The evolution of being a knowledgeable sports fan has changed extensively since the early 1970s. This blogger grew up listening to sporting events on the radio at home and when riding in the car. It was an extremely lucky week to be able to watch the Denver Broncos play on television during the National Football League (NFL) weekends. Monday Night Football was a treat to get to halftime, and then listen to Howard Cosell rattle off five minutes of highlights about the games already played the day before. ESPN was a decade away from changing the sports television landscape. As this blogger navigated his way through elementary school, I craved all live sporting events being shown on television.
Watching Professional Sports
Major League Baseball (MLB) regular season, playoffs, and World Series games were watched and analyzed. National Basketball Association (NBA) Finals signaled that the school year was about to end. MLB All-Star Game was a nice diversion to losing track of time during each summer break. College football was hit and miss, due to the major television networks showing the majority of Notre Dame football games. The conference matchups of the Big 8, Big 10, and Pac-10 weren’t highlighted until Halloween to Thanksgiving. College bowl season was good but not great due to shoddy camera work and the lack of timely in game statistics.
NFL playoffs were easy to follow due to the small AFC and NFC bracket used to get to the Super Bowl. Winter and Summer Olympics coverage was always shown on ABC until 1992, and used to focus more on the athletic events, instead of the back stories of the athletes and their trials and tribulations to get to the ultimate athletic competition. The big three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) had their niche markets in the mid 1970s, and no one could predict what was going to happen in 1979.
New Sports Network Was a Shot in the Dark
ESPN debuted on 9/7/1979 to low fanfare and dismal ratings. Why would a cable network focus on showing games that only small market regional sports fans cared about? Or spend thirty minutes highlighting what had happened at daily practices? A lightning bolt struck on 12/5/1979, when a fired head basketball coach named Dick Vitale, called a non-descript basketball game between Wisconsin and DePaul. DePaul won 90-77 and a talented announcer with a unique personality was born that night.
Fantasy Baseball Origins
Fantasy baseball started in the early 1960s due to the analytical mind of a professor at the University of Michigan, William A. Gamson. Gamson most likely used his basement to develop a game based purely on baseball numbers. The intent of this new game was to focus on statistics (AVG, HR, SB, W, S, ERA). Fantasy team owners would draft their roster and play against another fantasy owner for one calendar week.
The fantasy baseball team that scored the most points based on statistics would win the game that week. The fantasy baseball league schedule would reset the following week and different fantasy owners would play each other again. ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, Silly Little Game, chronicles how fantasy baseball started. An excellent book written by Sam Walker, Fantasyland, explains how far fantasy baseball has progressed since it was started 60+ years ago.
Fantasy Football Origins
Fantasy football started in 1989 as a mirror image scoring wise of fantasy baseball. Football was different due to fantasy team owners studying roster trends all week, choosing starters for Sunday and Monday games, and then regrouping and strategizing again. Fantasy baseball is a daily crossword puzzle for six months. Fantasy football is a weekly cadence that closely mirrors all NFL work weeks.
The general public warmed up quickly to fantasy football in the 1990s. With the quick expansion of the internet and websites that could track scoring in real time, the popularity of fantasy football exploded in the late 1990s. NFL is the biggest fantasy sport with approximately thirteen million people playing in 2024. All fantasy team owners are trying to make their NFL season a memorable and profitable one. Several books have been written about fantasy football (Committed: Confessions of a Fantasy Football Junkie, annual release of the Fantasy Football Index, Fantasy Football for Dummies) to help beginners, intermediates, and experts take steps to dominate their respective leagues. An entertaining television series, The League, highlighted the extreme lengths fans go to win their annual league.
Fantasy Sports Expansion
As fantasy baseball and football continued to expand their respective participant footprints, pro basketball (NBA) was next. Was then followed shortly by pro hockey (National Hockey League). Due to the noticeable spike in auto racing popularity in the late 1990s, NASCAR became a fantasy sport. Golf, boxing, MMA, and Formula 1 all fell in line to be fantasy sports. That enabled their fans to know and leverage all of the statistical details of their favorite sports.
As the years have passed since 1999, sports statistics have evolved to fully explain player ratings and predicted outputs. Moneyball is the best non-fiction book and movie to explain and demonstrate this upper tier of statistical analysis. The world’s new focus on data analytics has caused sports statistics to become as critical as business financial planning data. This blogger loves numbers and how to use them for a cerebral advantage. I can’t wrap my head around Yards After Contact (YAC) in the NFL and a player’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in MLB. A player is a player until he performs under real game pressure and statistics/metrics can be deceiving.
Fans Flock to Fantasy Sports
So why do more and more people continue to sign up and play fantasy sports? It has become significantly simpler and easier to play due to online website platforms. All fantasy sports require an entry fee and transaction dollars, which at its core is sports gambling. Most fantasy sports players enjoy winning more money than they paid to enter their respective league. Season ending trophies are a nice sentimental touch.
Social pressures and group behavior naturally cause people to form fantasy sports leagues with similar interests. Work groups, families, friends, and athletes naturally congregate together to see who ends up being the smartest or luckiest owner, based on how the ball bounces. Hard core fantasy players are driven to be smarter than the experts on ESPN and Fox Sports. For the armchair QB, fantasy sports enable them to be more savvy and smarter than most professional sports teams’ front office staff. This is due to being able to draft an unbeatable lineup that may or may not have salary cap restrictions, contract holdouts, and underperformers. Injuries and bad luck are the great equalizers for all fantasy sports experts when their teams struggle.
Internalizing the Impact of Fantasy Sports
This blogger has been playing fantasy sports since 1992. I’ve spent way too much time entering box score data into spreadsheets, collecting season entry fees, and arbitrating player trades. Basically, been an adult babysitter for thirty-two years. Lost and gained friends through various leagues, due to the competitive nature of fantasy sports. Most importantly fantasy sports has provided a tether for me with close family and friends since starting a low-key fantasy baseball league in 2011.
An excellent article written by Tony Gervino, Eternal Bragging Rights, published in the New York Times Magazine on 8/11/13, keeps me grounded as a sports fan and fantasy sports player due to simplifying the bond that keeps fans and families together no matter what the statistics show. Winning a league title is nice, being a statistical expert is better, but keeping close ties to friends and family is what matters most. Batter up!
