Raise your hand if you have been personally victimized by Fantasy Football. (Guess I just have to have one Mean Girls reference in each of the articles for some reason). We all have, of course. The dice don’t roll your way one week, or one trade, or one decision, etc. You try to shake it off and make the next right move. The whole point is to try not to linger on your mistakes.
But you have to acknowledge the pain. Because that stuff sucks. And I thought I could compare the mental pain to the physical pain that those rapscallions of the “Jackass” crew have dealt with over the course of four movies.
I’ve listed out some of the terrible things that can/have/will happen over the course of any given season and comped the mental pain to the physical pain of a stunt. *Note: These stunts are from the movies and not from the TV show. **Double Note: “Jackass” Rules
1. GETTING BLOWN OUT – THE HIGH FIVE
Sunday’s here. You’ve set your best lineup, spent hours perhaps on starting the players that give you your best shot at winning that week, and now you’re ready for an intense battle against your opponent. At 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, you are confident (cautiously optimistic, perhaps). At 4:25 p.m. on Sunday, you are down by 56 with only your kicker left. You never even had a chance and you might as well have spent all that time reading S.A Cosby’s new book ALL THE SINNERS BLEED instead of trying to set your lineup.
Just like with The High Five, which is a stunt that makes me fall down on the ground laughing each time I watch it. Please watch the clip that’s attached, but if you can’t I’ll try my best to explain: a giant hand is being held by Johnny Knoxville on one side of a corner. He lets go when one unsuspecting person turns the corner and it slaps them and makes them fall to the ground. They’re just going about their day and then BAM, they’re on the ground with a group of people standing over them and laughing.
2. STARTING THE WRONG PERSON EVERY WEEK – MEDICINE BALL DODGEBALL
In a one-QB league, my buddy had a choice to make each week regarding his quarterback. Each week he would start one of his guys and then the guy on his bench would go off and the guy he started would suck.
He switched them each subsequent week and the same thing happened each time. Eventually, he stopped switching them for three weeks and the guy on his bench went on a good-three week stretch, and the guy he started was bad all three weeks. It’s times like these when we get convinced that we’ve wronged the Fantasy Football Gods somehow.
Medicine Ball Dodgeball is a simple pitch. Bunch of guys in a pitch-black room throwing heavy medicine balls at each other. You’re just trying to not get your teeth smashed in, and maybe do some damage of your own to someone else, only to get your teeth smashed in and not do any damage.
3. SCORING THE 2ND MOST POINTS IN A WEEK, ONLY TO LOSE TO THE HIGHEST-SCORER – BEEHIVE LIMO
How comforting is it to watch as your team crushed it? Even your tight end who you drafted later came through with a touchdown and forty yards. Your score is higher than every one of your league-mates and you’re on top of the world.
Until the late game on Sunday and Monday comes around and your opponent had the Mahomes-Kelce stack and Kelce has his four-touchdown game and then all of a sudden you went from the highest-scoring team to the second-highest-scoring team. Loser. Had you been luckier and played literally anyone else that week, you would have won the week. You somehow lost even though you played perfectly. That’s got to sting.
Beehive Limo is a great Jackass prank. Like the best of them, it’s very, very self-explanatory. It’s literally guys putting a bunch of bees inside of a limo. What makes it funnier is that Knoxville and Co. pour marbles underneath the car doors so when the guys step out, they fall on their butts.
It’s your basic slapstick comedy, with a little added pain and paranoia. Those guys in the car were kicked back and relaxed in their fancy limo and then SURPRISE! PAIN AND SUFFERING!
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4. DROPPING A PLAYER ONLY FOR THEM TO BREAKOUT – LAMBORGHINI TOOTH PULL
Now I was the benefactor of this one. One team decided to drop Justin Jefferson after Week 3 in his rookie year. I promptly spent all of my FAAB budget on him and did not have to wait very long at all for him to break out. That felt good. (Too bad the rest of my team was terrible that year.) There’s always that moment when you’ve picked a guy off the waiver wire that might be useful, so you drop a guy from your bench that hasn’t done anything.
I did that with Dawson Knox a couple of years ago after Week 1 and he was a top-ten tight end for another team as I played Waiver Wire Whack-a-Mole with tight ends in a 16-team league. When that happens, it always feels like it could only happen to me. No one else would make that mistake but me. It was supposed to be an easy drop with zero consequences.
Speaking of massive consequences: I would like to introduce you to Lamborghini Tooth Pull. In which a poor soul name Ehren Mcghehey ends up with a fractured skull when all that was supposed to happen was a tooth getting pulled. What seems like a simple idea with little-to-no consequences turns out to do some serious damage to the guy.
5. LOSING BY 1 OR LESS – THE CUP TEST
One catch, one yard, one fumble, one two-point conversion, one interception, one mistake, one miracle. That’s all it takes to be on the losing side of a matchup. (Everything depends on the settings of your league, of course.) These are the plays we will remember for eternity.
The last-second Hail Mary that grinds your 10-point lead to dust in a matter of seconds. Jason Sanders making his SIXTH field goal of the day as time runs out. Sam Darnold for some stupid reason launched a moonball down the sideline, despite being down by three scores, only for it to be intercepted. Or the worst in my opinion: the kneel to end the game that turns a tie score to a -.1 loss.
Guy wears an old cup and gets punched by a heavyweight boxer in the balls, then has to sit at the end of a bowling lane and have a bowling ball hit him in the nuts, then have a professional softball pitcher launch a softball at the same terrible, old cup. And finally, have another guy pogo-stick onto the cup. That’s the feeling of a loss like that to me. Just plain, old-fashioned testicle torture.
6. INJURIES – PAPERCUTS
I won’t linger. Season-ending ACL tears. Multiple concussions. Lingering foot issues. COVID. Whatever Kadarius Toney is hurt with this week. Injuries suck. Obviously, they suck more for the players who experience them and whose careers depend on their performance and health.
There’s nothing worse than watching one of your star players down on the field during a preseason game, a fantasy playoff, or (God forbid) the championship. Because there’s nothing you can do. If it’s season-long, you can’t trade them for anything. You’re screwed, plain and simple. And as you watch the next week or the next week as the backup running back runs for a hundred yards and two scores, the thought of “that should be my guy” won’t stop poking at you.
Do not watch the linked video for this stunt. Take my word for it. It’s Knoxville and Steve-O getting purposeful papercuts in between the webs of their fingers and toes and on the tongue. That’s what a player’s injury feels like – an awful sting that hurts a little more each day like it’s charging you interest on pain.
I know it’s not going to help, but it’s all a part of Fantasy Football. Sometimes we’re the player whose star running back gets hurt, but sometimes we’re the player who picks up Justin Jefferson off the waiver wire. All of us are going to be unlucky, some longer than others, and that’s just part of the game. God, I love/hate this game.
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