When I was a kid, the entire week really revolved around football. On Sunday afternoons, I remember sitting on the couch in my grandparents' parlor watching the NFL before dinner. Mondays were also made for football--for marquee match-ups and a theme song that was the soundtrack for playtime during the rest of the week. We'd run around the yard, crunching through the leaves in the half-light while humming "dum-dum-dum, dum, dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum, dum, dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-duh-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah" and imagining ourselves making some fantastic over-the-shoulder catch worthy of a highlight reel.
Saturdays brought many college football games, and we went to quite a few during my teens. (Everyone should, at least once, see a game at Michie Stadium at West Point during the fall foliage. The stadium, the campus, the neighboring towns--they make for an amazing sight in autumn.)
And then there was Friday. On Friday, the entire town would turn out for high school football. All of the towns would across the entire region. Teens would walk the track and chat up the cheerleaders or band members. Parents would sit huddled under blankets and drink hot chocolate and eat thick square pizza slices or funnel cake or hot dogs with sauerkraut. They'd grouse about play-calling and officiating. They'd gasp, cheer, and cajole. And it... was... magic.
Then you grow up and find that adulthood involves very few pep rallies. I didn't stop enjoying football, mind you. But that visceral thrill--the joy of the home town team's victory and the agony of its defeat--I found that it gradually faded as I moved away and my life carried on, presenting other opportunities and challenges. That will probably come as a shock to some people I know who think my fandom has always been deep and absolute. In reality, I actually lost touch with football for several years until pulled back by the lure of what I thought was a new way to enjoy the game--fantasy football.
On paper, fantasy football should have been the perfect pastime for me. As will become evident in later posts, I have more than a passing interest in numbers and statistics. So combining that with my extensive--almost genetically inherited--knowledge of football should have been a marriage made in heaven. And on paper it was.
Those few--those fortunate few--who got to play against the Westmoreland Warbirds may tell you that they were always a contender, and that would be true. Over roughly a decade of play, they were a playoff fixture in office, family, and public leagues. To my recollection, I don't think I ever had a losing season. I missed the playoffs maybe a couple of times. My lifetime winning percentage across all leagues and formats hovered around 70%. And while I only won 3 championships over the above span, you'd certainly have supposed I was having a good time.
Only I wasn't.
Oh, certainly there were moments of enjoyment, if fleeting. That joy of victory was there on occasion--especially during those wild weekends when I'd find myself behind by maybe 20-30 points going into NBC's Sunday Night Football coverage only to pull it out in the last two games of the week. Just as often however, I'd find myself sitting on the edge of my seat on Monday night rooting against an opponent's quarterback or running back, watching their point totals slowly and inexorably climbing towards my own.
And then one day the realization hit me that I'd stopped watching football. Between 2004 and 2014, I'd tracked the performance of literally hundreds of pro football players only I'd stopped paying attention to the game itself. The TV would be on, but I was keeping one eye on the field and another more attentive eye on the crawl of statistics running along the bottom of the screen. I could be in a room full of people cheering and high-fiving over a local team's spectacular victory, and what would I be doing? I'd be quietly calculating point totals in my head, wondering if I'd have been better off if they'd kick one fewer field goal.
Ultimately, we all need to be true to ourselves. And if I'm honest with myself, I'm just not wired for fantasy football. Some people will tell you that it's because I'm too competitive; I don't think that's exactly it. Rather, I'm not wired to be casually competitive. If I do something, I figure out what my goals are--what I'm trying to get out of it--and then I lean into that. In that regard, I found fantasy football to be a bottomless pit. There is so much information to collect and deconstruct, so much change and churn. Not having an off switch, I quickly found myself in free fall. And so I decided to walk away.
Will the Westmoreland Warbirds ever have their day in the sun again? Perhaps, but probably not.
That said, one day you may be in a book store and see a man lingering too long by the magazine rack, eyeing that year's fantasy football draft guides. Try not to judge him. And if you happen to speak to him, ask him if he's seen any good games lately. If he has, then he'll likely smile and keep on walking.
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