That Guy…In Your Fantasy League

Every guy that I know participates in a fantasy football league.  The intriguing part about most leagues is the dynamic of the people in it.  It can be your best friends, your family, your co-workers, complete strangers or some combination of all of them.  In some leagues, it’s about the money and in some leagues it’s about being able to talk shit about how good your team is.  Fantasy football makes the late December Monday Night Vikings/Packers game interesting (besides for gambling purposes) because you have Minnesota’s third receiver, you’re down by 4 points, and you’re sitting there at midnight yelling at the TV that he’s open.  And as always, there a few knuckleheads that find their way into each league. 

• That guy who’s in 47 leagues and tells you about every league he’s in.  Anytime you say, “Did you see Steve Smith’s catch?” his responds with “Yeah, I have him in my other league.”  I’m pretty sure this guy’s other league is comprised of two teams because he seems to have every superstar in the league.    Rule: If we are in the same league, you can only talk to me about our league.  Telling stories about your other leagues is telling bad beat stories, it’s annoying and nobody wants to hear it.
• That frustrating guy at the draft.  You aren’t friends with this guy, so this is the only time of the year you see him.  And for that reason, it’s sort of fun to mock him for the first few rounds as he fumbles through his papers and magazines and asks questions like “Is Tomlinson still on the board,” when he’s picking in the 3^rd round.  By the 6^th round, when you have your core players and all you want to do is hurry along the draft, you want to stab this guy in the neck. This is the guy that still takes 5 minutes to make a pick in the 15^th round when he’s thinking about whether he wants Billy Cundiff or Paul Edinger as his backup kicker.  And at least once, you can count on this guy not knowing that it’s his turn late in the draft even though he’s been picking behind the same guy all God damn night.
• That guy that makes 10 trade proposals a week.  You can’t log onto the league’s website without it notifying you that there has either been a trade proposed to you or there is a pending trade between this guy and another team in the league.  Most of them are just as ridiculous as the guys who call WEEI in the last two weeks of July saying the Sox should deal Seanez and Tavarez for Oswalt and Andruw Jones.  Every league does need a guy like this though because he has so many transactions throughout the course of the year that he pads the money pool for the winners at the end.  There is a downside to his neurosis though.  He comes by your desk and tells you exactly the reasons he got rid of the Raiders D and picked up the backup tight end for the Cardinals.  And how that move along with the other 94 moves he makes during the year is going to propel him to the championship.
• That guy that can’t take a joke.  As everyone knows, Fantasy Football is a microcosm of real life. And in real life, there are two kinds of guys.  Guys that can dish it and take it and guys that dish it out and when they get it back, they call your mother a whore.  So when someone makes fun of you on the message board because your QB is on bye and you had to start Ken Dorsey and he went 3 of 14 with two picks, don’t fire back a message criticizing the team of the guy that made fun of you.  You’ll look like even more of a loser than you already are by starting Dorsey.
• That guy who thinks he’s Joe Football.  This guy has an opinion and his is right and yours is wrong. End of story.  When you ask the question “Who’s better LT or Alexander,” he says “Alexander, definitely.”  You fire back with all of LT’s stats and attributes but he wants none of it.  He saw Sean Salsbury and that little goofy John Clayton guy say that Alexander is better so that is gospel.  This is the guy who will tell you that the reason he lost last year was because he had Deuce McAllister, Daunte Culpepper, and every other guy that blew out his knee and not because he made some stupid picks.
• The annoying commissioner who is a maniac about getting the money at the draft or else.  Dude, the season is 4 months long and you’re my brother in law. I’m going to see you again. 
• The guy who wants to discuss the most outrageous possible scoring events at the draft.  “How do we score it if Favre throws a ball off someone’s head and it bounces back to Favre and he runs 90 yards for a TD?”  There are an endless number of crazy things that can happen in an NFL game, just get your TD, yardage, and bonuses set and leave the rest of the website.