The Mercy Rule – Keep Your Football Fetish to Yourself

Being erotically humiliated in front of a panel of Food Network stars. Multiple clammy hours of tantric waffle- and love-making with Kirstie Alley. Any kind of sex with Paris Hilton. Given all the embarrassing fantasies we all secretly foster, it’s tough to tell anyone that his or her (but really, mostly “his”) fantasy football team should be a source of shame. After all, pretty much the entire internet is comprised of things that are objectively more embarrassing than pumping your fist over LeSean McCoy punching in an ultra-meaningless touchdown on Sunday. But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t something shameful-ish about the irresistible ascent of fantasy sports.

To be clear: fantasy sports are not a bad or even inherently/particularly embarrassing thing. Yes, if you want you could make some dissertation-ish Marxist noise about how fantasy football teams, after all, are premised on notional ownership of other people’s output—to pick a player in a fantasy draft is to make a bet on his performance over the course of the season, when he will “be” on your “team.” And yes, fantasy sports combine math and obsessive fandom in an opposite-sex-repelling way, but having your own little team is fun (seriously), and having an interest in a Josh Freeman or Sam Bradford or Beanie Wells is just about the only thing in the world that can make me care for even a minute about the Buccaneers or Rams or Cardinals.

As with any fantasy, the trick is to minimize its impact upon your non-fantasy life. It is fine, really, totally fine, if you spend the moments just before sleep imagining squalid truck stop sex with the cast of Everybody Loves Raymond. But you probably don’t need to be reminded not to bring that up at lunch. “What a cretin you are to discuss how you want to get fucked by Ray Romano and have him call you mean names,” your co-workers/friends/grandparents will say, pushing away their Cobb salads. All that still holds if you swap the Romano dirty talk for yell-pleading in a bar about how the Packers need to give the ball to Ryan Grant in this particular short-yardage situation because of how much it would help your team. Either way, you are mistaking others’ general hey-whatever-floats-your-boat attitude for a wish on their part to be invited onto your particular boat.

Anyway, if there’s anything pernicious about fantasy sports, it has more to do with the last decade’s sad, spastic tendency towards commodifying everything. Witness, for instance, Grantland’s pioneeringly crass “Reality TV Fantasy League,” which finally (?) breaks the sports-wall and turns the residents of reality TV’s monster island into a player pool. If fantasy football is in one sense just a way to make more of football more interesting, it’s also a way of turning people into things, which is not traditionally the coolest or healthiest way to view people. And some people prefer to watch their football without having to autistically count the yards gained by certain receivers.

When Houston Texans running back Arian Foster called overzealous fantasy owners “sick” on Twitter a couple weeks back, the counter-howl belied more than a little shame. ”Nobody sincerely cares about you,” Yahoo’s Chris Chase wrote. “They care about your performance.” That’s supposed to sound tough-minded, I guess, but it has the overcompensatory nastiness of someone explaining how Alf slashfic is a perfectly normal expression of creativity. By all means, pick your own fantasies and fantasy players and get as much from them as you can. Then keep them where they belong—in your head and on your league message board. And talk to someone about that Ray Romano thing, because it’s weird.

Previously – Every Day Is 9/11 in the NFL