Bless you, fantasy football

Bless you, fantasy football

Posted on September 30th, 2019 by Scott Warnock

My boys have never watched football, and I have counted this as a parental failing.

Not just because I love the NFL. I mean, I was that kid (kind of like the Super70sSports guy). Our days of youth were spent getting our corduroys dirty playing kill-the-man-with-the-ball. Sometimes we would play a game where one of us would run the ball at two defenders. For hours. In our minds’ eyes, we were in the midst of a frosty-breathed NFL game, trying to wrench free of clutching, mud-caked hands. We played touch football in the streets. We had a neighborhood tackle team. How could that not have shaped my persona?

I sat, as a youngster, rooting for the Minnesota Vikings. Of course they suffered three of their four Super Bowl failures while I watched. How could that not have shaped my persona?

Don’t even bring up electric football, which I played with an immersive, obsessive interest, creating an order to those little plastic men running around aimlessly. How could that not have shaped my persona?

I even played tackle football every fall weekend until I was 40 years old.

My guilty pleasure is watching the crunchy NFL every weekend. I suppose it’s one of the few ways I fully unplug for a few hours and relax in my life.

The failure here is not that they don’t like football, I suppose, but that this passion never caught on with them. Here they are, at 15 and 18. I mean, they’re healthy fellows with their own passions, interests, and friends. They know, it seems, every soccer player in the world, but what about dad?!

Somewhat stupidly, I suppose, I kept trying different ways to involve them in football watching. I sometimes resorted to guilt, saying: “You know, poor old dad won’t be around forever, and you may regret not spending a Sunday afternoon with him.”

That didn’t work either.

My 15-year-old started his sophomore year a few weeks ago. In the first week, I guess instead of learning stuff for school, he and some pals got together at a lunch table and launched, of all things, a fantasy football league.

I only learned of it a few days later, when he was trash talking a friend of his, as is common practice in such activities.

Suddenly, though, he wanders in to see what’s happening during the games. Then he’ll plop down on the couch. And, as anybody will tell you, it’s way beyond football, way beyond sports.

Not only was he interested in his fantasy players, but he wanted to know about the history of the game, the complexity of a given formation, how fast that fat guy really is, the strength of the players’ hands, and of course about the wonderful trajectory of our local star, Kelvin Harmon, who played football for Palmyra High School and is now on Washington in the NFL.

Fantasy football is dumb. Fantasy football is immersive. Fantasy football is silly. Fantasy football is gut-wrenching.

There’s a connection here. We spent the other night staying up too late watching the Birds (he has Zach Ertz, who I assured him will break out soon). The only other time he stayed up like that was when they won the Super Bowl a few years ago. He has learned a bunch of weird rules that I didn’t know, meshing his YouTubing expertise with football: Search how you can score one point in a football game!

He plays three sports, does great in school, and has a great friend group. He’s a growing boy: He needs to eat right. He needs his sleep. But I was watching a couple teams I didn’t even like that much the other night, and he came in toward the end of the second half and asked, “Are you gonna watch the whole game?”

I’ve got two kids gone. The next one is only here for another 2.5 years. Those are going to be difficult invitations to turn down.

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.