Fantasy football has always been intriguing to me because I know barely anything about the NFL outside of the fact that Georgia has a team. I actually had to look up what they’re called. The Falcons! Yay! I also had no idea how actual fantasy football works, besides the fact that the losers sometimes have to sell lemonade in the parking deck and sometimes have to tell bad jokes in the Williams Plaza.
I needed an “expert” so to speak, who could explain it to me in the simplest of terms. That expert turned out to be David Rumph, who’s playing in 3 leagues this year! While he said participating in that many isn’t unheard of, it is a lot to manage.
The first thing David explained to me was that when you join a league you draft real NFL players to pick who your 8-person team is based on their stats. Every week, how well your particular players do week to week in their games converts into points.
“So, a touchdown is 6 points in most leagues (with the PAT counting for an extra point), and for running backs, each yard they run is 1/10th of a point,” he explained to me. At the end of each week, whoever in the league has the least points receives a punishment for “picking the worst players.”
Through the process of free agency, you can also add a couple of players that you keep on backup, so long as they haven’t been claimed by anyone else. Those players are kept on a very business-like “waiver list” that resets every week. Everyone is ordered numerically on the waiver list, and if you want to take someone off, you have 24 hours for the “transaction” to go through unless someone who’s ranked higher than you claims that player first.
While I didn’t know any of that before David explained it to me, I did know about some of the entertaining (and very public punishments) that I’d seen online and around campus.
One was Jackson Schmidt’s “Get ready with me for my girlfriend’s birthday dinner!” TikTok, in which he had to put on a full face of makeup on camera like a beauty influencer.
Another one that was carried out on campus was ultra Brendan Pittfield’s lemonade stand, which you can read more about in Mr. Newman’s personal Q&A with him. The week before he had to carry around metal plates for the day, which seemed to be worse to me than the lemonade.
When I asked David why anyone would willingly subject themselves to that, he told me that it’s “all part of the fun.” While the guys all do make fun of each other’s punishments, it’s all in “wholesome fun” since everyone in most leagues is friends.
It also enhances the experience of watching some of the games, as most people in leagues have watch parties for their players’ teams. Some of his league’s highlights of the season are also drafting some of his players during the watch parties, which can turn into a pretty intense competition between the guys.
He watches games with teams he wouldn’t normally follow during these watch parties, and everyone in the league “pays attention to how they play” so that they can consider the players for their drafts. It ends up feeling like there are “higher stakes” for the games because they have to consider so many factors while watching.
David’s season has gone pretty well so far in 2 out of his 3 leagues, but he said “this week is looking pretty grim.” His punishment might be something referred to as “the cage,” where he may have to sit in a cage whilst being doused in various condiments. He explained that the punishments aren’t usually that extreme, but they’re getting more intense as the year closes out.
They’re allegedly so bad that they can’t even be talked about. The cage is one of them, and another is having to sit in a Waffle House for a full 24 hours. A person either has to stay within the Waffle House building for the total time or shave off an hour of that time for every waffle they eat.
A lot of us also probably remember a senior having to be taped up to a pole on West Paces Ferry by his league last year, and who was brought down because the police thought that his league was “committing a public execution.”
Of course, while the end goal of this fantasy season is always to have fun, participants can also enjoy a bit of the chaos that comes with some of the bolder punishments- as well as the thrill of never knowing whether or not you’re going to get one.
It ends up being a bit of a gamble.
