By Paige Albright
Boston University News Service
In American sporting culture, the top of the food chain is the National Football League or the NFL. The league is such a powerhouse that it takes up spots one through four in a proportional ranking of professional league influence. Professional football dominates the American broadcast scene, filling prime-time slots four out of seven days a week, with college football taking up an additional day.
In professional football, a sport known for its brutality and full contact, there are on average 200 diagnosed concussions amongst players a season, with rates of injury overall much higher. While the technology to protect players on the field has advanced, as well as recovery practices for helping athletes off the field, the boom in fantasy sports could turn this forward progress, focused on athlete health and life beyond play, on its head.
Fantasy football has been around for decades; however, it took off in the late nineties when the “fantasy gridiron” was put online. Today there are over 29.2 million participants in the yearly contest. Fantasy play is considered “water-cooler talk,” as its popularity is so far reaching that even people uninterested in sports have joined in on playing.
In fantasy football, an individual is the general manager (GM) of a team they create and manage. The team is composed of current NFL players, and fantasy participants select players for their team in a draft, like a true general manager of a professional team. Participants join leagues with friends, co-workers, and more to compete with their handcrafted team.
Teams in fantasy football leagues “match-up” every weekend similar to NFL fixtures. Teams score points based on the performance of each player on their roster, meaning the performance of players on the real playing field is now put into a personal win-loss situation for the fantasy team.
However, now more than ever, injury is seen by fans as a personal gain or loss. Injury takes players out of a point scoring position for fantasy teams, meaning fantasy GMs must switch up their rosters to account for a potential loss in point production. This is exacerbated by the fantasy app, which reduces players down to scores based on their expected performance.
In a sport that has only just begun to alter expectations and practices surrounding player care and health, the loss of fan connection to players as people threaten to regress the sport to its past eras. Players are now missing 700 fewer games in the league due to injury prevention and state of the art rehab.
The dark days of horrific injuries in the sport are not far in the past. Massive fan and player pushback has forced league heads to restructure policy to encompass players as humans more than money making pawns. Many today still remember the years where players suffering from paralysis due to tackles on the field, or developing serious health issues from returning to play after injury too quickly, were far too common.
With the NFL as powerful as it is, is fantasy football only adding to the power imbalance between players and the league? Many fear with the loss of fan empathy for players, the push for a holistic approach to care for players will diminish. Players then will be defined purely by their performance, with the focus of medical care focused only on how to maximize players at any cost for the team.
This begs the question if football is anything other than what it has worked so hard to disprove, a sport for knuckle-heads seeking violence.
