Fantasy Sports

As you may have heard, Football Season started yesterday. Being from the Los Angeles area, and not having a football team to grow up rooting for (for which to grow up rooting?), it's been rather hard for me to hop onto the whole NFL train. I've had some marginal affiliation with the Steelers (friends/family and hanging out where they have their summer training camp) and an awesome new reason to root for the Ravens (talk about irony, ha cha cha), but so far neither team has provided enough of a draw for me to tune in every Sunday.

Last night, during the game, a friend of a friend who happened to have it on the tube gave his lament for his hometown not having a team, and then said something interesting: that he wouldn't particularly care about the outcomes of NFL games were it not for Fantasy Football.

I find this a really interesting dynamic, that fantasy sports can give rise to a closer following of actual sports. A fantasy player obviously needs to follow the real sport fairly closely, since the fortunes of your fantasy team are inextricably linked to the fortunes of the real life athletes. But in the beginning of fantasy sports (most say around the 1950s or early 60s), the urge to make lists of players and keep track of their year-to-date stats grew out of paying very close attention to the real sports. Indeed, before Yahoo and ESPN and The Sporting News started taking care of all the tedious data gathering, fantasy players had to keep track of all the stats and organize them manually.

Nowadays, it seems like the direction of information has been reversed (or rather, has the potential to be reversed). For instance, it's possible to care about a sport just for the sake of your fantasy team, whereas before, it was impossible to even operate a fantasy league without already having intense interest in the sport itself.

What's more, with all the advanced data tracking tools and in-depth fantasy coverage, following the sport isn't even necessary to performing well in a fantasy league. I don't think I watched a single NBA game the whole time I played fantasy basketball (just a couple of years, in high school). I just browsed through all the players with the best points per game value and made the most cost-effective decisions (it was one of those salary cap leagues). In this way, my fantasy basketball experience was a lot like a less advanced version of playing the stocks. Sure, stock brokers and traders are aware of the market and the individual companies, but they get into the business because they want their stocks to do well, not because they see any kind of entertainment value in the dynamics of businesses competing with one another. What happens in the business world only matters for them insofar as they can make some money from it.

The sports world, on the other hand, differs from the business world because a great many people find great value in the sports world for its own sake - in this example, let's call those people "fans." Fantasy sports can provide fans with a great deal of enjoyment, because it allows them to apply their extensive knowledge of the sport to a contest among friends and/or strangers. (Or, contrarily, it could cause no small amount of frustration to certain fans who, based on their nigh-encyclopedic knowledge of the sport in question, should be sitting much higher in the standings than they currently are. But I digress.)

My point is that it's interesting how fantasy sports and real sports have had such a developing, reciprocal relationship over the years. Love of sports gave rise to people dedicated enough to organize fantasy leagues. And now the very presence of fantasy leagues is encouraging a new group of otherwise uninterested fans to follow sports. It's not quite a chicken-or-the-egg story, since it's obvious which one came first. But it's an interesting story of co-existence nonetheless.