Fantasy Football Rap
December 15th, 2010Sports Junkies Rejoice
December 15th, 2010
This is a natural fit for the Fantasy Sports Junkie, ‘Sports Junkies Rejoice! The Birth of ESPN!’ by ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen. I vaguely recall when ESPN showed up on the scene. We didn’t have the cable package that carried ESPN, but we did have WPIX and I loved the sports segment with Jerry Girard. I was thirsty for a sports programming channel that had all the highlights I could handle.
I didn’t really appreciate ESPN until the early ’90′s when I left home and joined the Navy. It’s amazing how many times I could watch the same segment of ESPN Sports Center over and over and over and sometimes over again. When we were in port (USS Eisenhower) I could easily watch 2 or 3 hours straight of Sports Center. Anything to avoid work I guess.
Has anyone read this book? I hope it’s good, I just ordered it from Amazon.
Andre Reed Likes Ike
December 15th, 2010
I’m a Buffalo Bills fan. I’ve been a Bills fan since my Dad lived in Buffalo, off Delaware Ave on Avery St in the late 70′s, early 80′s. There’s been a lot of happy times, particularly in the late 80′s and early 90′s. One of my favorite players during that period was Andre Reed. Before football became a big money business, I remember going to see the Buffalo Bills off-season touring basketball team at Hobart College in Geneva, NY. One player stuck out in my mind, Andre Reed. What an athlete. The guy was all over the basketball court, dunking and smiling the whole time, having a great time. Real friendly with the fans too.
I joined the Navy in 1989 and was deployed to the Persian Gulf in ’91 – ’92. Yeah, go figure, I join the Navy for 6 years and the Bills go to 4 Super Bowls in a row. It was a real challenge to watch those games overseas on delayed and compressed video. The Redskins Super Bowl was particularly awful. Anyway, at some point during the ’91-’92 season my Step Father heard of an autograph session and got Andre to sign “I Like Ike” and sent it to me. I was on USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) and the ship motto was “I Like Ike”! It was really cool to get that picture with a personal message.
The reason that it’s coming up today is that Andre (@Andre_Reed83) tweeted today that he’s headed to the Middle East to visit the troops. Just wanted to give a shout out to Andre about the difference he made 20+ years ago when I was deployed in the Middle East. Thanks Andre.
30 for 30: Silly Little Game
December 14th, 2010I just added this episode of 30 for 30: Silly Little Game to my Neflix queue. I was a sports nut in 1981, why didn’t I hear about this? I guess I should have been reading Inside Sports instead of Sports Illustrated!
I couldn’t find the original article that Daniel Okrent online, so this article Revisiting Roto’s Roots by Chris Colston will have to do.
I’ll let you know what I think of the movie.
Welcome to The Fantasy Sports Junkie!
December 13th, 2010
Welcome to The Fantasy Sports Junkie. This site is born out of my love for sports and fantasy sports. When I say “love” I’m not talking about the type of love I have my wife or kids, but the type of love you have for a hobby, like wood working, scrap booking or just about anything that you enjoy spending free time. I don’t and never will have 27 fantasy football teams!
I’ve been playing fantasy sports for about 17 years now. The game has come a long way in 17 years. The first league I played in was the 1993 NFL season. My first pick was Barry Sanders. Despite his on field greatness, he wasn’t a great fantasy player. One week he’d run for 220 yards, the next week 25 yards. He was hot and cold, not the type of consistent player that justifies the #1 pick! I also had Jim Kelly (I’m a Bills fan) as my QB. A good NFL QB, not a good fantasy QB. Anyway, back in the day, we submitted our line-ups on paper to the commissioner and anxiously waited for the commish to manually tabulate the results with the USA Today sports page. A far cry from where we are today with instant on-demand scoring. It was one and done with the 1993 season. A combination of military commitment (Navy) and user-unfriendliness initiated a three year hiatus from the game.
In 1997, the year that I consider to be the start of the modern fantasy sports era, when major internet sites first appeared to automate the draft, roster management and scoring. I was in heaven! I was a bit of a sports stat nerd growing up and fantasy sports was meeting my need for stats. In my early years I satisfied my passion with baseball and football cards. I created a game complete with rosters, scoring, contracts, league standings and playoffs. I entertained myself for hours. More on that in another post, I recently found some documents from those years, very entertaining.
So, back to the modern era of Fantasy Football. In 1997 I was in college at the University of Buffalo and we started a 10 team league on Sandbox.com. Sandbox had been around for a couple of years at this point, but it was the first year I think they really got aggressive with marketing. It was free, but we got what we paid for. Performance was awful, but after the first few weeks of the season, it was decent. We’ve moved around from Sandbox to Yahoo to NFL.com to CBS and back to Yahoo. Sadly, Sandbox.com is closing their website effective January 7th, 2011. The core players from that first season in 1997 are still playing today and I’ve managed to win 5 of the 13 years. No one else has won more than twice! I’m in the running for my 6th championship this year, the playoffs start next week. We also now have a baseball league, which I blew the championship in the last week and we’ve also tried basketball and hockey. My main interests lie with football and baseball.
Back to the reason I started this site, as an outlet for my passion for sports, fantasy football & baseball and aspiring graphic designer. What? graphic designer? By graphic designer I mean “outlet to taunt my friends when I beat them by creating my very own fantasy sports championship t-shirt”. Nothing says I crushed you in fantasy football like a 5-time fantasy football championship t-shirt!
What you can expect from this site:
- Fantasy Sports News, mostly football and baseball
- Fantasy sports tips – What am I doing to win, what sites am I using and rationale.
- Fantasy Sports T-shirts – T-shirts for your Fantasy Baseball Team, Fantasy Football Team, celebrating your championships, taunting someone in your league, etc… If you want it, we can make it.
Come along, enjoy the ride and let’s have some fun. Contact us if you have questions, comments or suggestions.
