4 Ways Fantasy Football Makes You Miserable

Like running over a pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto, vile team names are guilt-free because the whole thing never feels too connected to reality, even if the winners and losers are determined by real-life events. Yet, even in a pocket universe where no one bats an eye at the most disgusting, depraved name ever conceived, there is something somehow even more offensive: when an owner shifts to the other end of the name spectrum and names their team after a serious real-world cause. Last year I was in a league where one of the team names was "Justice4Trayvon." An acquaintance of mine played in a league that had a team named "BostonStrong" in remembrance of the Boston marathon bombing.

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Zimmerman and O.J. are killing it in my Murderers Who Got Away With It fantasy league.

Take whatever cause you believe in most, then open your toilet bowl and shout that cause into the shit-flaked water loud enough to ripple the surface. Flush if you'd like. By doing that, you've just made as much of an impact on the world as you would by naming your fantasy football team after a cause you support. Fantasy football is supposed to be a fun distraction. Unless you're George Zimmerman, who the fuck would want to beat a team named Justice4Trayvon? Do you want to crush the strength and healing power of Boston with the might of your fake football team? The frivolous misuse of the cause is insulting to the cause. More than that, it's also a huge bummer. Can't wait to see how thoroughly I crush the team named in remembrance of a deadly bombing that filled us with an all-too-familiar sense of dread and brought us to a nationwide standstill. Yeah, can't wait to play that fucker. It's gonna be a blast.

If you have one of these self-righteous team names, fantasy leagues make it easy to change your pompous name with a few clicks. Use that option. Just change your name to "Fifty Yard Cunt," and we'll all go back to not feeling so insulted.

Every aspect of fantasy football is filled with bad decisions like this. But when it comes to the actual act of making bad decisions, fantasy football has the best possible version of it, because ...

Fantasy football hits fast-forward on everything you do poorly. Have you ever made a bad choice in life and wished you could skip passed the wait-and-see part and straight to the moment you realize you suck? Well, fantasy football would like to talk to you about an exciting opportunity that could expedite the travel time between hope and despair! All you need to do to apply is dedicate too much of your time to poring over player stats and put too much faith in the barely-more-knowledgeable-than-you opinions of fantasy football "experts," who are right there with stock market traders in terms of professions fueled by speculative bullshit.

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And stock market traders are playing fantasy football with your money.

You get to see yourself suck so quickly you'd think fantasy football was optimized and rigorously tested by NASA engineers to be a the world's most efficient failure simulator. Within days you'll go from being able to so vividly imagine yourself holding the championship trophy that you can almost smell the cheap plastic to inventing new and exciting slurs to hurl at your shitty team, because there is no doubt that at some point ...

There's catharsis in loathing. When your fantasy football roster is shitting itself uncontrollably, missing the bed pan by wide margins, the only response that feels right is verbalizing your anger over the incompetence of the pack of assholes you put together and launching it toward a screen. Fantasy team owners hanging around at the bottom of their league's standings -- as I am this year so far -- understand this flaw in human nature that fantasy football pulls out of us like Dumbledore pulling thin wisps of memory out of his head. The only thing as good as or better than watching your team dominate on a Sunday is, conversely, getting to scream obscenities at their names on your computer screen when they are being dominated.

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Pleasurable domination.

It feels good to hate. Suddenly, all the malice and spite in the world that we turn our eyes away from in shame when we see it on the news makes sense. Because, yes, of course -- why didn't I see it earlier? Fuck those guys! They're all pieces of shit. Fantasy football is the Two Minutes Hate from Nineteen Eighty-Four, unbrokenly stretched Thursday to the following Monday of a given week.

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Like this, but in a Buffalo Wild Wings.

It's such a pathetic exercise that some team owners may never admit that they're really yelling at themselves. But, hey -- it's fantasy football. Enjoy the fantasy no matter what form it takes, even if that form is deflecting your hatred of yourself onto the players on your roster. If you hate them, you can sleep tight knowing the feeling is mutual, because ...

Houston Texans running back Arian Foster strained a hamstring in the 2011-2012 season, so fantasy owners gave him shit for not playing. Foster tweeted this in response: "4 those worried abt your fantasy team, u ppl are sick." Same goes for Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings, who thinks fantasy football is a "headache," and former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, whose Twitter page was flooded with angry tweets from sociopath fantasy owners after he left a game with a hip injury. Peterson is a child abuser and Rice is a woman beater, so I'm sure the tweets they're getting right now are a tad harsher in tone. They're doing very well for me in my Deplorable Scumbags fantasy league.

I stole that line from myself.

A full, tangible connection to the players on your roaster is never established. I may like and value some more than others, but ultimately they're all just names that can be swapped out for other names. Sometimes they're not even names, just stat lines. Fantasy owners dehumanize players and reduce them to numbers and then demand that the numbers be impressive every week. If that doesn't happen, well, we've already stripped the players of their humanity, so why not take to Twitter and let them know how personally disappointed we are in them by chipping away at their psyche one caps-locked letter at a time. Fantasy football takes all the terrible personality traits the Internet pulls out of people and turns them into a competition to add a nuke to the fire.

All that being said, you should totally start playing fantasy football. It's super fun!

Luis is currently setting his lineup in his all-kickers league. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.

For more from Luis, check out 8 Crazy Sports Traditions That Got Out of Control and The 5 Most Utterly Insane Games You Can Play at Work.

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