about 4 weeks to get around to dropping him from her roster. Maybe she was hoping for another comeback season!

This Sunday 10-12 of my family and friends will sit around a giant draft board in my back yard to choose our teams for the 2013-2014 NFL season. We will draw numbers to see who gets first pick. The first few rounds will go pretty quickly. There will be cries of "I was going to pick him next" and "oh, is he already gone?" Sometimes I take it all pretty seriously and actually prepare for the draft - sometimes I pick directly from the hundreds of cheat sheets available on the Internet. One year I drafted only players named Johnson and Jones (my kickers were Hanson and something similar...which I declared to be Swedish for Johnson). It took quite awhile before any of the other team owners caught on to what I was doing. My sister Karen (who is very attached to her cheat sheets) kept saying "I can't find that guy! What page is he on?" My current co-commisioner Melva (a former sportswriter for the Washington Post...I mean the Bedford Bulletin) was the first to figure it out.

Melva LIVES for draft day. I think that if she had to rank her favorite days of the year it would be Christmas, Birthday, Draft Day, Thanksgiving and the church family camping trip in the top slots. She is so prepared that she requires no cheat sheets. She rarely takes any of the 60 second time limit to make a pick. And many of us wait for her to say "Good Pick" after one of our angst-ridden choices. When Karen gets a "good pick" from Melva she just beams.

This year I have the pleasure (?) of passing on the trophy to last year's league winner. The blue football will reside with Mr. Carl Howell - owner of the Hogtown River Rats. My team, The Hamster Beaters were victorious in 2011-2012. And if I take some time away from Candy Crush for a little draft preparation, perhaps they will be victorious again!


Good luck to all of the teams in our league.

Even Melva's Froot Loops. For someone who prepares so much, and actually pays attention to her team - it is kind of sad that she's never won. Not even close.

So sad that I'm chuckling to myself a little bit.