Fantasy
football is the reason I am so into football today, and know more about it than
I do any other sport. I played just
about every other sport in schools besides football, but thanks to fantasy
football I follow it the most. Now I
want to pursue a career in sports analyzing and get my own show on NFL Network
or ESPN to state my opinions on all the current things going on in the
NFL. I bring up my history with fantasy
football because the motives mentioned to participate in fantasy sports in
chapter fourteen of Sports and
Communication are the exact motived that got me started and drove me to the
part of my life I’m at today. The first
concept is camaraderie, which is
joining into something because people at some sort of social place (work,
school, etc.) are partaking in the fantasy sports and the participant wants to
be part of the group. My soccer team all
got together to play fantasy football, and invited me. I agreed to it, although I had no idea of
anything about football then. Fantasy
football is also the reason I’m a huge fan of Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson. We still get together to play fantasy
football every year. The next motive is
called enhanced enjoyment. I felt a connection to my team and it
motivated me to watch football every Sunday.
Enhanced enjoyment is giving meaning to watching the particular sport
your fantasy player is in. It gives you
more to root for than just your favorite team.
The third motive describes me perfectly.
It is called autonomy. This is the fantasy player’s false sense that
he could run his/her favorite team better than the current coach or
management. However, I am 99.9% sure
that nobody is going to tell me I couldn’t run the Lions better than Jim
Schwarts. The last motive is called addiction. This is pretty
self-explanatory, but it means the person feels a need to play his/her fantasy
sports every year. I personally partake
in more than one fantasy football league every year, because I feel the season
would not be as entertaining without doing it, and I like winning every week.
Fantasy
sports have not only affected me and the fans, but it also affected the
sports/media complex in a major way. It’s
rare to be able to watch a full sport without the stats coming across the
screen with not only the players’ main stats, but how many points they scored
in a default league game in their fantasy sport. ESPN has a show every Sunday before the
regular season that starts two hours before the first kickoff, then reports
injuries, favorable matchups, and who’s on hot and cold streaks to help fantasy
sport players set their final lineup before the games start. There is a lot of Synergy between sports and fantasy sports to put it simply. Some analysts would say that fantasy sports
just exist as a form of accumulation,
however. It would appear as there are many more jobs
collecting money because of fantasy sports, but fantasy sports just seem to be
a form of a spectacle if I can put in
my own opinion. It almost seems as if,
as explained in chapter 14, that it is more of a ritual for fans to set up a
fantasy sports team then watch shows that would help them with their lineups
because it has become more of a norm.
I feel
as time goes on fantasy sports will become more and more popular and almost
every sports fan will be participating in them.
They appear to becoming more and more of the norm. Fantasy sports don’t only make their own
special shows more popular, but I believe they bring more popularity to things
such as NFL Redzone, because fans can instantly know when their players
score. I mostly follow football which is
why I focus on it the most, but I’m sure the same goes for every other sport,
as well.
Fantasy sports definitely effected the sports/media complex in a huge way. It just gives media another thing to talk about that people care about and then those people are participating in it and keeping it going. I also can see why someone would say fantasy sports are just a form of accumulation of wealth, however I think that these fantasy sports provide people with things like camaraderie and enhanced enjoyment. It does bring in money, but that is not its main purpose.
ReplyDeleteI kept thinking about one thing when we were going through this chapter and it was about how much media coverage Fantasy Sports receive, especially with TV! There are entire shows, hours long, multiple nights of the week devoted to covering only the Fantasy aspect of sports. Football is the big one in terms of participants and media coverage, then from their I would say Baseball is next, and last would come Hockey. Those last two are going to see increased media coverage of their Fantasy sides in the years to come, that's my prediction.
ReplyDeleteFantasy is a huge part of the media. When football comes around the shows are always on TV. Not only that it is incorporated into the pre-game and post-game shows of football broadcast. This is because like you said it has gotten a big and it will get bigger.
ReplyDeleteObviously, football is the most popular among fantasy participants, but I do see the other sports growing. In order to do that I foresee the media becoming more involved with pumping participants into the other fantasy sports.
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