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Ever Wonder How Fantasy Football Started?

Ever Wonder How Fantasy Football Started?

Years ago, fantasy sports were the game of the few. An entire subculture formed, one that shared much in common with the tabletop roleplaying phenomenon of the 1980s. Those who played the game were essentially the D&D nerds of the sports world. We can almost imagine them with glasses and pocket protectors crawling over newspaper box scores with ink-stained fingertips.

That once-association between lovable geeks and fantasy sports gives rise to the common belief that Rotisserie baseball was the first of the fantasy sports. Baseball fans do love their stats, after all. However, the first fantasy game was actually golf, devised and played by Wilfred Winkenbach in the late 1950s. Winkenbach was a limited partner in the Oakland Raiders organization.

In the early 1960s, Winkenbach defined the rules for the first game of fantasy football, and he played it alongside a Raider employee and a beat reporter, among others. By all accounts, the game was a success, but it never made it very far outside that circle. It was not that the idea of it was unappealing. Fantasy sports had existed in one form or another since World War II. However, the early 1960s marked the age of Strat-O-Matic and the magnetic football games.

This was stiff competition for the barely budding game, and inevitably too much for it to gain notice then. Fantasy sports as Winkenback had imagined them and as we view them today, fell by the wayside and they would not gain favor again for many years. When they did, it would all start in the 1980s at La Rotisserie Francaise, a Manhattan restaurant, with a group of baseball-loving friends.

This time, the time was right, and the stat-based nature of fantasy baseball suited itself perfectly to a game fueled by the statistics. This is when the subculture formed. Adults are playing in work cafeterias, and the children are playing in the cafeterias at school. This captures the attention of game companies who soon begin to offer play-by-mail versions of fantasy baseball and even fantasy football. Fantasy GMs across the nation are hammering out trade negotiations by phone.

By 1990, the USA Today newspaper estimated that more than 500,000 Americans were playing some form of fantasy sports. That number may seem small by modern standards, but it was more than enough to set the table for the coming boom. By the mid-1990s, the pastime was so popular that USA Today had a dedicated fantasy sports writer in place, John Hunt, and he operated a high-profile baseball league that included such notables as Peter Gammons and Bill James.

Then, the storm came, the advent of the Internet in the late 1990s. Websites like RotoNews and RotoWire were forming faster than the fan could follow. Suddenly, fantasy sports were more accessible than ever, and we were all experiencing information overload. Gone overnight were the days of tracking box scores or playing by mail. Heck, you didn’t even need people to play with locally. Those 500,000 Americans now counted themselves in the millions, and many of them were online.

More change was coming. While fantasy baseball was still essentially a niche hobby, the football version was about to take North America by the proverbial storm. While pop culture recognizes baseball as America’s pastime, sports fans recognize that it is, in fact, football that captures America’s passion. Likewise, while baseball had carried the fantasy sports torch into the Internet age, it was fantasy football that would create a phenomenon and bring the game to the mainstream.

Football is a fascinating game for many reasons, but the fan culture in particular is intriguing. This is a sports fan culture that is actually inviting to those who would otherwise have no interest in the sport. Sure, the wife might attend a ballgame with you, but she’s not likely to huddle around the TV set for the World Series. The Super Bowl is another story entirely, and this casual association with the game inevitably led those “almost-fans” to fantasy football.

Earlier, we presented the notion of the wrinkled-nosed mathematician pouring over stats as he played fantasy baseball. However inaccurate, that was the image, but the fantasy football player was shattering it. The fantasy football player was your teacher, your secretary, your mom, the person you overheard at the grocery counter, and your coworkers standing at the water cooler. This was the new March Madness, and offices across North America were battling it out on virtual gridirons.

In less than fifteen years, fantasy sports, riding on the back of fantasy football and powered by services such as Yahoo and SuicideFantasyFootball.com, became a billion-dollar industry. That’s a lot of cheddar, and the sports leagues, notably the MLB and NFL, became acutely aware of just how much money these services were generating. So they made a play for their piece of the action.

This is a critical time in the history of fantasy football. If they have their way, fantasy sports services have to pay for the use of the stats, and that means no more free fantasy football. “Free” is a vital thread in the fabric of this phenomenon. If you take free out of the equation, you lose the casual fan, and then fantasy football becomes a lot more like fantasy baseball. Fortunately, we’ll never have to know what would have become of the game because the courts upheld our First Amendment right to use publically available information.

Thanks, in part, to that decision, fantasy sports continue to grow in ways we never conceived. It is common for Sunday gatherings to look like small IT affairs, as everyone in the room uses laptops or mobile devices to make last-minute roster changes. Is the wife demanding that you shop with her on Sunday morning? Well, we’ll just monitor the roster from our phone and know that the DVR will have us covered if we’re a few minutes late.

Perhaps we witness the game’s greatest mark on culture in ESPN’s programming. Consider how many hours they spend preparing us for our fantasy drafts. During the season, they have entire shows dedicated to managing our teams. Tomorrow, you can walk into any office in North America and get a reasonable answer when you ask the question: Who’s your number one?