Editor’s Note: Graduate student, Palm Beach Post Gators beat writer and reader Ben Volin earned a guest column for winning our inaugural alligatorSports Fantasy Challenge.
So apparently the prize for my outstanding performance and season-long dominance in this little fantasy college football league is to write 500 words for the Alligator.
Awesome. How thrilling.
This is exactly how I should be spending my time this week.
Not, you know, covering the nation’s No. 1 team as it prepares for the Game of the Century, or studying for my MBA exams.
Nope, instead I’m supposed to sit here and brag or something about beating a bunch of college kids in fantasy football.
Yeah, I won the league. Cool. Can’t wait to drop that line with the ladies in Midtown.
For both of you that care, I won because of a kid I didn’t know existed until Week 2. His name is Blaine Gabbert, and he’s a sophomore quarterback for Missouri who lists sports, hanging out with friends and fishing as his primary hobbies. Not quite the stuff of Tebow, but he did me well this season as a replacement for Sam Bradford, who I took with the second overall pick and promptly hurt himself for the season in Week 1.
The Tigers went 8-4, 4-4 in the Big 12, but Gabbert was a champion in my locker room. He finished with 3,302 passing yards, 228 rushing yards, 26 total touchdowns and just seven interceptions.
I contacted the Missouri athletic department to try to score an interview with Gabbert, but saying that I’m writing a column for The Alligator apparently didn’t have quite the cache I expected.
But Gabbert, of course, didn’t win this thing by himself. Texas’ Jordan Shipley, Kansas’ Kerry Meier, Minnesota’s Eric Decker, West Virginia’s Noel Devine and the Alabama defense also led me to the title.
Florida fans hope I don’t type that last part of the sentence again this weekend.
How many words are we at now? 306? Ugh.
This was my first season playing college fantasy football, and you know what?
It’s really easy. I played in two leagues, and reached the finals in both.
I can’t sit here and claim that I had any special insight during the draft.
By the fourth round, I hadn’t heard of any of the remaining players, and we still had like seven rounds to go.
We limited the playing field to only BCS teams, which if you’re counting at home is 65 teams.
Then consider that we only had 10 owners in the league.
With 65 teams, there were plenty of good players to go around.
When my running back Nic Grigsby got hurt, I simply went to the waiver wire and found a guy named Daniel Thomas from Kansas State I had never heard of him before, but I’ll take his 971 yards and nine touchdowns, thank you.
The fact that I dominated the league — no one came within four games of my 12-3 record — says more about the simple-mindedness of the other owners in the league than of my fantasy football genius.
This really isn’t hard, people. Please come stronger next season. Dominating isn’t as fun as it seems.
Especially when it results in you having to write 500 words.
