Time To Kill Time

As summer fades away, it's time again for fantasy football to get going again. I had played consistently in high school and college, but gave it up after a while. It got resuscitated in me recently, and this marks the third year in a row that I play with friends I have here in Los Angeles. I have had tolerable finishes, but not won. That is in keeping with how I ever did before, when I only ever came as close as third or fourth. Perhaps this year I will do better.

I'm lukewarm on the team I have assembled. The method of drafting players in this league is challenging, as you must bid on each player in the manner of an auction. Not only is it hard because of how you must assign value to each player, it is hard because the best players do not necessarily come up for bid all at the beginning. To draft well, you must be the master of your emotions and nerves, subjugating them both beneath solid reason. I struggle there.

I do better at shoring up a weak team after a few shaky games, and have gone on a mid-season tear each of the last two seasons. One must find the good players who initially languish on the waiver wire, and I do fairly well at that. I am reluctant to make trades, though I have a time or two. They have not helped tremendously. In any case, I hope this year for that year to conclude with the final game of the places, and not a couple of games before the end of the regular season. That has been my fate.

Win or lose, it is inevitable that I will be rather preoccupied during much of the next few months. That is not to say that I will be less productive, because I can't allow that, but it is seldom that fantasy football will be far from my mind. I will refrain as much as I can from discuss it among those for whom it holds no appeal, but don't think that its absence from my conversation will be its absence from my thoughts. What can be said except that it's an irrational passion?