Source: Sports Geek
59.3 million people in the United States and Canada played fantasy football last year, which is the equivalent of the entire populations of California and New York added together. I was one of those people, and I am once again in a league this year[1]—a fact I feel very conflicted about. On the one hand, it is one of the best ways I have of connecting with high school friends, people I’m not able to see often but who remember to mock me pitilessly when I lose. On the other hand, I have serious moral reservations about supporting an industry that so blatantly profits from causing its employees acute physical pain and lifelong impairment. It’s as if I wanted to watch and predict the outcomes of a day at a steel plant in the age of the 12-hour shift, or as if I were scouring the internet for the latest news about a particularly talented coal miner’s lung condition. Is he good to go this weekend, or is he questionable?
For now, though, I want to lay those moral issues aside, and try to find an appropriate frame for how we might begin to ask intellectual historical questions about what fantasy football is. The proposition I would like to put before you is: that fantasy football is a form of self-directed learning, and given the eye-popping numbers of people involved, it may constitute the most widespread adult educational activity in the United States today.
I have been reading Joseph Kett’s excellent history of adult education—The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties—recently, so perhaps I am stretching the definition of “education” here to make a point, but I’m not sure why fantasy football wouldn’t qualify as a form of self-education. Fantasy football is a hobby attached to a sport, but many hobbies – from birding to model trains – require hobbyists to amass substantial bodies of knowledge in order to pursue them enjoyably.
Fantasy football is no different, and in fact, it touches on more fields of knowledge than one might expect. Certainly the degree to which hobbyists plunge themselves into their avocation varies, but a particularly avid fantasy football player needs to know something about both anatomy and sports medicine to have some sense of the severity of players’ injuries and how they might affect their play. They need to understand the complexities of game strategy, a subject that encompasses history (how today’s game is different from the game as it was played five or ten or fifteen years ago, and who benefits from those changes) while also clearly mimicking military science. They ought to have some notion of the business side of football—how teams are built, how salaries are structured, how the terms of a player’s contract may indicate how the team values him. And they increasingly need a relatively sophisticated familiarity with the language if not the mathematical underpinnings of statistics: they must be able to parse fantasy advice that is about a player’s “regression to the mean” or an “outlier” season. All this—it goes without saying—is on top of the basic knowledge of football-specific terminology, lore, rules, etc. without which one could not begin to understand how to play.
In other words, fantasy football requires a lot of intellectual energy—or if that is too lofty a term for you, it requires a lot of mental labor. And, while much of it is repetitive mental labor—checking and re-checking on the health of players, interpreting the same platitudinal answers from coaches about how the team is doing, and so on—much of it is also cumulative: one learns more about football, about strategy, about medicine, about finances, about statistics the longer one plays.
Let’s do a little back-of-the envelope math. I haven’t been able to find very recent data about time allotment for fantasy football, but a 2012 Yahoo! survey (Yahoo! is one of the most common platforms for fantasy sports) put the number for the average user at four hours a week. Seasons tend to run between 14 and 16 weeks (depending on the structure of a league’s playoffs). That would translate to 56 to 64 hours during the season, but that would not count the number of hours players put into preparing for the season, including researching before the fantasy draft, which for most players is probably their largest single time investment during the season. Let’s arbitrarily add eight hours, meaning that the average player spends between 64 and 72 hours a year learning more about fantasy football.[2] If we multiply that by the number of people playing fantasy football last year, we come up with a grand total of 3.795 billion to 4.269 billion hours collectively spent playing fantasy football in 2017.
What might be the intellectual effects of this giant chunk of time? If we were to think about all these hours as training, what is it training for?
As I mentioned above, one of the non-obvious aspects of fantasy football is that it is, albeit at a rudimentary level, a training in statistics—or to put the thing more precisely, it is a training in how to argue with statistics. Fantasy football advice-mongers present their cases for why Player X is primed for a breakout year or why Player Y is certain to underperform. Fantasy football advice mirrors advice about picking stocks: people try to convince you that something is undervalued or overvalued, and they try to do so by pointing to a set of facts hidden in an array of numbers about the past and a clump of extrapolations into the future. Even more, they try to get you to internalize this method so that you work on convincing yourself. You learn how to argue yourself into buying or selling on a player using their past performances and the trends that seem to be running silently through those performances.
