For the first time Sunday, I was cheering for Russell Wilson.
It’s not that I’ve ever really cheered against Wilson, the quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks. I’m sure he’s a great guy who’s worth every bit of the four-year, $87.6 million contract extension he got from his team. But I’m a casual NFL watcher who has no particular attachment to a team on the western side of the country.
Count me as a default Dallas Cowboys fan, in part because the team is owned by an Arkansan who was once a Razorback. It doesn’t hurt that ex-Hog Felix Jones played there for four years and the team now has former Hog Darren McFadden. I’m a product of my Arkansas roots. For my generation, that means pulling for the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series and hoping the Dallas Cowboys compete well in the NFL. The Cowboys are the closest thing Arkansans have to a professional football team, if one doesn’t count the Razorbacks.
NBA? I’ve been to one Memphis Grizzlies game. Meh. My son’s interest in the NBA convinced me to watch more games in the last couple of seasons than I had my entire life before. Still, give me the college version and Mike Anderson’s Hogs any day.
But it’s my son I can either credit or blame for my interest in Russell Wilson Sunday. As it turns out, he’s my quarterback.
Well, not mine, exactly. This editorial page gig is fun, but it doesn’t pay anywhere enough for me to afford even a few minutes of employing Russell Wilson, who makes about $42 per minute if one assumes he’s paid for every minute of the year. I’ll never have that much money in my wildest fantasy.
But apparently when it comes to fantasy, Russell Wilson is my quarterback. My 12-year-old son convinced me to join a fantasy football league. No, he wanted me to become the manager of a fantasy football league this year. And because I’ve come up short lately on ways to embarrass myself, my response was, “Why not?”
For those unfamiliar — and until a couple of weeks ago, that included me — a fantasy football league involves setting up a group of friends as team owners. There are a dozen in our league. These “owners” go through a player draft a lot like the NFL does every year to restock its ranks. But in fantasy, this involves an intense hour or so of turn-by-turn selections of real-life NFL players. Then, when the season gets under way, the performances of those very real players establish how many points each team owner’s stable of players posts each week. If your players post more points than the guy you’re up against, that’s a win.
Fantasy leagues have taken off with the advent of the Internet, where stats and scores are updated just seconds after completion of a play.
So there I was Thursday night, watching the New England Patriots play the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first game of the 2015 NFL regular season. All I really knew about the game was that footballs used were probably the most scrutinized balls in the history of the NFL. Turns out Tom Brady can handle footballs pretty well no matter how much or little air is in them.
Absent fantasy football, I would have been watching the 25th anniversary edition of “Ken Burns’ The Civil War” on PBS. At least I know who won that contest.
My opponent Thursday had two players active in the game; the Patriots’ defense and special teams made up my involvement. I led by a score of 11-2 early on. To my shock, my score started declining. What kind of unAmerican Ponzi scheme had my some talked me into? Apparently, scores can go backward based on the performance, or lack of performance, of one’s players. The Patriots, although they won the game, somehow worked my score all the way back down to zero by the time the game was done. Ugh!
My score was so low I was asking whether I could switch to a golf fantasy league. A low score is what you want there, isn’t it?
But I still had high hopes for Sunday, when most of the NFL games happen. Strangely, I’d be cheering for players I had never even heard of until I got stuck with them — I mean, my team was happy to acquire.
What have I gotten myself into? I suppose by the end of the season I will be a fantasy football fanatic or will be wondering why anyone would want a fantasy that relied on millionaires throwing a piece of leather all over a big plot of mostly fake grass.
Fantasies just aren’t what they used to be.