My name is Bryce Warwick, and I am a fantasy sports addict. It wasn’t so bad when it was just 15 minutes a week to tweak a fantasy football roster, but then I started playing fantasy basketball, which requires checking up on your team a couple times a week too. Next came fantasy baseball and a team demanding seven months of constant attention. When I started playing fantasy hockey and found myself concerned with the power play production of Ladislav Nagy, I started to question whether or not I’d become addicted. When I started playing fantasy golf, I knew.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of fantasy sports, it’s relatively simple. You and a group of friends — or a group of complete strangers if you sign up for a public league — draft real professional athletes and create a team of your own. When those athletes compete in real games, your fantasy team gets points based on their performances. For example, if you have Kevin Garnett on your fantasy team and he scores 24 points and has 13 rebounds in one night, you add those point and rebound totals to your team’s stats. You become the general manager and coach of your team, deciding who to start or bench and whether or not to accept a trade offer while monitoring the progress of your players.
What started out as a pastime for only the most sports-obsessed has become the hobby of millions nationwide. All of a sudden you have a rooting interest in a football game between the Ravens and the Jets that you otherwise wouldn’t have cared about, and whether or not Rasheed Wallace makes his free throws in a game that’s all but over.
Even though I think I’ve taken it a bit too far — I find myself rooting for Shigeki Maruyama’s putt to break harder to the left so Phil Mickelson can move up to third place — this increased interest in things I wouldn’t otherwise care about gives me an idea.
What if we had our very own fantasy league here at UCSD, devoted entirely to UCSD sports? Attendance at women’s basketball games isn’t usually very good, but would more people show up if they had Ali Ginn on their fantasy teams and were rooting for her to score 20? Would men’s volleyball games be more exciting if along with rooting for the team, fans cared about how many kills Adam Toren was able to pick up? Would softball get more attention if fantasy owners’ hopes rose and fell with Amy Mettee’s batting average?
The idea may be impractical, but for fantasy geeks like myself, it’s definitely intriguing. It shouldn’t take fantasy teams to get people out to see UCSD compete, but I think that if it was enough to draw people out in the first place, they’d want to come back.
Unfortunately, I’ve run out of time to ponder this subject. I need to see how many greens in regulation Sergio Garcia has hit lately before I go to class. I’ll start trying to control my addiction tomorrow.
