Have you ever tried to explain fantasy football to anyone that is not a football fan?  If so, the conversation might have gone like this.

“What is fantasy football?”
Okay, so you have this team, and you draft these players, they play every week, except one. You decide which players to start, although most of them play on different real NFL teams.

“So, you don’t know these players personally and it doesn’t matter if the actual team that pays their salary wins or loses?”
Correct, you are more interested in their stats as individual players. Players get points for yards, touchdowns and catches.

“So,why are you on the internet watching a computer screen all day Sunday?”
Well, you have all these players and have to watch how they are doing and what stats they are compiling.

At this point it becomes painfully obvious that you are no better than the computer programmers who spend their day debating the merits of the old vs. new ‘Dr. Who.’

Even after being humbled by realizing that you spend all this time for something that really doesn’t matter, that you have virtually no control over, you are still not deterred. It’s addicting and we need the rush that comes with the wins and losses, even though most of us won’t win money, but will lose precious time that could be focused on doing something productive.

We don’t think about the reasons behind it. When we graduate college, we get a stiff dose of reality. We will be working at a job, that most of us don’t really like, for the next 45 years, along with the supervisors that allow us to keep receiving bi-weekly paychecks.

As our 20’s fade into to 30’s and 40’s, we lose that control which defines youth. Responsibility, which now includes a family and kid, now occupy most of our free time. The decisions in life become relatively easy — take the job that pays the most money, convince yourself the government really does care about your phone conversations, and focus on what’s for dinner and where to go for Sunday brunch.

The above opinion sounds rather morbid, but it’s really not. Spending time with your family is great and there is nothing that rivals the feeling you get from watching your child evolve from a little bump in mommy’s stomach to a functioning human being.

We all need to live that fantasy to help us escape from the rigors of life’s daily grind. That is the reason behind fantasy football, and why it’s so rewarding for so many of us. Fantasy football gives us control of our fate and the decisions we make hold little consequences in the grand scheme of things. Winning and losing bring out that primal emotion in people; it numbs the pain that goes along with being a responsibility human being. Ironically, we play the game because we do love that normality, structure and those people that occupy so much time in our lives.

It still wouldn’t hurt if CJ Anderson becomes the next Demarco Murray and Jordy Nelson continues his torrid pace.