Happy Super Bowl Sunday!
The state of everything is such that Fantasy Baseball at the End of the World feels a lot more relevant than this nonsense, but make time for nonsense we still must. Following a musical interlude, anyway.
What I knew
I don’t really care about sports.
I like sports stories. 30 for 30? I dig that. Very inspirational. Or at least theoretically inspirational as none of them have ever actually inspired me to do anything. But they FEEL inspirational. I like that. I can see how maybe they could inspire me, hypothetically.
And I like betting on sports. Which is at odds with my belief that sports gambling now being so prevalent is hugely detrimental to society. Am I saying that it should be barred for most people but available for me? Have I ever really thought about it before I started this paragraph? Does any of this matter when I’m talking about a free for-fun league?
I have to talk about my sports gambling history since this is Actually Never™ but I have Actually Sometimes done some related things. Truth and honesty in reporting is the cornerstone of my dumb little blog that 3 people read. You can tell it’s working because it used to be 2 people.
When I was in high school, back when they didn’t really bother to enforce that “you have to be 18 to buy lottery tickets” rule, I played some Sport Select. This was during a brief phase where I tried to force myself to get into hockey. Partly because I enjoyed the NHL games on the Sega Genesis, and partly because being a Canadian boy who doesn’t care about hockey is pretty isolating. (So is being a poseur as it turns out.)
This post is becoming more introspective than I imagined.
Anyway I won around $45 once which was pretty good money when you’re 16 and also it was over 30 years ago. A few smaller wins too. Mostly I lost, of course.
Sometime around the early 2000s, I got invited into a fantasy baseball league with some guys from a message board I was on. They took baseball very seriously and I drafted a team based on who had the funniest names. Tim Spooneybarger, my man. This strategy was unsuccessful at winning the league and also at impressing or amusing my message board compatriots, and I was never invited back. I learned nothing, as you’ll see.
During the peak of my UFC fandom, I had an account on a gambling site and would throw down occasional $5 bets to make the shows a little more fun for myself. Nothing serious. For one card, a friend who knows a lot more about the sport than me gave me a selection of underdogs that he thought could win. I bet $5 on a six-fight parlay and needed them all to pay off to get anything. Then I had a nap. I woke up to texts from my friend going nuts about the show, which annoyed me because I had told him I didn’t want spoilers. Then I figured out why he was going nuts. I had gone 5 for 6, and the sixth fight had been thrown out. I assumed this would void my bet but no, I won over $700 US. I cashed out $650, sent $100 to my buddy for his picks, and spent the rest making a few years of $5 bets until the money and my interest in the UFC ran dry.
In more recent years, I’ve been part of a CFL pick’em pool. You choose the winners of each game every week and assign them points based on how confident you are in your picks. Somehow – I will never know how – I came in second place this year and won $170. This was pure profit because my wife is in the pool too and she always pays the entry fee for both of us. I also had a week where I was the only one who made perfect picks and honestly that would have been more than enough for me. I’d love to say I’m a CFL genius but my success is really a condemnation of everyone else in the pool.
But what I had never done was true, proper, fantasy football.
What I know
I know this guy, PK. I know him by many names, one involving frozen foods, but PK is what we’re going with here. And last year, he was excited to tell me that he was bringing back Teriyaki.
I don’t know if PK was part of my one ill-fated foray into fantasy baseball, but he’d have been around then. And he ran Teriyaki back then, I think. An NFL fantasy league with crazy scoring. I knew of it but never took part.
I don’t remember how it got the name Teriyaki. I’d ask PK but I suspect the answer would be cryptic and why ruin the magic anyway?
Believing I’d been in Teriyaki before, PK asked if I wanted to take part in the 2024 iteration, and I said sure. In short order I realized this was a terrible mistake because the pick’em pool only needs minimal knowledge of the CFL (or, in my case, even less) but Teriyaki would require me to know actual things about the NFL. And also how fantasy leagues work.
I’d never watched an NFL game in full. That’s a thing I know. Not a good place to start from.
First and arguably most importantly, my team needed a name. I’d forgotten what I originally named my team but through the magic of text message searches, I found it – Wat Hi Grandma. It was some combo of a typo and predictive text that I picked because that all happened right as I realized I had to give my team a name. I never really liked it and I soon switched to The Pure Fusion Collective, borrowing the exceptionally goofy name of a WWE stable. I can’t take credit – I’m in a group chat that also got renamed to The Pure Fusion Collective a few days before and I was just stealing the idea. It was better than what I had. I’ve never been good with titles. Neither is the Pure Fusion Collective.
