Every year at this time, I hear a lot of people bemoaning the fact that football is not starting for several months. I always look away and smile to myself, knowing that just isn’t true. In baseball they call the off season slow time the hot stove league. We hear stories of occasional free agent movement and very little of importance. In football, that sport to which we are all addicted, there is no off season.

When one is playing in a dynasty or keeper leagues, fantasy football never stops. That simple fact alone is why a re-drafter league can never in my mind hold a candle to a dynasty league.

Trading, evaluating rookies and fantasy free agents for the annual draft, deciding who to cut, determining the affect of free agent movement on your team and having a great time with it all year round is reason enough that all of us should play in at least one dynasty or keeper league.

With a regular season ending at New Year’s, a month long play off ending in the Super Bowl, the Pro Bowl game and Combine in February, free agency during March, the rookie draft in April and mini camps up to the opening of July training camps, the NFL has become a year round event. And that triggers a question of why do we need that so much?

Back in 1962, as most fantasy football historians acknowledge, Bill Winkenbach, a limited partner in the Oakland Raiders and a few of his friends started the first fantasy football league. Winkenbach is also credited with being the founder of rotisserie baseball in the late 50’s. The strange thing about all that is that it took so long for either activity to take off. I think the whole key to the retardation of progress was technology.

We started our dynasty league in 1985, 23 years later. At that time, there were very few people playing the game. The written resources were few and far between. How many of you remember the Fantasy Football Digest? It was sort of a boiler plate production that changed very little from year to year. Yet it was the bible of the game back in the 80’s. Major publications in that era were certainly out there on NFL football in general. Pro Football Weekly, The Sporting News and Street & Smith’s were at the top of my list. However none of them catered to fantasy football players specifically.

Keeping the stats was a pain in the neck to say the least. Fortunately, two of us in our league are CPA’s. We manually calculated the weekly results and kept cumulative player statistics as well. I just couldn’t wait for Monday morning to arrive. I would leave an hour early for work, stop and buy the newspaper and sit in the car computing fantasy game scores. Can you imagine waiting so long after the games have ended to know whether you had won or lost? All the results would get double checked and verified later by both myself and my buddy Jim. We then recorded them for the ages on hand written spreadsheets.

Heck, when we started, spreadsheet software was in its infancy. Before long I used my Apple IIe and AppleWorks to create spreadsheet generated standings and statistics reports. Without a hard drive, this was the technological equivalent of using whatever the cave men used to write on the cave walls. We then moved up to Lotus. Record keeping became so easy that even a cave man could do it (it’s ok to groan at this point?). It couldn’t get much better that that… Could it?

The answer to that was a resounding yes! In the early 90’s, Sideline Software created Fantasy Football League Manager. That made our record keeping a relative breeze. The only trick was that new fangled download thing. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. This new computer stuff was just sooooooo complicated. Would it ever catch on?

Ten years later, we switched to the Sideline Software folks’ new product, MyFantasyLeague.com. We now had online connectivity for all league members at the click of a mouse. Wow! We had come so far from the days of the four and 13 column green handwritten spreadsheets.

Bill Winkenbach and his buddies were certainly ahead of their time. This was a game that was perfect for the multimedia technological explosion that took place in the mid 90’s. It’s a bitter shame that Winkenbach died in 1993, just as the game he fathered was reaching puberty.

Why do we play this game? What lure is there that draws us deeper and deeper into the fantasy football world, year after year? How many people reading this article are able to limit their playing of the game to only one league?

Back in 1985 when we started playing, the game was in its infancy. We had seen an article about the roots of the game and it sounded like fun. Back in those days, the olden days as my kids call them, people actually enjoyed sitting around playing recreational card games and board games. If we had physical aggressiveness to get out of our systems there was always bowling, or softball.

There was no computer to sit at and worship for hours on end. Survivor and Big Brother meant entirely different things. Watching Gene Simmons was part of seeing a wailing Kiss concert and not a reality TV show. Sitcoms were actually funny, without relying on vulgarity and double entendres. People spent time together enjoying each other’s company. Social meant face to face meeting of other people.

Today it seems that more of our time is spent watching TV. The cable and satellite explosion has left us with hundreds of channels to watch, many more than the channels we could count on our fingers as children. The internet has changed the world too. Now many of our friends are online. We write to them and possibly speak to them on the phone. My wife Bonnie and I met online, not at a church social, or in a bar.

My Merriam-Webster Online (what else?) dictionary tells me that vicarious is defined as “performed or suffered by one person as a substitute for another…” Fantasy football has become the ultimate vicarious experience. Up until a few years ago we were limited as adults to getting our competitive juices flowing by over managing kids playing little league baseball, peewee football or basketball. I guess I could include soccer here, but I have trouble giving games as exciting as watching paint dry any degree of legitimacy.

I can remember managing one year in a T-Ball league. The boys and girls were about seven years old and I think at least half of them had ADHD. They sat down in the outfield and picked dandelions in the middle of an inning, dropped everything hit to them, couldn’t throw worth a lick, but they were having FUN. Unfortunately the adults running the program took things much more seriously. Winning 37-36, instead of losing by that score was not only important, it was imperative.

Another time, coaching six year olds in a park district basketball league, it became obvious that not one of our ten kids could hit the basket with the ball. The powers that be waited a couple weeks before dropping the baskets from 10 feet to eight. They were concerned about destroying the reality of the game. Frustrating children and making them hate the game didn’t seem to matter. The budding Bobby Knights and Pat Rileys took the way the game was played very seriously.

Back in the 60’s Vince Lombardi was credited with saying “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” I think that over the years there has been a transition from gratification obtained through interrelationships with God, our families and our community to self absorption with an imaginary life style. As much as the technological revolution has been a godsend, I think it has destroyed our imagination.

When was the last time we all read a book? How many of us watch more then one reality TV show per week? How many of us sit down and listen to music played on our musical device of choice? Do we ever sit down with our young children and play Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders? Do we ever read them a story?

Now I’m not trying to say that I am holier than thou… No, I am as involved in all the techno baubles as anyone. I just have enough memories to know that the other things are important too. That Sunday drive in the country; maybe a board game night once in a while with the wife and kids, or friends; a visit to a museum or planetarium; a hike in the woods, or anything else that promotes family unity is something we just have to do once in a while. Do we eat dinners as a family anymore, or is it more like cafeteria style in front of the TV?

Another good aspect of this technical revolution is that we can watch TV shows pretty much anytime we want, not just at the prescribed time. Sports events can be recorded with TIVO or DVR devices to watch anytime we please. I think its time to declare our freedom from the technology gods and proclaim our independence. We can use these new tools in such a way that we can not only enjoy our sports and other TV shows, but we can also spend more quality time with our families.

I’m sure going to try it. God knows that I have been a BIGTIME offender of screwing up my priorities. Now I have an opportunity to try to correct that. How about you?