Every Man's Fantasy

Note to readers: the Artist and I apologize for not having posted much recently. The artist just started graduate school and I have been traveling the last 2 weeks. Hopefully there will be more posts to come.

This week represents the culmination of a dream I've been building for about 8 years...my wife got her own fantasy football team.

For the last 5 or 6 years I have run a fantasy football league amongst the astronomers at my institution. Amazingly, we've kept essentially the same participants the entire time, despite people graduating and moving all around the world. A few years ago I convinced one of my wife's (girl) friends to play with us, and she in turn got my wife to be her co-owner.

What started out as a joke quickly turned into an obsession. They were soon doing tons of research, asking me and the other girl's boyfriend for advice, and had even bought Yahoo's instant scoring access ($10/year). They got trounced their first year, but came back with a vengeance last year and dominated the league thanks to the lethal combination of Ladanian Tomlinson, Tom Brady, and Maurice Jones-Drew.

One of the fun things about playing with the same people is that we develop our own loyalties to players who have been good to us. My wife and her friend have had Maurice Jones-Drew since their first year, so when I drafted him this year with the first pick of the second round they just about killed me. But they were able to handle it because they had TOM BRADY. He's everything two girls could want in a QB: good looking, awesome stats, and ultra durable.

You undoubtedly know what happened on Sunday: Brady blew out his knee in the first quarter of the first game of the season. When my wife found out she was furious. I can only imagine what happened when her co-owner found out; she once cried when Randy Moss didn't get a single catch in the second half of a Monday Night Football game because if he had gotten only 9 yards she would have won the week!

By Sunday night they were already beginning to think about tanking the rest of the season to ensure they would get the first pick in next year's draft (we set the draft order based on the previous year's standings). By Monday, they had decided that the best course of action was to start another league with only four people (I was not invited) so that they could all have awesome players. So, tomorrow night at 8:00, my wife will be drafting her second team this season, and her first as sole owner. It appears I've created a fantasy football junky!