By Alex Kurtz Sports editor
In the past ten years, the world of fantasy sports has grown exponentially from the point where only die-hard football fans played it to its current state where nearly 75 million people play fantasy football alone according to a 2015 report by American Express.
FOX even ran a comedy show called “The League,” which followed a group of people who ran and played in a fantasy football league.
The lengths that the characters go to in order to win their championship and be the best team are outrageous, but this is not too far from the reality of fantasy football. The show ran for seven seasons, which says a lot about the popularity of fantasy sports.
If you play fantasy football and have not watched it, please do because it is hilarious.
With fantasy being such a large part of the football lifestyle now, people just take its functionality for granted.
Back in the ancient times, fantasy football players would eagerly await Monday’s paper to review box scores and tally up their players points in accordance with their leagues scoring policies.
Today, fantasy football players have shed these neanderthalic ways, and have instead embraced the wonders of technology. And technology has embraced them right back.
Any major sports website now has a fantasy football platform that allows the user to draft their team online, with computer tallied points, and adjust everything from the comfort of their own smartphone in the form of an app.
One of the game’s biggest platforms is sports giant ESPN.
On Sunday, Sept. 11, 2016 when the NFL season was set to kick off and fantasy gurus waited anxiously with their televisions primed and smartphones in hand, the unthinkable happened: The ESPN fantasy football app crashed and people were left without up-to-date stats for the first games of the season. And absolute anarchy ensued.
People, including myself, wait all year for football to come back so they can fully indulge in their obsession.
People wait all summer to defend their fantasy title or regain bragging rights from last year’s disappointment, or maybe a little bit of both if you play in multiple leagues. When the ESPN app crashed on the holiest of sports days, did we expect people to keep to themselves about the issue? Of course not. This is 2016 after all.
Fantasy players were triggered, immediately taking to social media to voice their extreme displeasure with ESPN’s blunder. Reactions ranged from tweeting the picture of Michael Phelps and his pouting face from this year’s summer Olympics, to people to using Adobe Photoshop to put the popular “crying Michael Jordan face” meme onto the ESPN fantasy app’s logo.
The anger though was definitely justified. You had one job ESPN: to make sure this app was working on the first day, and you botched it really hard.
As a league manager myself, I was bombarded with people asking if my app was working to see if it was just them, and multiple players even asked me to change their lineups because some players were supposed to start, but they were not because the manager could not update their lineup with the app crash. It was an absolute nightmare.
Eventually the app began to function around the second set of games, which started around 4:15 p.m., and league managers were able to update players and move players to starting roles if the teams were not able to update their starting lineups. But the damage was already done.
One player in my league was actually kicked out of his team during the crash and the situation was not fixed until Thursday, when he finally regained access after I kicked him out of the league and invited him again to take control of his team.
Despite all of this, fantasy football will still remain a huge hit for the “World-Wide Leader in Sports,” and people will still continue to play.
What this whole debacle has really taught us about fantasy football, and fantasy sports in general, is that they have absolutely consumed us.
I haven’t seen widespread panic on social media like this even when natural disasters swept across the country. People would have less of a reaction to aliens making first contact with humans than they did when the ESPN app crashed.
Fantasy is so deeply rooted in our culture today that websites such as Draft Kings, who made over $300 million in entry fees in 2015, have sprung up and have been hugely successful. With fantasy football growing by the year, I do not expect a halt in the industry any time soon. So go out there and make you and your players, who do not even know you exist, proud.
