I play fantasy sports and enjoy them a whole lot. I am a little scared though by people like Bill Simmons who pay more attention to fantasy sports than the real sports. I really enjoy fantasy sports but they are just a sidetrack to the real thing for me and I don't get into them to write a 10,000 word essay on them. Bill Simmons does.
Simmons' fantasy dream game!
I get told constantly that I pay more attention to my favorite teams than normal fans do, and that is true, I try to know everything about the sports I am watching. I don't get overly wrapped up in fantasy sports and I worry about those that do. I worry about Bill Simmons.
Monday's Eagles-Cowboys game was the highest-rated telecast in cable history.
Both have large fan bases and have moderately successful teams that play in the same division, it is a bit of a shock to me as well, but that is how it turned out.
I went to sleep that night believing "Dallas 41, Philly 37" was the most influential fantasy game ever played.
Seriously, get a fucking life. Rather than going to bed thinking what a great game, Dallas does have a great team, or Philly almost pulled one out, Bill Simmons thought about fantasy sports.
This is my great worry with where fantasy sports are going, where they are going to become bigger than the sport itself. This column causes me to worry even more. I take fantasy sports seriously on a scale of 1-10 at a 7, it is the 10s the really cause me to worry.
When Westbrook (irony alert!) scored right after Jackson's boner, that two-play sequence ended up swinging two of the five matchups in my West Coast league.
Ironic because he knelt down last year...I guess. I had no problem with Westbrook falling down on the one yard line last year because he wanted to make sure his team won a REAL football game and that is how it should be, in my opinion.
It startles me that he knows when one play, even as widely discussed as that one, affects several football teams. I pay attention to my team and what happens to it, I ignore everyone else. Maybe I am alone on this.
You know what has swung my matchups the past couple weeks in my leagues? Carson Palmer, Larry Johnson, and T.J. Housemedhahahzhahahah putting up 4 points a week combined. Me starting Greg Olson because the Panthers can't cover a tight end, except at a strip club, and then watching him get negative fantasy points. That is what really swung my matchup.
When the play happened, I started an e-mail chain with my friends at 9:53 p.m. ET:
SUBJECT HEADING: If I lose by 3 because of DeSean Jackson …
BODY: Would that be the worst loss in the history of our league?
I bet his friends hate him. Everything always has to be the greatest ever, the worst loss ever, the biggest blowout ever. He is not satisfied with sitting down and drinking a fruity little drink, you know he likes them, and enjoying some football.
Everyone disagreed, pointing out that my season was already cooked. After all, I lost my first-round pick, Tom Brady, in eight minutes, thanks to Sammy Morris going low on a 224-pound defensive back.
This was the real response.
"What the fuck are you talking about Bill? It is one game, if you did not draft Patriots every single year, then maybe you would not have this problem. Please stop emailing me late at night like that, it makes my Blackberry go off at 12:30am. I know your wife does not care but my wife and I have to be up in the morning to go to work and make sure the kids eat before they go to school. You email me, the Blackberry goes off, the wife wakes up, the baby hears the wife, and the next thing you know I am walking around the house shushing a child because you had to make a mountain out of a simple football game. Your team sucks anyway, so I am sure this one game did not ruin your year."
Again, it was an extraordinary game.
Two popular teams, Terrell Owens has that feud with Donovan McNabb, and it could help decide the division. Pretty important early season game.
But it wasn't more dramatic or memorable than Baltimore blowing its chance to end New England's undefeated season on a Monday night last December, right?
Absolutely Bill. Nothing in the world was more important than that game. Here is the thing. It was not more dramatic or memorable than that game, but there were more people watching regardless. Unlike you, mortal humans can not tell the future beforehand, so everyone can not know this game is going to be dramatic and memorable before the game is actually played. See? So there is no way more people watched because, as learned afterwards, it was dramatic, it was because more people wanted to watch this game than wanted to watch the Ravens-Patriots game. Do you get it?
The more I thought about it, I decided the fantasy subplots propelled the Philly-Dallas game to its record numbers. That had to be it.
I have a couple Philly defensive players, and two offensive players from both teams, and played a team called "Cowboys" in one of my fantasy leagues this week, which consisted of pretty much the entire Dallas Cowboy roster. I did not watch the game. I doubt the fantasy subplots had anything to do with it.
Maybe you are right though...not really.
My first team was called the Banana Hammocks -- named for me by our commissioner, Camp, who couldn't get over the fact that I refused to wear boxer shorts in college.
If I were Jim, from the tv show "The Office," I would be giving Bill the "Jim is shocked by what was just said and shows you he is by a slight head tilt."
