by Kevin Burton
In business, you have to give a report to the CEO from time to time, so she knows what's going on.
It's called being accountable. And this is serious business.
So it was Thursday that the CEO of the Burtons' fantasy football company paid a visit to the Mock Draft War Room.
See there. I just made the mistake of not capitalizing "Mock Draft War Room" and had to go back and correct myself. This is BIG business. You could say I am rounding into shape, as in training camp.
This is a two-person operation. We have my wife Jeannette, the CEO, and we have me, the President of Football Operations. Her preferred title in all this is "silent partner."
You could also call her "the sane one."
"Wanna go through a draft with me," I said
"Sure," she said brightly.
My home office doubles as a fitness room and triples as a dressing room. It is much more organized than the Mancave, which is to say it looks like pre-tornado preparations, as opposed to post-tornado carnage. It's an odd space. Having more than one human in it requires a sort of wedging of chairs, but we made it happen.
"Give me a number between one and ten," I said. "Six," the CEO said. So I sat down in chair number six of one of the Yahoo Fantasy Football ten-team mock draft rooms.
I must say, for a CEO Jeannette lacked focus. I guess she's rounding into shape too.
She actually left the war room at more than one point during the draft for lesser priorities such as going to the bathroom and putting in eye drops. The latter has risen to the importance of the former these days, because she has just had cataract surgery. I say this in her defense.
But she not only allowed her attention to drift to stray notes on my desk which were not associated with the draft, but asked me questions about them, during the draft, an absolutely unacceptable distraction.
"This is just practice," she laughed, with the emphasis on practice.
"This is preparation for the real thing. It's a mindset," I said.
OK, so here two instincts are grappling within me. There is my reporter's desire to give great detail for the reader. But there is also my CIA-level desire for secrecy, lest I casually give away our fantasy football strategy secrets, which have brought us a fantasy championship each of the past two season, and seven playoff teams out of ten teams fielded.
Fantasy football is that juncture where jock culture crosses with mathematics. It's all about statistical probability and chance and pulled groins.
So here I ask myself the statistical probability that A) someone would actually read this blog post, all the way down to this paragraph, and B) said someone would ever compete against me in fantasy, use these words against me in a draft.
We're talking next to no chance. We're talking miniscule, Cowboys-win-the-super-bowl-level chances.
But the CEO is watching and it's not good form to blurt out our secrets.
But I can tell you, I explained to Jeannette to her greater amusement, why I chose a wide receiver over a slightly better one because his quarterback is better. I explained who the eight "premium" wide receivers are. I told her who our must-get tight end is (and we got him!).
We watched together as the defenses I was targeting were being taken off the board one by one, until finally my turn to draft came and just one of those teams was left standing.
Exhale. That's the essence of fantasy drafting. The exhilaration, the exasperation, the second-guessing.
"Now I know what you're in here doing all this time," Jeannette said. "You're taking this so seriously."
I departed from my usual strategy very slightly during this draft, but came away with a team that could definitely compete for the playoffs, were this a real draft and not just a mock.
I then asked Jeannette to pick a number between one and 12 for a 12-team draft. She said "four," but this is where the story ends.
I told her exactly who we would be getting at number four but seemingly didn't get anything else right for the whole draft. I got that creepy feeling that fantasy players call "tilting" and couldn't wait for it to end.
The e-mail that yahoo sends with draft results has been deleted. The little slip of scrap paper I used to keep track of which players I selected was torn up in disgust. So it sort of didn't happen.
But it's going to happen in about eight weeks when the real fantasy drafts begin. Lord have mercy on the Burtons.
No comments:
Post a Comment