Here’s PK’s pre-draft assessment of my team:
The Pure Fusion Collective
THE MAN: Meet James! Another member of the Regina Supercluster, computer toucher at large, devoted partner, avid writer, pro wrestling enthusiast. The dirty secret is that a lot of us met via pro wrestling writing/message boards. Avid live music attendee, with more knowledge of the Crash Test Dummies than probably anyone who isn’t actually in the band. Rock solid dude and dangerously close to Most Normal Guy I Know, which everyone agrees is a damning indictment of my taste in men. Tolerates my endless stream of Canada questions.
THE NAME: A reference to a heel stable in WWE that I didn’t know existed until I Googled it. It’s got Shayna Bayzler, so it can’t be all bad. I have even less knowledge of WWE in 2024 than I do of the NFL at this point, so if you ask me what’s going on the G1 Climax, I’ve got you covered (Takeshita was a revelation all summer), but if you put a gun to my head and asked me if, like, the Hurt Business was currently in existence, I’d get vented.
THE HISTORY: Much to our mutual surprise, this is James’ first year in Teriyaki somehow! He is going to die.
THE DRAW: James’ numbers were 3, 10, 8, 8 and 9, with an average of 7.6. This tied him for 8th, and I asked Red instead of James to pick heads or tails, solely because I was already talking to Red about the Beta Band, probably. James has been awarded the ninth (9th) pick in the Teriyaki Draft, and James has been awarded A Favor™.
More on the Favor later.
The draft date was set. Not sure where to begin, I turned to my brother-in-law, who made a suggestion that seemed as good as any. My first pick was Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson. Those of you who know things are already cringing. Jeff knows things:
And the draft went on. One by one, I picked 23 Cleveland Browns based on what their rankings were in the system, or open positions I needed to fill, or who had a funnier name. I did not draft the Browns’ defence, which I should have done early on, but someone else got to it first. Jeff is a Green Bay Packers fan so I took their defence instead. I hoped this would annoy him but he didn’t seem to care. Feely, however, was delighted because his team went up against mine on Week 10, which was when Cleveland and Green Bay shared a bye week.
PK, busy conducting things, didn’t realize what had transpired until later:
This has never failed to make me laugh ever since.
The Yahoo! fantasy football AI ranking thing gave my team an F and a projected record of 0-15-0. Rude.
You surely know the general idea of fantasy football better than I did going into this. You set your lineup for the week based on which of your players are actually playing. Each week, your team goes against another player’s team. You get points when your guys do good stuff and lose them when they do bad stuff. Easy enough. I’d been told that the scoring in Teriyaki is out of whack compared to a normal league. I showed the scoring matrix to some friends who thought it was crazy and others who said “seems like normal fantasy football to me” so I don’t know.
What I do know is that my terrible team got predictably annihilated for the first few weeks. Then came Week 4, where I lost by less than 4 points (328.70 to 324.84 to be precise). I thought it was very funny that the ALL BROWNS ETHNOSTATE (as PK called them) (a much better name for both my team and that WWE stable) came so close to pulling off an upset. I figured it would be the highlight of my season, especially since I could never remember to actually set my lineups and I kept playing injured and benched players.
Somewhere in here, Deshaun Watson, my gross sex pervert not-very-good-at-football-anymore quarterback, suffered an Achilles tear. As one with a perpetually sore Achilles tendon myself, that sounds horrible – but also I was real glad for the excuse to kick him off my team. Me and the Browns both replaced him with Jameis Winston.
Added after the fact:
Mika, reading this for some reason, said “wait, why do I know the name Jameis Winston? Oh right, he’s a sex pest too.” And yes, his Wikipedia entry has subsections for “sexual assault allegation” and “2017 groping allegation,” among other things. To which I again say “it’s the NFL.” I’m thinking now about the difficulty of trying to draft an allegation-free team and I think the defence alone would make that impossible.
Around the same time as the quarterback change – I don’t care enough to look up exact dates now – wide receiver Amari Cooper got traded to Buffalo. I debated whether or not I was morally obligated to drop him because he was no longer a Brown, but when he immediately began racking up more points for me since he was now on a better team, I decided to keep him. He was a Brown when I got him. Good enough.
With my team having accidentally improved, I made a few more moves, cutting some underperforming Cleveland Browns and replacing them with players whose name was Brown. Chase Brown, Noah Brown, Dyami Brown, Hollywood Brown, Equanimeous St. Brown – I honestly couldn’t tell you if the last two even ever made it off the bench for me but how could I not take them with names like that?
I won week 8. Wasn’t even close. 369.60 to 275.12. This is my life’s greatest achievement. Then I wrecked it all.