So Bill Simmons is a tighty whitey man? Or does he like banana hammocks? Or man thong underwear? I am afraid he has overshared with the world at this point. I have no personal problem with any of these underwear types, but I have to say this definitely makes Bill beyond uncool that he is admitting this.
(Note: I had reasons. Let's just say I never wanted to be the Levi Johnston of my school.)
You wanted to have a low sperm count? If that is your reason, that is the single worst reason I have ever heard in my life for wearing tighty whiteys. I like how Bill is inferring in this passage he was getting a lot of action in college, so he did not want to get a girl pregnant. Saying this was probably even dumber than admitting his first fantasy team was called the Banana Hammocks. Not by a whole lot though.
For some reason, we totally trusted Camp's scoring, even though he was probably doing it after 12 beers and eight Marlboro Lights.
Last time I checked, which was three years ago last June, Marlboro Lights do not affect one's judgment. 12 beers do though.
When I worked for the Boston Herald in 1995, I pitched a weekly fantasy column to my editors that August; I might as well have been pitching a column about drinking and driving or trying to sleep with underaged girls.
Simmonsologists know that Bill has thought of everything first. We can now add a weekly fantasy column to this list. I don't think the Boston Herald was stupid for not liking the idea of a weekly fantasy column in the paper, fantasy was too underground at that point to generate any readers on the idea and the Internet had not advanced enough to where keeping score was easy.
At least Banana Hammock Simmons knows if he had pitched a column about drinking and driving and sleeping with underage girls, he would not have gotten any of them pregnant due to his underwear selection.
Bill just goes on and on about the impact fantasy football has made on the world in the past five years, which I can't argue with. I can argue with the premise that the Eagles-Cowboys game got such high ratings because of fantasy football. I don't think there is a correlation between two popular teams playing a nationally televised game and people watching with concern over the fantasy stats.
Couple more tidbits in this inoffensive but still very incorrect Bill Simmons column:
Although part of me wonders whether Cassel is the Johnny Doe to Brady's Dirk Diggler -- yeah, we can film a decent porn movie with him, but every game ends with Ricky J impassively looking at the tapes and telling Jack Horner, "It is what it is."
That reference to Boogie Nights is here to remind you the movie is now almost 10 years old. Bill has a good 15-20 years of use in quoting it though.
Courtney Taylor, Logan Payne and Jordan Kent sound more like the gang of bitchy girls on the new "90210" than Hasselbeck's new targets." In a related story, they're 0-2 and look worse than Shannen Doherty in HD.
Ba...da...dum. Please remember you can read this type stuff all week in his columns.
If you made an All-Star team for "Athletes with Latino Names Who Look Like Their Name Should Actually Be Something Like Jimmy Scott or Rick Stevens," would you call it the Jeff Garcia All-Stars or the Anthony Gonzalez All-Stars?
He is making up more team names for his incredibly loyal fans to discuss among themselves and then send to him in an email so they can be just like him.
In a related story, Bill Simmons just made my All Star team for "Columnists Who Try So Hard To Be Hip and Cool but Come Off Like They Are That Creepy Dad Who Wants To Go To The Shins Concert With You Because He Likes The Music But You Have a Feeling He Is Checking Out The Girls."
Gregg Doyel welcomes you Bill.
I'm fascinated by this Phelps-as-a-celebrity thing because he doesn't follow the Ali-Jordan-Mantle-Tiger model even remotely. I mean, would any of those guys have been caught drinking Corona out of a can on live television? What about his awkward SNL appearance? Or all the pictures of him and Hollywood babes, in which he always looks like the little brother of a college sophomore who showed up for a weekend and ended up puking outside the football stadium all night?
This is actually true and funny. I think Michael Phelps looks like a douchebag. Great swimmer, seems like he would be a douche.
I decided San Diego's last two losses had to be the toughest back-to-back defeats in football history.
Well, he did experience it firsthand, so it has to be up there. Well all know if Bill Simmons experiences something firsthand, it automatically makes it an important event.
Hey, here's my theory on Favre's comeback that I've been waiting to spring for two months: I think the retirement was legitimate. He wanted to quit. Then, he was probably running errands for his wife, stopped to buy some groceries, then got chewed out at home because he forgot to buy half and half. And as his wife was yelling at him, he thought to himself, "Wait a second, what did I just do? I could keep playing!"
Those crazy women! I bet that is exactly what happened! Bill should write a sitcom about how men and women don't get along. It would do great!
That's all I can handle for the time being.
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