9: Fantasy Football

Sunday morning is always the most stressful time. You’ve scoured all the stats: power rankings, the spread, home vs. away records, strength of schedule, injury updates, individual match-ups, est. Once the game turns on, it’s hard to concentrate. Rooting for your favorite team takes a backseat to flipping through the channels to catch glimpses of your fantasy studs dominating their respective games. You jump every time the live coverage segway into Boomer and Shannon announcing a ‘gamebreak.’ Every commercial you run up to the computer to get the live score updates. Fantasy football is an addiction.

Fantasy football is a phenomenon that has gripped the sports world practically since the creation of the Internet. The concept is that you get to pick your own ‘fantasy team’ from all the players in the league in a draft format against your competitors. Every week, you decide which players are going to start and which are going to sit out. These players get points based on their performance. Touchdowns, yards, and field goals are good for your team while interceptions, fumbles, and sacks are bad. Fantasy football is tied directly to the Internet. Sites like Yahoo keep track of the statistics and tabulate the scores. Yahoo even offers software that gives you life updates, which allows the ‘owners’ to know exactly how many points they need their last wide receiver to get in order for them to win their weekly match up. Other sites charge people for ‘inside’ tips on who to play each week.

Problematic Internet Use(PIU) is defined as “Maladaptive Cognitions and behaviors involving internet use that result in negative academic, professional, and social consequences”(Caplan 2004). Fantasy football is an online space that fosters such an obsession in individuals. For the devoted fantasy footballer, there is an infinite amount of resources available. Sunday has always been a source of tension in relationships. For guys, and some girls, it’s a holiday every time their team takes the field. Fantasy football perpetuates this feeling. It gives the individual more of an emotional (and sometimes economical) investment in the sport. Often times, people would rather stay hovered over their computer and TV than go outside and enjoy some good old-fashioned sunshine. This can lead to dire social consequences. When money is involved, it is a form of online gambling, and provides a forum that is primed to take advantage of individuals with impulsive and addictive personalities. Caplan predicts that those that compulsively check an online Internet space will form a negative opinion about FTF communication. While this is partly true, as people are in leagues with complete strangers and trash talk on their discussion boards in a way that they would not normally in FTF interactions, often the best fantasy leagues are the ones that include a group of tight knit friends or work associates in which most of the trash talking occurs outside of the online arena.

Wallace’s Operant Conditioning causes players to hover over their computers while constantly clicking the ‘refresh page’ button in order to get up to date statistics. From the NFL website or ESPN. Because of the delay from live action to online updates, people will continue to constantly refresh their page, each time thinking that the next will be when they find out if their running back ran it in on fourth down from the one yard line.

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