Best of luck to your teams over Christmas!
All Mariah Carey wants for Christmas is you, but I am holding out for a sweet, sweet fantasy football trophy over the festive period.
My ‘Dynasty Cowboys’ are in the Championship Game of the JMD Cup, albeit with a solitary Chicago Bear on the team.
D.J. Moore will almost certainly be warming the bench for me this weekend, with his best fantasy performance coming way back in the 36-10 Week 5 win against the Carolina Panthers. His 105 yards and two touchdowns that day netted me a total of 27.5 points.
The highs of October also saw the Bears’ single highest fantasy tally of the year, a 29.6 point performance from Caleb Williams in the last victory of the season against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
But the season has largely been devoid of superstar performances from my chosen team, which relates with how Fantasy Football was born way back in the 1960s.
The game was conceived in a New York hotel in 1962 by minority owner of the Oakland Raiders, Bill Winkenbach.
Tired of not being able to select the players he desired for his own substandard 0-7 Raiders, Winkenbach created a game where he could draft any player in the league.
By the late 1980s, a million people were playing the game, with this number swelling to tens of millions in the internet age thanks to the ease in which teams can be drafted on apps and websites.
A worldwide phenomenon
For those not wanting to commit to an entire season, Daily Fantasy Sports sites came to prominence in the early 2010s, allowing players to draft a Fantasy Football team for one game week only.
Prizes are awarded for the top teams each week, and readers of this site can get involved by gently clicking on the Fantasy Gameday banner at the foot of this article.
Although fantasy sports enthusiasts in Britain most likely cut their teeth on Fantasy Premier League, the UK NFL Fantasy Football community is now bigger than ever.
Charity leagues such as the JTT Cup, independent podcasts such as Jefferson My Drinks, and yearly symposiums such as the UK Fantasy Football Collective have contributed to a UK fantasy sports boom.
In the upcoming fortnight, fantasy champions will be crowned the length and breadth of this great isle. League losers, however, will enter the winter months with trepidation, awaiting their wooden spoon forfeit next spring.
Bill Winkenbach died in 1993 at the age of 81, way before the UK explosion of fantasy sports. If only Bill could see how his legacy has connected NFL fans across the globe – creating a focal point for millions of like minded individuals, sparking feuds and creating friendships way past his 81 years on the planet.