Apart from the scoring, there were other wacky elements at play – namely, Favors and The Envelope. As referenced above in PK’s writeup, the initial draft order was set through an overly complicated combination of multiple spins through a list randomizer, then the results averaged out, then ties broken with multiple coin tosses. If you wound up tied, and were not the one given the option to call heads or tails for the coin toss, you were instead awarded A Favor. I was awarded A Favor.
The Envelope, meanwhile, was a literal envelope and not a metaphor. That’s what it said on it. “This Is The Envelope. It Wasn’t a Metaphor.”
If 10 people voted to open The Envelope, it would be opened. You could vote at any point in the season. I immediately voted to open The Envelope because I don’t really care about football but I do care about chaos.
At the time of my Week 8 win, there were 6 votes to open The Envelope. Feeling that I had done all I could do with my one (1) win for the season, I chose chaos and asked to invoke my Favor; namely, I wanted 4 bonus votes which would result in opening The Envelope.
Kyle, Not From Saskatchewan (this is less helpful and personally identifying than you’d suspect since most Kyles aren’t), immediately called in his Favor, asking:
- for my Favor to be negated
- for my initial Yes vote (re: The Envelope) to be turned into a No
- for me to have to write a 500-1,000 word essay regarding The Envelope in order to get my initial vote turned back into a Yes
PK noted that cancelling out my extra Yes votes was asked for in the name of upholding democracy. But he also noted that subsequently cancelling out my original Yes vote would itself subvert democracy, so he had a decision to make. And he made it.
Me and Kyle, Not From Saskatchewan, were challenged to each write a song about football, in the style of Taylor Swift, that would be judged by Taylor Swift fans who don’t follow football. The use of AI would result in having your seven best players given to Drew. I don’t know Drew and am not sure how he wound up the beneficiary here but it didn’t matter because I refuse to use AI wherever possible and even if I had, let’s remember, my team? Still very bad.
Bonus points would be awarded for performing the song, with further bonus points available for dressing in era-appropriate Taylor Swift attire. We did not do this.
I promise you, I did put some work into my song. I spent far too long googling Taylor Swift songs – I only personally know, like, 3 maybe – and trying to rework them into something about football, a topic about which I also know nothing. Finally, after many failed attempts, I decided I was overthinking this and should put in the same level of effort as I had with team drafting and management. I took the Taylor Swift song Karma, changed every instance of the word “karma” to the word “football,” and sent it in. And I won.
Kyle, Not From Saskatchewan, had rewritten the lyrics to Shake it Off. One of the judges said that “Kyle absolutely made an attempt, but James tried.” This was even funnier than me actually winning a game. As my reward (?), The Envelope would be opened. By way of punishment, Kyle, Not From Saskatchewan, was required to start at least one player with the name Taylor or Swift for the remainder of the season.
As for The Envelope, PK revealed what was inside:
CHAOS.
Opening The Envelope led to all of the previous scores being rejiggered, with the funniest result being that I had now won a second week.
The second funniest is that it took PK hours to manually reconfigure everything, and then another player immediately asked for their Favor to bench the highest scoring player and two lowest scoring players instead of the top three. At this point I was greatly enjoying this Mario Party-ass football league.
Another player asked to not have The Envelope’s consequences apply to them at all, which was a much more sensible Favor.
PK’s decision was to put forward an essay question to the entire league. He wanted at least 500 words on the topic of “What makes you so damn special?” Just talk yourself up. Irony and self deprecation were forbidden. Whoever submitted an essay would be allowed to choose Justice or Vengeance, and the results would modify the effects of The Envelope.
Half the league sent in essays, including me. I came close to being disqualified for self deprecation, which I maintain I did not do. I was the sole vote for Vengeance because, again, Chaos. There were 4 votes for Justice, 1 abstention, and Kyle, Not From Saskatchewan, chose 85% Justice and 15% Chaos. As a result, everyone who had previously elected to open The Envelope would lose only their top scorer. Kyle, Not From Saskatchewan, who did not want to open The Envelope, would lose 15% of his top scorer for choosing partial Vengeance. The rest got no effects from The Envelope. This changed all the scores again and cost me my second win, which… yeah, that’s fair. I ended the season at 1-14-0. Suck on that, Yahoo! AI.
I kinda checked out after The Envelope nonsense settled down. As such, I still don’t know how the playoffs work. The league may or may not return next year, and I may or may not get invited back if it does; regardless, I’m not likely to ever need to know.
I sent this post to PK, who provided some important additional information:
All in all, a grand victory for Chaos.
Actually Never 
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