Fantasy Football Is All About Luck (Unless I Win)

One football writer’s quest to win his neighborhood league offered a reminder about the role of good fortune for both fantasy managers and real NFL coaches.

There is a scene in A Christmas Story, where, after Ralphie’s father receives the leg lamp as a promotional prize for completing a newspaper crossword puzzle, he begins describing it as a “major award” to people asking about it.

“You won it?” asks his neighbor, Swede, who starts drawing a crowd across the street to stare at the glowing leg in the Parkers’ window.

“I have mind power, Swede,” he says, swelling with pride, pounding his chest, feeling for a second like he is not beaten down by the world or his circumstances. “Mind power.”

The scene came to mind this week, not because the movie was shown on TBS for something like 72 straight hours leading up to Christmas, but because my neighborhood fantasy football team backed into the championship after losing its final four games of the season. Justin Herbert, our second quarterback, was lost for the year, joining Anthony Richardson on injured reserve. My fantasy partner and I decided to pick up Joe Flacco, mostly because it would be funny to rest significant financial implications on the shoulders of a man in his late 30s who also happened to live in South Jersey.

You fools! How could you let Conor get Flacco on the waiver wire? :: Troy Taormina/USA TODAY Sports

The resulting three weeks have been a whirlwind, as you can imagine. Flacco has posted two three-touchdown games and triggered a bunch of strange bonuses through his 50-plus yard bombs to Amari Cooper. And through that process, I began to notice a shift in my own mentality. I began to offer to people who didn’t even ask that we were playing Flacco, and I did not bother to clarify that the move was something of a combination of macabre humor and desperation. Indeed, the only other quarterbacks available were Nick Mullens, Will Levis and Aidan O’Connell. I liked the idea of people thinking that, because I write about football for a living, I somehow knew that Flacco, who, at his best is compared to a reliable pickup truck, would transform into Brett Favre and torch three straight opponents, including two with defensive head coaches.

I had no longer simply gotten a consolation prize from the newspaper. I had won a major award due to mind power.

As we begin the late December mythologizing of NFL playoff teams and our own fantasy football teams during championship weekend, I was grateful to have caught myself because it brought on a startling realization: Success is luck dressed up in fancy clothes. We’re going to deify the Baltimore Ravens for their foresight, when in reality, they placed a nonexclusive franchise tag on Lamar Jackson and allowed every team in the league to at least make him a competitive offer. We’re going to deify the San Francisco 49ers for their personnel savvy in taking Brock Purdy, when the team selected eight players before him in the 2022 draft. We’re going to praise the Miami Dolphins when, for some strange reason, the Kansas City Chiefs called them to unload Tyreek Hill, a legitimate MVP candidate, because they didn’t feel like extending him and wanted to go cheap.

And you, Little Red Fournette, or Hot Chubb Time Machine, who are playing in the league finale, what did you know of Puka Nacua before the start of the 2023 season? Did you really snap him up because you’d been grinding BYU tape or because you phoned his high school coach in Orem, Utah, and discovered that he turns into the Terminator on game day? Or, did you start the season 0–3 and use your first-place waiver position to pick up a rando who ended up carrying your team through the season? I roamed the Reddit threads from back in August full of folks debating who the true breakout wide receiver star of ’23 would be, and found a spirited argument between Skyy Moore and Josh Doctson.

Around these basic facts, we wrap a cocoon of sophistication marinated in the hubris of those who stumbled into good fortune. The best-selling author Michael Lewis once said in a commencement address at Princeton: “My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck—especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: The world does not want to acknowledge it either.”

A few weeks before our championship run, I was sitting at the kitchen table looking at the CBS fantasy football league stats matrix, making an audible scoffing noise to draw someone into a conversation. I had been oddly troubled by this idea of writing about football for a living and being terrible at fantasy football (true story, before this season I was so obsessed with Austin Ekeler that, to avoid our team’s drafting him, my comanager, before a cross-country flight, placed Christian McCaffrey in our queue to ensure I received the message) (another true story: I told all of my friends that Cam Akers was going to be the value pick of the year in 2023 and did the same for AJ Dillon in ’22).

I started to rant to my wife (who had no problem waltzing into the semifinals and finals in both of our family leagues, largely due to the advice of mine she chose to ignore) about what I perceived to be the issue with fantasy football. I started the season 4–0, but then all the other teams that started poorly got to pick all the good waiver guys, and thus, with the benefit of sample size, create teams that were more sustainably successful. My eventual losing streak, my bad luck, was not simply bad luck but the product of a system that ignored my true genius. I went on to espouse this theory to anyone who would listen, that teams that started the season undefeated should be given some kind of lump point bonus—some sort of mind power award—because we are the true football thinkers. God bless any of my friends and family who were in my orbit at that time, as I tried to relentlessly prove to anyone who would listen that I understood the game I cover for a living and conquer my impostor syndrome.

I sounded like so many former head coaches and general managers I’ve talked to, who still blame one aspect of their failed tenure on a bad signing or an idiot for an owner, or some dunce they were forced to hire as a coordinator, when the truth was that they’d failed to do the one thing that would guarantee them success: draft the greatest player in NFL history in the sixth round, after selecting seven other players, including a guy who sounds like a made-up businessman in a Hallmark movie. Those coaches had failed to get lucky.

And so, whatever happens these next few weeks, let’s be cognizant of the invisible forces that brought us to this point. If you are in the fantasy football finals, great for you. The only difference between you and Bill, the guy in your office who rides his bike to work and finished in sixth place, is that Bill had the No. 1 pick and, like everyone else, took Justin Jefferson … and you took McCaffrey second only because Jefferson wasn’t available.

This has so little to do with mind power. We are all just dopes, standing in the middle of the street, staring at a glowing leg lamp in the window, trying to convince ourselves that our disposition in life is a major award steeped in mind power and not just a random box mailed to us by the universe.