Media Savvy
Fantasy Or Reality
By Andrew Stockey

The kick-off is just days away with the season's first tackle to follow. Who will score the touchdown and which team will celebrate a championship? I will leave those questions to the writers and prognosticators in this fine publication.

I'm looking to that "other" football season. The one that consumes millions of Americans and probably accounts for more lost office productivity than March's NCAA Tournament pool. I'm talking fantasy football. It's "Dungeons and Dragons" meets the National Football League. Fantasy football has made satellite television a must-have since it's the only way you can get NFL Sunday Ticket.

Think it's much ado about nothing? Go around your office. I will bet a week's salary someone within 50-feet of your cubbyhole is involved in a fantasy draft this month, agonizing over whether to draft Tommy Maddox or Jeff Garcia. Trying to figure out if Jerome Bettis is going to get enough carries this fall to make him worth drafting.

I learned first-hand about fantasy football a few years ago when I did a story for Channel 4 Action News about one family's fetish for the fantasy game. The father and his sons, ages 10 and 13, were involved in a league. In August, via conference call, they drafted players and a defense. Each week, each player would submit his starting lineup and receive points for each player's performance.

What amazes me about fantasy football is the way people watch the game once they are in a fantasy league. Watching a game on TV with a fantasy player is like watching a strobe-light. With NFL Sunday Ticket, fantasy players have access to all the games and watch not one contest, but flip between games to look for scoring plays. They find themselves cheering not for teams, but for individual players.

This can get absurd. Former Steelers' receiver Charles Johnson is well aware of the fantasy football fanatics out there. He told me once he came off the field, after scoring two touchdowns, only to be berated by a Steeler fan because he only caught 90 yards worth of passes and 100 yards would have meant points for this particular fan's team.

So fantasy football, a form of gambling, is a bad thing and the league should take a hard-line on this, right? Wrong. Nothing could be better for the NFL, which has now stretched out its season into February. They are thrilled about this fantasy thing. It keeps their sport in the headlines year-round with fans who are trying to gobble up every nugget of information during the off-season so they can make informed choices at draft time.

Hey, even I think it's a good thing. Sunday nights at Channel 4, we even run the numbers on the top Steelers' performances with an eye towards fantasy football fans. I even engage in my own form of fantasy, video games.

I admit it. I love Madden football and I play it as much as I can. While it's not a league, it's a fantasy world where I can play out the season and make my own decisions on who should start and who should sit. It helps me to learn more not only about the team that I cover, but also the rest of the NFL.

So what's bad about this fantasy fix? Often the game and the finaloutcome become secondary. Great, the Steelers won, but Hines Ward had a bad day and my fantasy team is going to suffer for it. Then again, if people have found a way to immerse pro football in their lives, how bad can it possibly be, especially for that 400-pound gorilla known as the NFL? It's an enterprise trying to live out the fantasy of being the most popular sport in this country.

It's a fantasy that seems to have become a reality.

Andrew Stockey is sports anchor for WTAE-TV.