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I’ve played fantasy football since 2006, when I was a 22-year-old cub reporter at The Gazette in Prince George’s County, Md., and the paper’s sports editor asked me to fill in the last spot in the office’s fantasy league. I thought it silly, and that I’d be a natural at the game. After all, I had watched 12 hours of football with my dad every Sunday since I was 10 years old. I knew which players were good. I knew which players weren’t. What else was there to know?

Now, at 29, I cannot watch football the way it was meant to be watched. I watch for stats. I fret about fantasy points, not game outcomes. The game, in short, is meaningless.

I don’t watch playoff games. I don’t care who wins the Super Bowl. I have loyalty to no one but myself and my pretend roster of random players from across the league. I can’t recall the agony of emotional investment in a real team – the ability to feel that joy and pain has long left me, crowded out by fantasy obsession.

There is no joy, only anxiety, only pain, only disappointment. When I win a fantasy game, I’m only happy not to lose. When I lose, I’m crushed.

On Twitter, I found hundreds just like me: awash in the statistical minutia of a game that challenges its players to compose a lineup that will score more fake points than their opponents’ fake players, willing to put in any amount of research to find an advantage over their opponents.



I was immersed – I am immersed – in the roiling, everlasting Twitter chatter that is today’s fantasy football arena, where ideas are championed and derided and parroted and contradicted every minute of every day by wise and stupid alike. Twitter, for fantasy fiends, is an echo chamber and battleground, all at once.

Some of these obsessives make a living from the fantasy football knowledge they’ve contributed to the growing industry. I’m in occasional contact with these purveyors of fantasy groupthink and innovation, as I have a side gig as a writer for The Fake Football (as well as with NFL Jerks), run by guys with equal fantasy fervor.

Some addicts, like me, are left to answer questions from curious fantasy owners and hope for the occasional retweet from a fantasy bigwig as we fight for the attention of 32 million fantasy football owners, according to estimates from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

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Of all the daily constructive exchanges, petty spats and frenetic 140-character volleys among Twitter’s fantasy freaks, the issue of obsession – addiction – is rarely broached. It goes unacknowledged, I think, because in a dank flophouse, junkies don’t ponder the ill effects of their addictions. They just do their drugs. They get high.

Kimberly Young, a licensed psychologist and founder of the Center of Internet Addiction, told me fantasy sports addiction is hardly different from other Web-based vices. Many online addictions, Young said, stem from a desperate need to control an outcome – any outcome.

“It’s just an illusion of control, of course, but that’s the driving force,” Young, a psychology professor at St. Bonaventure University, told me.

She said most patients who come to her asking for help with their insatiable need to research pigskin stats at every hour of the day are men in their 20s. No surprise there – 80 percent of fantasy footballers are men. Almost every fantasy addict has an alternative to Young’s prescription of total Internet detox.

“When I tell them there’s an abstinence component, they tell me they’ll just cut back,” she said. “But they can’t cut back. It’s an all-consuming activity for them, but many think they can have just that one cigarette. It doesn’t work like that.”

I was surprised, after hearing Young’s tales of life-destroying cases of fantasy sports addiction, to learn that Internet addiction hasn’t made the cut as an official disorder in psychology’s universe of definable problems.

The literature, as outlined in “Abnormal Psychology,” defines Internet addiction as an impulse control condition that, if left unchecked, alters an addict’s neurotransmitters in their brain while they engage their vice. Changing neurotransmitters – I can almost feel this happen when I scour the waiver wire, exploring every last statistical crevice for the player who will bring me victory that week – creates altered psychological states that bring euphoria to an addict’s ravaged brain.

Enough of this euphoria, like with gambling or drinking or drugs, brings an Internet addict back to the glowing screen for more. I can attest: Devouring fantasy football tidbits, no matter how meaningless or numerically abstract, makes me happy. I think it makes me happy, anyhow.

I told Young that I was a fantasy football addict, but like any addict – even one who has admitted his problem – I was no fan of the solution.

David Devaney, who lives in Baltimore and works in sales, said his fantasy addiction peaked a few years back during a drive through the mountains of western Massachusetts on the way to visit family.

With his wife and daughter in tow, Devaney pulled over before they traversed the highest parts of the mountainous drive, where he knew he’d lose all phone and Internet connection. Devaney had forgotten to plug in a last-minute waiver wire pickup, and game time was 10 short minutes away. An empty roster spot, for any fantasy addict, is a mortal sin, and enough to make you sick.

“I’m up there, basically climbing these huge rocks, doing anything I can to get one bar on my phone, any sort of connection,” he said. “I’m essentially fully extending my arm in the air and I’m setting my lineup, and I just stopped and thought, ‘It’s ridiculous that I’m doing this.’ ”

As an addict, as someone who has gone to humiliating lengths to tweak a lineup at the last minute, I had to ask: Was it worth it?