The problem is, most predictions—most advice from others and most decisions that we talk ourselves into—turn out quite differently from what we worked so hard to convince ourselves would be the case. What does that do to the way fantasy football players think about other statistical arguments they come across—from scientists, say, or from politicians, economists, or journalists? To experience predictive failures so often, even for such a petty thing as fantasy sports—how might that undermine the authority of any prediction, especially those that deal with national or even planetary phenomena? Or, on the contrary, could an awareness of the difficulty of prediction make fantasy football players better, more educated consumers of probability, understanding why some predictions are quite weak while others are quite strong? (“Don’t be fooled by small sample sizes” is one of the frequent refrains of fantasy football gurus.)[3]
But if, at one level, fantasy football is a way to train yourself how to argue with statistics, it is also a way to train yourself to argue—to make a case for or against something. Fantasy football is perhaps one of the more potent training grounds for young men[4] in rhetoric, at least as much so as Reddit or Facebook or Twitter. Arguing about sports has become a template for arguing in general, and the models for rhetorical force and craftiness are the talking heads of sports commentary and analysis.
Of course, arguments about sports—the greatest team of all time, the greatest individual season of all time, the greatest hitter, the greatest quarterback, the greatest catch, whether so and so belongs in the Hall of Fame, whether so and so does not—have been part of a vernacular rhetorical tradition for a very long time. But I believe that fantasy sports—and the statistical “sabermetric” revolution with which they have been bound up—has fundamentally changed how people argue about sports.
This post is by now quite long enough, so I will pause before explaining further—that is, if there is interest. Of course, I don’t quite know what the Venn diagram of S-USIH readers and people interested in fantasy football looks like, so perhaps it will be better to end here any way!
Notes
[1] My team name—which I feel unequivocally proud of—is Seals and Goffs: I drafted Jared Goff as a backup QB and Ricky Seals-Jones as my backup tight end.
[2] It is worth noting that the increased use of mobile fantasy sports apps since 2012 may have altered these numbers substantially, and in an upward direction. Being able to access one’s team anywhere almost certainly has led most fantasy football players to check on their team more often—if, perhaps, for shorter periods at a time.
[3] These issues are very similar to the questions dealt with in a very good recent book: Jamie Pietruska’s Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America, which is about how Americans cognitively and intellectually adjusted to the new sources of information they were taking in in the form of weather predictions, predictions about crop yields, etc. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
[4] About 70% of fantasy football players are men, and the average age is 32.
3 Thoughts on this Post
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Fantastic post! I’m guessing the Venn overlap is more (statistically?) significant than you might expect.
Another thing about fantasy football — lots of people make roster decisions without relying too much on rational argumentation of the wonky or statistical kind. Even for those hoping to be competitive, there’s “gut” — and, also, having to make do with who is left to draft if someone else gets your favorite first. And the non-competitive players — someone like me — might put together a roster of all Stanford alums, or all native Californians, or an all Pac-12 team. And then it’s just for fun — but a good part of the fun comes from using some totally random criterion and still coming out ahead of the guys in the fantasy league who spend countless hours poring over statistics.
As to the greatest catch — in baseball, there is no argument, surely. Here it is:
https://youtu.be/HDhGXVZnA3o
Hi Andy. In addition to claiming new lands for intellectual history, I wonder whether you’re implying it might be conceived as less about the mysteries of those entities commonly called “ideas,” whose matterings and efficacy we continually rehearse; and more about activities and processes of “thinking,” the deployment of “intellectual energy,” “mental labor,” rhetorical technique, etc. And what the implications of such a [minor, trivial?] shift might be: not so much the ideas in novels and/or novelists’ heads, as what it’s like, say, to do novelistic labor.
Thanks, both of you!
LD, well, I meant football catch, but I’ll give you that one! Still, I would have to rank this one pretty high: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EaEQVKIDGU
More seriously, that’s a good point about the many fantasy football players that use other methods to pick their teams and set their lineups. But the estimate I found said average player–it could be that the more intense players’ research more than counterbalances the people playing by their gut.
Bill,
I’ll dodge your question a bit: I think there are still a lot of ideas involved in playing fantasy football. If I’m reading your comment correctly, the distinction you’re drawing is between an intellectual history that delves more deeply into processes (“thinking”) versus one that examines products (“ideas”). In this case, then, I guess the product–the idea–is the fantasy football lineup that one sets: it is the final expression one gives at the end of a process of researching, calculating, arguing with oneself, etc. I can very easily imagine an ethnographic project where a researcher interviews a bunch of people about their fantasy football lineups, asking them to explain not just their reasoning, but what sources they used, why, how they interpreted them, and so on.