Fantasy football is a more popular “sport” than most actual sports, with more than 40 million people playing in the United States per a recent study by the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association.
This should come as no surprise to those of us who have spent too much time the past couple of weeks studying up on, oh, the pass-catching merits of Jonnu Smith versus Rob Gronkowski in preparation for our drafts. I went Smith as my TE1, by the way. He’s going to be Mac Jones’s best friend. We’re all experts until we aren’t, right?
Fantasy football – and for our purposes here, I’m referring to the traditional version where you draft a team at the start of the season, rather than the more recent daily kind – has been a familiar companion to the real NFL for so long now that it’s hard to remember a time when they didn’t correspond.