“No,” Devaney said flatly. “I did all that for some guy who got me five points that day.”

It was during the 2010 season that Devaney’s fantasy obsession had chipped away at his undying love for the Philadelphia Eagles. He said secretly rooting for various Dallas Cowboys on his fantasy squad – specifically, the reviled Miles Austin — and the New England rock-climbing, bar-searching incident were his rock bottom, the point at which he knew he had to remove fantasy football like a tumor.

“I was getting so lost in it,” he said, recalling hours spent in the glow of a laptop, analyzing waiver wire players and trade offers until they were indecipherable. “Everything revolved around maximizing points. It was consuming me. I wasn’t thinking about the game of football when I’d sit down to watch football. I was thinking about the players. Things got bad.”

So Devaney quit, just like that. He turned down offers from friends and coworkers who had for years bashed heads with Devaney in fake football matchups. The temptation was there, to join just one league, to do just one little draft, Devaney said, but he turned down every offer. The 2011 season started with Devaney planted on his couch, caring for nothing but his beloved Eagles.

“I tell everyone I know how great it is,” he told me over the phone. I dreaded what came next, what I knew he’d tell me, because he knows me, because he was me. “I highly suggest it to you. Just quit. It’s freeing. You won’t even miss it. I promise.”

I laughed as politely as possible.

“Seriously,” Devaney said, “it’ll make you feel older, more mature.”

I told him I’d consider it, the easy lie of an addict.

Austin Lee, when he’s not working in California’s movie industry, is writing in-depth fantasy analyses for Pro Football Focus, a daily resource to any hardcore fantasy footballer. He knows what it’s like to be trapped in the vortex of fantasy football Twitter chatter. You read a couple of dozen tweets from industry authorities and casual fans, you read a few more, you click links that lead to more links that lead to more links, and what started as a quick check of the Twitter feed turns into a two-hour orgy of stats and comparisons and player comparables. Tumbling down the rabbit hole of endless information is a terribly easy pastime.

Lee repeated a common refrain from my pool of justification when he said, “I thought I could keep it under control.”

“But when all social contributions with friends and family were fantasy football related,” he said, “that was an indicator that I needed to unplug.”

Fantasy addiction, like anything that consumes hours and thoughts with equal ferocity, takes a physical toll on obsessives. I know, when my head hits the pillow on Sunday night, that sleep will be fleeting, even if I manage to banish thoughts of fake football long enough to fall asleep.

“I was losing a lot of sleep over waiver wire moves and trades and other decisions,” Lee said. “It had a lot of weight to it, a lot of meaning. You just lie there awake and you think, I know I can find the right fit, I can come up with the right combination. I just need to try harder.”

Lee’s wife is an avid fantasy footballer, too, but even she grew weary of her husband’s endless machinations – his trade offers, his fretting over whom to start and whom to sit.

“I knew then that I had crossed a bad threshold,” he said.

Lee cut back, but found that the growth of fantasy made it impossible for any football fan to give it the cold shoulder.

“If you’re a real addict, you have lots of people who can make your obsession seem completely normal,” he said. “If you need that kind of confirmation, lots of people are there to tell you it’s O.K., because they’re addicted, too.”

Melissa Jacobs remembers fantasy football when it was by geeks, for geeks, of geeks. Jacobs, a San Francisco native and former ESPN producer who founded the site TheFootballGirl.com and has 5,220 faithful Twitter followers who digest her weekly fantasy wisdom nuggets, played fantasy when it was a subculture, way before ESPN dedicated an entire hour of Sunday morning program to people’s make-believe football roster decisions.

In the ’90s, when fantasy scores were tallied from real life ink printed on real life newspaper every Monday and Tuesday morning, there was no massive online community of fantasy obsessives. There was you and your league members.

“I was playing it when it was totally socially taboo,” said Jacobs, who now lives in Washington. “I was very closeted – we all were. It was considered a very dorky pastime – it was seen as sort of a freakish hobby. I’m not so sure people today realize that. No one is embarrassed about it anymore.”

Lineup decisions still churned, she said, but the infrastructure of fantasy sports addiction – namely, the Internet – did not exist in any mainstream way.

“Trust me,” Jacobs said, “I wanted to talk to someone about it. But no one played, so I kept it to myself.”

Twitter isn’t the lone feeder of my fantasy addiction. There’s also the RedZone Channel, which caters to fantasy players by only showing games in which teams are on the cusp of scoring, usually inside the opponent’s 20-yard line. RedZone reduces football to a real-time highlight reel of scores. The channel, in short, is a fantasy addict’s most precious gift and most threatening enabler.

Watching RedZone, especially during a flurry of Sunday afternoon scoring, has become an experiment in how much stress my heart can handle without failing. I’m not proud to admit that, when I watch football alone in my basement, I don’t shut the bathroom door when nature calls. I leave it open enough to see half my giant TV screen. On the rare Sunday when I have company in the basement, I close the door and feel the beginnings of an anxiety attack constrict my breathing. I have to see what’s happening, what my guys are doing.

