It’s time for your fantasy football draft, and naturally, you’re terrified.
Sure, it may seem unlikely that you bounce back from that 2-14 season last year, but think about it this way: NFL football almost didn’t even happen at all! But you probably know that, because you were secretly praying for it to happen. Whether or not Tim Tebow got his shot mattered little in the wake of your funereal trudge through 17 nightmarish weeks of autumn. Also everybody kept leaving those increasingly personal insults on your wall.
Autumn: The most violent, degrading, hideous time of year.
Don’t use football season as a chance to crawl into an emotional hole try to remember all that advice your old coaches gave you between the screams. Just continue reading here and we’ll work this all out.
Or we could just commiserate. Everything you did wrong last year, I guarantee you, I did it ten times more than you did, and it somehow got exponentially wronger each time while I repeatedly tapped a single key on my keyboard and wept.
"WHY WON'T THESE TERRIBLE PLAYERS BE SPECTACULAR?!"
1. The team name is the most important part
Should you draft Maurice Jones-Drew and Felix Jones just to name your team “Keeping Up with the Joneses”? Many would tell you, “What? No.” You can have the best team in the world, but if you look at the ground and have to say “The Awesomes” when somebody asks your team name, then you’ll spend the majority of the season dead inside.
So do yourself a favor and put some effort into it. If you can’t come up with a good overall name, here are some cool words so you can piece something together:
- “Explosion”
- “Sexual”
- “Riot”
- “Bonetown”
- “Hole”
- “Shocker”
- “The”
- “Guitar”
- “Fart-Swallow”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t tell ME “Those are all horrible words.” The whole point is to distract your opponents with such profane gusto that they don’t even notice that they’re starting Ray Rice despite his shattered pelvis. You can thank me when the “The Bonetown Riot Hole” goes up 40 points.
2. Don’t draft any Dolphins
They’re so bad.
You should also freak out about Peyton Manning.
3. Don’t just pick your favorite players
What? Yeah, I did draft James Starks, Greg Jennings, Mason Crosby, Jordy Nelson, and the Packs defense. But I dropped Nelson later that night. And picked up James Jones.
But I also picked Ben Roethlisberger, who, let’s face it, could be removed from the roster three games into the season for being “invited” to the backseat of a woman’s car for six hours while she’s at work.
It’s all about picking players who will be able to churn out points at the correct time, depending heavily on the skill of the players surrounding them. It’s also about including the phrase “fart-swallowing” in your team name. It’s about a couple things.
4. Use the message boards
Okay, so you’re a little worried you’ll leave the laptop open and your significant other will lose all respect for you and also faith in humanity upon glimpsing your team’s name. That’s understandable. I guess some people have people who respect them or whatever. If that’s your game, congrats.
Fortunately, there’s a way around this. Any league worth anything will make trash talking readily available to it’s participants, because we’re fantasy football players and we like to drink shitty beer, have quirks, and devastate each other emotionally. Isn’t that right, beer commercials?
If you’re not an angry person naturally-which, again, I’m not sure what business you have in a fantasy football league–then use these last few days before the season to cut down strangers with some of your more creative insults. If there’s anything complete strangers are good for, its testing out your favorite vulgarities. Eventually, you’ll be writing these down on the internet, so your timing doesn’t have to be perfect.
You’ll be aware of your effectiveness based on how quickly somebody’s jaw drops or they look down at the child, horrified at exposing them to the outside world where people like you are.
5. Ignore everybody
Jordy Nelson is what’s known as a “sleeper,” which means he’s a guy you wouldn’t expect to generate a lot of points, but some analyst somewhere saw him on a roster and thought it would be funny to see how many assholes he could convince to draft him. Some guys will, others won’t, and still others will, then get mocked by everybody at their draft and drop him immediately. Now Jordy Nelson will have the greatest season in NFL history and he’ll do it for a team other than “Sex Flavored War Machine.”
Don’t fall into this trap. Do what you normally do when your friends are talking to you and pretend you’re on a yacht with rich, intelligent, sexy people who actually respect you.
