3

You Get to See Your Bad Decisions Bite You in the Ass Quickly

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So much of life is wait-and-see. You wait nine months and hope your baby looks like you and not your neighbor. Will your overpriced college education payoff big, or will you end up jigsawing your diploma and leaving the pieces as calling cards at crime scenes, tormenting detectives until you complete your murder masterpiece by leaving the scrap with your name on the final body? Only time will tell. A lot of time. This is where fantasy football excels. You get to see the direct result of your terrible decisions quickly. Make a bad roster move on Tuesday, see your stupidity come to fruition as early as Thursday.

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.

2

You Will Hate Your Team With a Passion

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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.

1

The Players on Your Roster Hate You, Too

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NFL players hate fantasy football. It's hard to blame them. Fantasy football adds another layer of pressure to their weekly performances. Now winning games for their team, their city, and for the sake of their own careers isn't enough -- they have to be the most dominate player at their position every week to satisfy some dipshit fantasy owner with a Twitter account and an always-on caps lock button.

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Guys like this goofy prick, who are basically a walking caps lock button.

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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