Watching the cavalcade of football games as they unfold won’t change anything. Unlike a tree falling in the woods with no one around, your No. 3 wide receiver is going to fetch you three lousy fantasy points, whether you watch every snap or none at all. This realization, in the frenzy of Sunday football, means nothing.

“You can see the terrible impact of being an alcoholic right away,” Lee said, recalling his darkest fantasy days. “But this consumes your thoughts. It really eats away at you.”

It forces you to watch the RedZone Channel from the comfort of a toilet.

Chris Wesseling is a senior N.F..L editor at Rotoworld, an online treasure trove of fantasy goodness that I peruse with great interest every day, many times a day. Wesseling has taken on a godfather-type role in the fantasy community – a sober voice of reasonable advice, never brash or cocky, like so many self-professed fantasy football experts who dispatch a thousand grating tweets a day. Wesseling will tell you what to do without telling you what to do. In short, I strive to be like him.

The culture of fantasy football has gone to a progressively darker place since Wesseling started playing the game in the mid-1990s. There is hardly any acknowledgement, he said, that this is a game for nerds.

“There should be just a bit of shame involved,” he told me. “That gets left behind as the popularity rages out of control. Let’s face it, there’s not much separating fantasy football from Dungeons and Dragons. You’re living out a fantasy through the actions of someone else. Teddy Roosevelt would be appalled at such behavior. Nobody cares about your fantasy team except you.”

Wesseling said he has liberally employed Twitter’s block button as a preemptive weapon against fantasy owners looking to publicly embarrass fantasy’s most respected voices.

“My track record on fantasy advice speaks for itself, so of course I’m not going to take it well if one piece of advice in thousands is thrown back in my face because it didn’t work out for that fantasy owner that week,” he said. “The older I get, the less I’m willing to suffer fools gladly — particular fools complaining about a quality free service. Who raised these disrespectful animals, anyway?”

My wife is pregnant with our first child, a boy, due in late December. When the doctor announced the due date, I was filled with joy and terror and excitement. I hugged my wife, her pregnant belly exposed in the sterility of the doctor’s office. For the ten thousandth time, I told my wife how much I loved her. We kissed.

Then came the thought, my addiction tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me of its omnipresence. Hello, it said, I’m still here, and I’m not going anywhere.

I tried to banish the thought, to vanquish it before it was fully formed, but I couldn’t.

The last week of December, I thought – consumed by shame – is fantasy football championship week.

I want nothing more than to have a normal relationship with fantasy football, normal enough to one day share the game with my son when we’re all making fantasy start-sit decisions on floating holograms in front of our eight-dimensional televisions hovering weightlessly before us.

I looked to Patrick Lane, a Maryland state trooper and my friend since middle school, for advice. How, I asked Lane one night during an instant message screaming match about the fantasy value of Ryan Mathews, can you go to bed on Monday night, just as your fantasy players have their last shots to notch a win for your make-believe football team?

“Mostly my thoughts are this: I’m tired and I would like to go to bed,” said Lane, whom I introduced to fantasy a year after I took the plunge. He has often berated me for watching every minute of every prime-time game, and staying on Twitter until 2 a.m. discussing fantasy implications. “Watching games all day Sunday and then a late night game and then another on Monday? After a while, I’ve had enough. I’m not going to kill myself to watch one guy maybe not do anything. I’ll find out in the morning.”

Lane will wrench open his eyelids and watch the waning minutes of “Monday Night Football” if, and only if, his beloved Redskins are playing. He still sees the game through the eyes of a real fan. Good for him.

Fantasy obsessives who considered themselves full-fledged addicts told me, yes, it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole and go to that dark place where fantasy decisions matter more than anything. But, they said, an addict has to know when to unplug.

That isn’t an option for true addicts. It isn’t an option for me.

“Of course I can empathize with other people who are addicted,” said J.J Zachariason, author of the book, “The Late Round Quarterback,” a persuasive counterargument to fantasy dogma that says owners must draft elite quarterbacks to win championships. “But at the same time, I think like any addiction, you need to know when to stop. I guess that’s counterintuitive, but I think it’s always good when people realize a problem and seek help. I, and a lot of other fantasy people, know when and how to stop.”

With parenthood comes perspective, right? Things that were once paramount become utterly meaningless; priorities change a hundred times until you can’t remember what was so incredibly important about that hobby you used to hold dear. After a few years of parenthood, no one can even remember life before kids, right?

Having a baby, maybe, will be the stake driven through the heart of my fantasy football addiction. Part of me – most of me – hopes it is.

C.D. Carter is a reporter, an author of zombie stories, and a writer for The Fake Football and NFL Jerks.