Darn-It-All . . . My Kicker Just Threw a Shoe!

Okay here's one for ya . . .

How many Jim Beam jello-shots would it take to get Monday Night Football's John Madden safely onboard a Delta cross-country red-eye flight? Strangely enough the Applied Science Department Fantasy Football league at the New Jersey satellite campus of Harvard University recently posed this very same question to all of its dues-paying members and the general consensus was that it would be easier to convince Santa Claus to go on a crash-course diet than it would be to get the beloved Mr. Football anywhere near a departing airplane.

Fire up the bus!

Now I'm certainly no expert, but I'm pretty sure that we used to play a game that was very similar to Fantasy Football only we called it Dungeons & Dragons. I still get goosebumps when I think about all of the hobgoblins and orcs that my Class 2 Paladin slayed with the Enchanted Crossbow of Elvendorf. Those were the days - when a geek was a geek and a jock was a jock. Now it appears that the lines are getting a tad bit blurred.

The most heard phrase on high school campuses across the country is no longer "Hey, can I borrow your IPod for homeroom?" or "Can you see my thong in these jeans?", instead you're much more likely to hear something like this coming from the football practice field, "Dude, I can't wait to get home and check out how my fantasy team did this weekend."

Unfortunately, the bizarre stat-lust that descends upon America like a blanket of mix-matched scores every Fall knows no age-limits. I can't even begin to count the number of times that I've had to wait patiently while the the old guy down the hall re-inserts his teeth so he can tell me all about how he was going to bench his quarterback, but changed his mind at the last minute and thank goodness he did, because the rookie left-hander threw for 5 touchdowns and ran for another 3, carrying his fantasy team to yet another thrilling come-from-behind victory.

And for my money, the most distressing part of this rabid Fantasy Football trend has to be the all-but guaranteed lameness of the team names. I'm pretty sure they did an official tally recently and darned if the team name "Dave's Destroyers" didn't register 229,000 hits in less than an hour. "The Microsoft Marauders" was a close second. You don't even want to know what the third place name was.

Try and remember that there are 2 "P"s in "Power Puffs" when you engrave that league championship trophy . . . okay!

Now in all fairness - I have actually participated in a Fantasy Football league before and I do remember having a limited amount of fun for about the first day and a half. I was really enjoying myself right up to the point where my team had to play their first game. Everything after that was a relentless blur of spastic statistical analysis and overt dorkiness so intense that it would probably have made Bill Gates seem downright cool. I became a hideous shell of my former self - one part Dan Dierdorf, one part Frank Gifford and a little bit of that guy in the movie "The Waterboy". Trust me, it wasn't pretty.

Hopefully we haven't ruffled too many feathers here today. I guess the key to Fantasy Football success is to strike a balance between real life and fantasy life. Either that or total willingness to forsake any and all aspects of your previous life in a vain and hopeless attempt at complete devotion to the game.

I think you can actually buy those little plastic trophies at Super-Walmart . . . if it makes you feel any better.

I feel better already.

Ben O.