Coming to grips with the inevitable impact of everything we don’t know leading up to football Sunday isn’t easy. In fact, it’s mind-numbingly difficult. Before this lesson sinks in, the belief that you could’ve guessed more accurately will keep you up at night. It’ll make food taste worse and turn you into an intolerable curmudgeon on a Sunday evening. Believing that you should be able to guess the unknown unknowns, in short, will wear away at your sanity.
Accepting that you are going to be the victim of Rumsfeld’s various unknowns, however, is your first step in removing that loser’s mindset from the recesses of your brain.
Poker legend Roy Cook writes in “Real Poker: The Cooke Collection,” that instead of acknowledging the role of luck and understanding its short-term effects, losers will “make excuses justifying losses to themselves. … It’s a hopeless optimism rooted in self-delusion which drags them even further down the losing path. The reasons for their losses lie within.”
Every Sunday morning on Twitter, I field questions from fantasy owners bent on knowing (guessing) every last factor before they use a certain player in their lineups. I swear the following is true, so help me God: owners bench top fantasy quarterbacks because the forecast calls for rain, they bench top-five receivers because they’re also deploying the tight end who lines up alongside that receiver, they use backup running backs because they anticipate a blowout in which the second team will play most of the second half.
If you’ve made any of these decisions in a given week, you’ve already lost. Even if your team happens to score more points than your opponent, you’ve lost. You’ve refused to accept fantasy football for what it is, and embraced the game as you wished it would be: a contest filled with certainty and absolutes. Many of our fantasy decisions are based at least partly on guesswork – a hideous truth, I know.
Multiplying a guess by another guess – How hard will it rain? How can the receiver and tight end both have sufficient targets? What will the score be at halftime? – is a fine way to increase luck’s impact on your final score rather than chip away at it in our attempt to make good fortune as small a factor as possible.
The very act of trying to know the unknowable increases luck’s impact on your fantasy football life.
And when things go badly, when your Sunday afternoon sees your fantasy team tormented by a bad bounce here and a tough break there, don’t blame external forces. That excuse making is the domain of the fantasy football loser. Instead, remember that this is a game, and that luck plays a part in any competitive contest, especially our stupid little game.
Remain focused on making the correct decisions, free from subjectivity, and never multiply a guess by another guess. This game is difficult enough.
What I Learned From Jim Luhr
My first job out of college was as a reporter for a local newspaper headquartered in Laurel, Maryland. It was there, at The Gazette newspapers, that I was assigned what I thought would be a simple obituary. The assignment would prove to be much more, and the story made me – for the first time – engage mortality’s cold reality.
Someone in my coverage area had died, and an email was forwarded one morning from my editor’s inbox to mine, with a note telling me this needed to get into the next day’s paper. My pulse quickened when I opened the email. My stomach flip-flopped. The deceased’s name was Jim Luhr. I had interviewed him a few months earlier for a story I wrote on renovations made to the local Adelphi Pool, of which Luhr had been the president.
It was then that I was overcome with a melancholy I didn’t quite understand. Journalists deal with death in strange ways, probably because so many of our assignments involve death. We joke about it, we write about it without thinking of the pain and agony of loss because, if we did, we’d be in straight jackets after a year on the job.
We cope.
This story was different. I had a distinct memory of Jim, his enormous, fluffy white beard hanging from his skinny face, as a genuinely kind man. He spoke softly, but wasn’t shy. His eyes smiled and maintained contact with mine. Jim spoke so eloquently about improving the Adelphi Pool, making a better place for kids in the community to spend their summer days. Jim, who served as the commissioner of a nearby softball league, rarely said “I,” choosing the communal “we” when discussing the selfless group of locals who were helping with the pool’s renovations. He acknowledged no hierarchy at Adelphi Pool, despite being its president.
Everyone at Adelphi Pool spoke glowingly of the bearded man. Jim was the neighborhood’s unofficial bike-riding trainer, always willing to help a child struggling with the two-wheeled vehicle. He was incredibly patient with every girl and boy, those neighbors said. Jim was an advocate for community over all else, and one of the rare people who seemed genuinely interested in what a person – any person – had to say.
