Like millions of people around the country and even around the world, I participate in fantasy football.  It adds a certain level of interest when I watch NFL games.  Although my primary NFL rooting interest is for the Indianapolis Colts, playing fantasy football has gotten me to watch games between teams that I would otherwise not care about as I root for individual players from those games.  Plus, it’s a fun competition that allows me to pretend that I own, operate, and coach my own football team.  A few years ago, I joined a fantasy football league (appropriately named “Fantasy Football League”) including a few friends, with my team called the London Sillynannies.  I wanted to take some time here to mention our league and my exploits regarding the recently completed 2022 Sillynannies season.

For those of you unfamiliar with how fantasy football works, you join a league and then draft NFL players shortly before football season starts.  Your team then “plays” another team each week during the football season, with your players accumulating points based on their statistics that week.  Settings in each league may vary, but our lineups use 1 quarterback, 2 running backs, 3 wide receivers, 1 tight end, 1 kicker, and 1 other player of any position (usually a 2^nd quarterback).  The most common way to earn points for your team are as follows:

• Rushing or receiving yards:  10 yards per point
• Rushing or receiving touchdowns:  6 points each
• Passing yards:  25 yards per point
• Passing touchdowns:  4 points each

During the season, you decide each week which players to start and which players to bench.  You can also cut underperforming players, add new players to your team, and maybe make a trade or two.  After Week 14, the top six teams in our 12-team league advance to the fantasy playoffs, with our championship game being Week 17.  Although the NFL regular season is 18 weeks long, most fantasy leagues end before that, since lots of players sit out Week 18 to rest for the NFL playoffs or to avoid injury.  (I call this the Fletcher Rule, in memory of the time I lost the fantasy championship in a previous league to my college roommate, partly because my best players, LaDainian Tomlinson and Drew Brees, didn’t play the final week of the season.)

In my current league, we were asked to name our team after a city and nickname, like NFL teams do.  I named my team the London Sillynannies, fictionally based in the town of London, Ohio, where I used to live.  The name is also a reference to the fictional London Silly Nannies from London, England, featured in the episode of Family Guy in which Peter joins their team and challenges the New England Patriots to a game.  But to be clear, my team is the Sillynannies from London, Ohio – not the Silly Nannies from London, England.

I have played in the Fantasy Football League for a few years and finished as the runner-up in 2021.  Since we play in a keeper league and I was able to keep some of my players from last year, I was hoping to build on my 2021 runner-up finish and that 2022 would be my year.  This past August, we conducted our online draft for this season, and I was greeted with this award from Yahoo shortly afterward:

Although projected success is always nice, it means nothing if your team doesn’t actually win.  I was rudely reminded of this when the Sillynannies started 0-2 and starting QB Trey Lance suffered a season-ending ankle injury.  With few options available, I added the Seahawks’ Geno Smith out of desperation, who was considered by many people in September to be among the worst starting QBs in the NFL.  I plugged him into my lineup right away, and he went on to have an unexpectedly good season.  Geno led my team in total points this year, despite not even being on the team for the first two weeks of the season.  Even with this much-needed boost, my team still only had a 2-5 record after 7 weeks, and was sitting in 11^th place out of 12.  It wasn’t looking good for the Sillynannies.  That’s when the turnaround started.

Although my team was averaging less than 100 points a game at that point, a 143-point outburst in a Week 8 pounding of the rival Indy Racers started an unbelievable winning streak.  Suddenly, my players started doing better.  It’s hard to say exactly why, but I like to think it was the fictional new plays I drew up and the fictional pre-game motivational speeches I gave them.  Led in scoring by a different player almost every week, the Sillynannies rattled off seven wins in a row.  After 14 weeks, my team was 9-5 and was the #2 seed going into our 6-team fantasy playoffs.  This earned me a first-round bye in Week 15 and propelled me into the semifinals in Week 16.

In another rivalry matchup against the Anderson Arrows in the semifinals (during the NFL games held on Christmas weekend), the Sillynannies narrowly escaped with an 81-77 win.  The hero of that matchup was Cowboys WR CeeDee Lamb, whose monster performance on Christmas Eve accounted for 24 of my 81 fantasy points that week.  Even with that, I had sweat it out on Monday Night Football as the Chargers’ Austin Ekeler almost willed the Arrows to victory with a pair of touchdowns before finally running out of time to do even more damage.  Many thanks to CeeDee Lamb for carrying me into the finals.

With the win over the Arrows, the Sillynannies advanced to the Fantasy Football League championship game for the second straight year.  This year’s championship between the Sillynannies and the Salem Miners took place during the Week 17 NFL games on New Year’s weekend 2023.  With a balanced attack led by 18 points from Steelers RB Najee Harris and 17 points from Seahawks QB Geno Smith, six of my nine starters scored in double figures for a total team score of 104 points.  However, a certain Tampa Bay QB (who needs to retire already) scored 37 points for the Miners to keep them in it.  Going into the Monday Night Football game, I had a 104-84 lead over the Miners, but all my starters had played, and the Miners had one player remaining.  The championship would be decided based on whether Buffalo Bills QB Josh Allen could score over 20 points for the Salem Miners on Monday Night Football.  It was going to be close.  This is where things took a strange and unfortunate turn.

As many people are aware, Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin suffered a serious life-threatening injury in this game between the Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals.  The horrific scene prompted the postponement and eventual cancellation of the rest of the game.  Obviously, a player’s life and well-being are much more important than the result of an NFL game or a fantasy football league, and the scene quickly brought things into perspective.  As of this writing, in the days since this has happened, Hamlin has shown encouraging signs of progress as people from all over continue pray for his full recovery.

From a fantasy football perspective, the situation affected the championship of many leagues.  Per the NFL (along with Yahoo, our fantasy football platform), since the Bills-Bengals game was cancelled, no statistics officially count for that game, even the stats that occurred before the game was stopped.  It’s an unfortunate outcome for anyone who was depending on Bills or Bengals players, since all those players got zero points.  From my side of things, at least the cancellation means that my team won.  Although, it would have obviously been better if the win had come naturally and not under those circumstances.  Officially, the final score of our fantasy football championship game was 104-84 in favor of the Sillynannies.  Even if Josh Allen’s statistics from the partial game had officially counted, the final score would have been 104-87.  We will never know how it would have turned out with a full game under normal circumstances, and the score would probably have been close.  It was not the ideal way for the fantasy football season to come to an end, but at least I did get the win and the championship.

In light of the circumstances of Monday night’s game, I wondered whether writing this post would still be appropriate.  But I had already said beforehand that if I won the championship, it was going on a blog post (and that I might possibly write about it even if I lost).  So, while recognizing that there are more important matters, I thought I would take some time to chronicle my wild ride of the 2022 season of this little game we play.  Plus, there’s a small segment of people who know me who I talk football with that might be interested in the details of how this all turned out.  And since I won the Fantasy Football League this year, I will also receive a championship ring out of this at some point.

So, how about you?  How did your fantasy football team do in your league this year?  Or maybe you don’t have a fantasy football team, but you just read all the way through and this looked interesting to you, and now you want to play it.  Perhaps you can find an available league to join next August, or create one with some friends, or join a public league.  Or maybe you don’t want to do any of that, but hopefully you found this interesting anyway.  Either way, thanks for reading.  As for the Sillynannies, we’ll celebrate our championship, maybe organize a parade, and look forward to defending our title next year.  And as for the Colts…well, wait till next year!