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Reality bites Do fans favor fantasy games over real action?Posted: Wednesday October 09, 2002 12:39 PM
It is not an altogether new development, but it is a fascinating one nonetheless -- actual games are being submerged by what might be called the personal dream interactive. This sort of thing began some years ago with the creation of what is known as Rotisserie baseball, wherein friends get together and draft real players -- well, their statistics -- for make-believe teams. Thus, your fantasy club might be made up of a catcher from the Red Sox, a first baseman from the Rockies, a relief pitcher from the Blue Jays, and so on. You would use the real achievements of these players to determine your record in a contrived league in which you would compete against your friends and their imaginary teams. Now, fans -- many of them young -- have adapted this idea to other sports, and fantasy football has become so popular that the NFL has started to feature it all the more on its Web site. The league even has actual players promoting their make-believe selves. Fantasy football participants, it seems, are often more interested in how their imaginary squads do than the teams in the real games really played by the real players. Among other things, fantasy devotees -- searching about to see how their players are doing -- spend more hours per week watching pro football games on television (8.4) than the average male NFL fan (6.6). I would love to see a survey of how much football gamblers watch. The NFL's dark bulwark has always been that it is by far the most popular sport to bet on, that it is not the true outcome but the point spread that matters most. If baseball is the national pastime, football is the national casino. Is it possible that betting on football has now been superceded by fantasy football? Add up gamblers and fantasylanders: Are we reaching a point where only a minority of NFL fans actually care most about who actually wins and loses? Not only that, but apparently ABC was right to hire John Madden as color commentator for Monday Night Football ... but for the wrong reasons. Madden has been celebrated as the most acclaimed football analyst ever, but it turns out that the reason more young men are tuning in on Mondays has nothing to do with Madden's ability to analyze the game being played, but because his video football game, Madden NFL 2003, is so popular with that cohort of young men between the ages of 18 and 34 that is most desirable to advertisers. The manufacturer of the Madden video game has bought time during the real game to use situations in the real game to contrive animation of the two real teams on the video game -- which, evidently, is more fascinating to many younger viewers than the actual game that the real Madden is analyzing. This isn't so much life follows art as life and art are simultaneous and blurred. The Monday night World Wrestling Entertainment bouts used to be so popular with young men, because, while the outcome was arranged, the plot was better written than a football game, which could be honest but boring. Sport has always had the advantage of being an escape from the quotidian day-to-day life. Now, apparently, sport must itself be getting too real, so younger generations are choosing to escape from watching actual games to pretend to be involved in personal dream renditions of games. Get it? Oh, if only Harry Potter could grow up and play for the New England Patriots. Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.
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