by MM_Dandy » Wed Oct 24, 2007 6:24 pm
Do you guys (Arneb and Ba) have fantasy leagues for European football?
About the only thing worse than being a sports fan is getting into one of those. It really is about reaching the penultimate level of frustration: if you draft manually, you'll have to decide between players from teams you hate and teams you like. Whichever you choose for whatever reasons will be wrong. If you let a computer draft for you, you'll end up with inordinate amount of players from teams you hate. Then, you ultimately despair as the teams you hate play your favorite team and beats them, even though all of your fantasy players were on injured reserve.
Fantasy leagues are evil, I tell you. Every time I get suckered into joining one, I end up lining up my roster for the day or week, getting my hopes up, and ultimately having them smashed by some no-name bench warmer that no one has ever heard about before, and yet, miraculously, your opponent had the 'foresight' to place that very person on his roster at the last minute.
So, it's easy to see this as an aberration, and you end up telling yourself that it was a fluke, it will never happen again. You talk your hopes back up again, and viola, your premier fantasy player mails the game in, and you wind up losing by a point to your little sister's team of players that she picked because they're cute.
After a whole season of this, you're emotionally spent, teetering on the edge of sanity, broke (because of the pay-in plus the money spent on useless fantasy league features guaranteed to give you 'the edge.'), and perhaps even a little bitter. You swear that you'll never, ever, play fantasy league again.
But it's like an addiction: it was painful, frustrating, and unpleasant. Yet, during the off-season, you forget. You look at the draft and say, "You know, that guy's got potential." The fantasy league commissioner says, "Hey, we're upping the payoff to $120 this year, wanna play?" You're little sister still doesn't know the difference between an ass and an assist. You remember that some of those games you lost last year were flukes. And this year, you just know you're going to beat that luckier than a leprechaun holding a horseshoe with a four leaf clover know-it-all that won the league last year. And before you realize what you've done, you're neck deep back in the cycle of hope and despair.
So, who wants to join my fantasy NBA league this year? :D