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Whose Football Is It, Anyway?


football.JPGA couple weeks ago I had a momentarily confusing, disorienting experience watching NFL football on a Sunday afternoon. I’d just gotten my son down for a nap and came down to see the score of the Denver game. I’m no hard-core fan—I can’t even remember who they were playing that day—but I do like to watch the Broncos a bit when I can.

So I started watching the scroll on the bottom of the screen, expecting to see scores of the games in progress (the Denver game, I learned later, had been interrupted because of lightning). Instead of game scores, though, they kept posting individual players’ game stats. At first, I thought the numbers were stats from key players in certain games, and then we’d get corresponding game scores. Nope. As I kept watching, and watching—and not getting game scores—I noticed a little notice in the lower-left hand corner of the scroll bar that said something about fantasy football.

Now, I know what fantasy football is, of course, and that it’s been around for many years. I know that people “draft” players for their fantasy team, then use those players’ stats and scores as indicators for how their team as a whole did. All well and good.

What surprised me, though, was that for the first time that I’d noticed, fantasy football—a virtual game of sorts—seemed to eclipse the real thing for a few minutes. I had to watch, I don’t know, seven or eight minutes before game scores started flashing again. It was annoying to me—a casual, non-fantasy-football-playing fan—to be forced to wait for fantasy stats to finish scrolling before the real scores came up.

As annoyances in life go, this one’s pretty insignificant. I could have gotten up and checked the Internet if I really had to know right now (and I didn’t) the score of the Denver game. But I do think my experience is indicative of some interesting things about where culture, technology, entertainment and individualism are colliding, in this case in realm of football.

Somewhere along the line, a programming director decided that catering to the needs of fantasy football fans is at least as important as catering to the needs of those who just want to know how their team is doing. And that sends an interesting message: how individual players are doing is just as important as how their teams are doing, because millions of fantasy football “owners” have virtual games riding on the outcome of individual players’ performance. And it’s all tracked in real time, via the scroll at the bottom of the screen.

I was talking with one of my Plugged In compatriots about this experience, and he said that he’s even seen some pro players apologize to fantasy fans via Twitter when their individual performance suffered on a given Sunday. Again, it alludes to the fact that some people have come to see the virtual game behind the real game as equally important—if not more so.

It’s not the end of the world, of course. But it makes me long for a simpler time when a football game was just that—a football game.