I had spoken to Jim’s wife during my reporting on the pool renovation story, so I had her phone number stored away somewhere on my computer. I gave myself a pep talk, telling myself that these were the ugly things reporters sometimes had to do, and I dialed her number. Sweat beads formed on my brow in the middle of The Gazette’s frigid newsroom.
She was receptive to my call, if not quiet and stunned by the loss of her 53-year-old husband. I asked her how he had died, since the email had no details. Jim’s wife, Karen, answered with what sounded more like questions than statements, since none of it had made much sense.
Jim had walked home after a New Year’s Eve party in the University Park neighborhood, did a load of laundry, and headed to bed.
He never woke up.
Jim’s friends told me he had fought what appeared to be a common cold in the days before that New Year’s Eve. His cough and runny nose hadn’t indicated imminent death to anyone in Jim’s life. Of course it hadn’t. How could it? The Luhrs’ family doctor, upon hearing Jim had died, was dumbstruck, refusing to believe that his patient had passed away. The doctor had given Jim a checkup a few weeks before that New Year’s Eve, and everything had seemed fine.
Jim had danced with his nine-year-old daughter, Kristina, in the waning hours of 2006, and the waning hours of his 53 years on earth. He ate with his wife and friends and family, and he laughed and wished people well when he left for his home. Jim did all of these things for the last time. Considering all this made me, for the first time, consider my own mortality. I was twenty-three years old, so it hadn’t been something I dwelled on with any regularity. Jim’s death shook me in a way nothing else had. I had had grandparents die, just like anyone else, but they were old and sick, and expected to go. My grandmother’s death was a merciful one – she had suffered greatly in her final months. Death, in those instances, seemed a natural part of life.
I got home from the Gazette office late that night, having put the finishing touches on Jim’s expanded obituary, a story I had cared for very much. I flopped onto my bed, stared at the ceiling and felt a sudden pang of shame, an unexpected shift from the sadness that had ruled the day.
I thought of the Sunday, about a month earlier, when my keeper league fantasy team had been fighting for the league’s final playoff spot. I had pieced together a few consecutive wins, despite losing my first two draft picks to season-ending injuries, and I needed one final victory to sneak into the fantasy postseason and make a run at the title. Things went sideways from the get-go on that Sunday, as my opponent’s running back took one to the house for an 80-yard score in the opening minutes of the 1 p.m. games, and, minutes later, one of my wide receivers was carried off the field with a concussion.
There would be no playoffs for me. I sat there though, and I stewed in the juices of my own misery and woe, for another six hours, determined to impose this strange torture on myself. I watched my fantasy scoreboard as if I’d ever had a chance. I ignored phone calls from family members. It was, in hindsight, as if I’d relished the torment of missing out on that last playoff spot.
That, I understood, was my source of shame the day Jim Luhr died. It was more of a well of shame, actually, as the memory of that Sundaylingered for days.
Why had I let fantasy football ruin an entire day? How could my world be so small, so insignificant, that this stupid little online contest could dictate my emotions? How could I have let such a meaningless thing have such a profound effect?
I knew the answer almost before I asked the question: It was because I had not treated fantasy football as a game. I treated it as something far more consequential. It sounds trite, I know, but I had treated that Sunday like life and death.
I’d never tell anyone that they should be ashamed of their reactions to fantasy football outcomes because there are kids going to bed without a morsel of food in their distended bellies, or because brave soldiers somewhere died in a fiery helicopter crash, or because an old man watching TV in his living room caught a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting. Those things happen. They’re part of the modern scenery, however horrific.
We’re always going to overreact to our fantasy teams ups and downs because the game means so much to us. And I think that’s OK – everyone should be passionate about something that takes their minds away from the spirit-crushing news of every day, every year, all the time.
When I feel myself teetering on the edge of overreaction, I think of Jim Luhr, his wife, and his daughters. I think of sudden death, Jim’s death. I find perspective, and I remember that I have a gorgeous, loving wife and a beautiful son whom I love more than I can explain here. This helps me put fantasy football in its proper place, to remember that I should accept fake football as it is, not as I want it to be. It’s meaningful and meaningless all at once – full of meaning in the moment, utterly without meaning in the long run.
It is, in the end, a game.
This is an excerpt from C.D. Carter’s “How To Think Like A Fantasy Football Winner,” available on Amazon for $3.99.
