Classes have officially started and so did football season. Many football fans join fantasy leagues to compete against friends and build excitement for the games. Some people find fantasy sports a waste of time while others wait around all year for the season to start.

Fantasy teams consist of players throughout the National Football League who score points for your team based on how they perform in a real game. People who obsess over fantasy football can spend a lot of time trying to build their team to its full potential.

Drafting a strong team is not easy and can require a lot of research before the season actually begins. After making your team the fun of watching your players perform begins.

David Lederer, a right guard for the Kingsmen football team, has been playing fantasy football for five years and still continues to find excitement within it.

“I love football and I always watch the games so [fantasy football] makes them more interesting,” said Lederer. “I also enjoy the competition with my friends.”

Although Lederer even spends time working on his team during class, he says it is worth the bragging rights.

“I probably check my lineup once a day, but I beat Sean Bellotti’s team in week one by 30 points so it’s worth it,” Lederer continued.

Fantasy football might be exciting but it can also be a distraction if you get too caught up with it. Senior Amanda Miller, an avid sports fan, does not find any enjoyment in fantasy football.

“People get too wrapped up in it,” said Miller, “I feel that fantasy sports take an element out of the beauty of watching sports. [Fantasy users] get so consumed on statistics of an individual player.”

In fantasy football it is highly important for an individual player to have a good game. Ultimately, fantasy users begin to focus more on the individual performances as opposed to the team’s performance.

“I think it really loses a magic factor in sports,” said Miller. “Football is not an individual sport, it’s a team sport and I think fantasy makes it into an individual sport and a statistic sport.”

It can be easy to get caught up in fantasy football and forget about the real game, but it also does increase people’s interest in the sport. Maybe you don’t care about the San Francisco 49ers but you have their starting quarterback on your team, so you decide to watch a game you would not normally watch.

Fantasy sports can make the game more interesting but at the same time it can make users much more worried. Brett Halvaks, the assistant cross country coach at California Lutheran University, has been playing fantasy sports for nearly a decade now.

Halvaks has always experienced the best of both worlds when playing in fantasy leagues.

“Fantasy football is exciting in a sense but I also think it makes it more stressful sometimes because you want your guys to do really well,” Halvaks said.

Joining a league can be hectic at times but you can also discover a lot more about the sport that you never knew before.

“[Fantasy football] is a fun thing to get involved with and I’ve had friends that knew nothing about a sport,” said Halvaks. “Then they played in a fantasy league and were able to learn a lot about it.”

It might take some time to understand how fantasy sports work, but once you figure it out it could become a new hobby. Whether it’s your first year or your fifth year in a league, the intense competition and multiple hours spent could eventually be worth the bragging rights of being a fantasy football champion.

Ryan Perez

Staff Writer

Published on September 17, 2014