What I Won in Fantasy Football (a Breakdown)

First off, fuck you, I know I haven’t updated this site in weeks, but it’s not like I didn’t warn you.  Secondly, I had better things to do than entertain the dozens of people that visit this site on a regular basis.  Fantasy Football wrapped up for me this past week and I fucking won.  Out of the two leagues I was in, I won 1st place and 4th place respectively.  I decided to finally break down my winnings and do some rough calculations on how much I actually earned from this hobby from hell.

One league was for $150, the other for $165 for a total of $315 invested in fantasy football for the year.  In one league I won the weekly total of most points for a team twice, taking home $100 before the playoffs.  So that’s $215 in the hole owed.  In the league I won, I ended up with the best overall record in the regular season, which put $150 in my pocket before playoffs even started.  So before the playoffs I was only down $65 total.  Finally, I won first place in that league, which netted me a very nice payout of $750.  In total, I won $685, not bad for some fantasy football.

But what did I actually earn?  Sure, I won $685, but I put a lot of time, effort and dedication to have the best team in the league.  A lot of man hours went into maintaining the most dominant team I ever assembled.  Let’s kick around some totals combining both leagues and time spent maintaining these teams…

Draft preparations:  4 hours

Weekly team maintenance:  1 hour a week for 16 weeks

Miscellaneous (watching fantasy football TV programs, etc.) : 2 hours a week

That’s a total of about 52 hours of actual work I put into these teams.  That includes making trades, checking out free agents, setting starting lineups, and everything else it takes to win.  52 hours to make $685.  That is the equivalent to working for an hourly wage of $13.18.  And that doesn’t even take into account how much time was wasted watching TERRIBLE football games just because I had a player going for me or against me.  I watched every televised football game available and was satisfied watching maybe 10% of them.  If you calculate how much time was wasted watching 3 hour long games all season, then you’d be able to tell how unrewarding fantasy football is from a monetary perspective.

But you know what?  It’s all totally worth it.  $13.18 an hour?  Awesome, sign me up.  It might not be much money, but I don’t know if there’s anything more rewarding than pretending you own a football team and having them face off against your friend’s fictional team as well for “big” money.  If fantasy football is foreign to you, I’d never be able to explain why a group of guys can actually have fun staring at statistics on a weekly basis.  Being able to say with certainty, “my fantasy team is better than yours” is one of the few joys I have left.  And that’s why I’ll always play this fantasy game from hell.

PS – For those of you curious as to what my team looked like, here were my starters I played almost every single week.

QB: Cam Newton, Phillip Rivers

RB: Maurice Jones-Drew, Darren McFadden, Fred Jackson (Reggie Bush, Michael Bush, Jahvid Best, Kevin Smith bench)

WR: Roddy White, AJ Green, Victor Cruz (Jeremy Maclin bench)

TE: Antonio Gates (Kellen Winslow bench)

DEF: Philly, Chicago

PPS – I owe Cam Newton $685