As I write this I am staring out at the Gulf of Mexico after an 80-hour extended boys weekend. My body is a cesspool of seafood, snacks, red meat, cigars and more wine than I care to admit out loud. It was the sort of caloric nightmare that would keep Brodie Lawson up at night in complete terror. It was glorious.
I have one simple message for everyone, and especially the younger fans: get into Fantasy football, especially a season-long one with your closest friends. I promise you I am not being compensated on the side by either the CFL or TSN for this blatant promotion. You see, this is the 25th anniversary of our fantasy football league. To put that in CFL perspective, in 1994 Ottawa was known as the “Rough Riders”, the league was populated by Pirates, Gold Miners and Posse, and the Grey Cup was that thrilling 26-23 win by the BC Lions over the no-good American Baltimore CFLers with Lui Passaglia playing the role of hero.
Back then we had to calculate our scores by going through the Toronto Sun’s Monday box scores. Yeah, times have significantly changed, but in so many ways, with my group of friends who have been a part of this league since ‘Friends’ debuted, nothing has changed.
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Lui Passaglia needed to be the ‘Canadian Hero’ when it came down to the Lions’ Grey Cup meeting with the US Expansion Baltimore Stallions in the 1994 Grey Cup. (The Canadian Press)
We still laugh at the same jokes, tell the same high school stories and generally act more like we did in 1994 and less like a group of 43-year-old men all with multiple children, mortgages and significant employment titles.
Right before the draft, I took a photo of all of the draftees standing on the edge of the pool deck watching the sunset. There was something so gratifying watching some of the most important people in my life enjoying not only the sunset but just each other’s company. As anyone over 35 knows, with each passing year it gets more and more difficult to get everyone together as significant aspects of one’s life get in the way. Wives, children, jobs and taxes all conspire against constant gatherings.
At 23 we’d all see each other once a week; at this age, you can go a couple months without breaking bread with one of your friends. But the one weekend we always reserve is our yearly fantasy draft; no matter what else is going on in the world on this weekend we get together for 10 a.m. beers, re-watching ‘The Big Lebowski’ and football drafts that go far too long because the older you get the less you know about the minutiae of 32 different rosters.
So I strongly advise you to get a group of friends together and start a league for next season. You can use the rest of this year to dip your toes in the weekly version that’s out there. Just imagine if you heeded this message before the start of the 2018 season. You’d be hanging off every bit of Johnny Manziel news; you’d be pretending to feel sympathy to whoever owned Ricky Ray while scrambling to pick up James Franklin on the sly only to be burned by that know-it-all that had stashed McLeod Bethel-Thompson because he had watched him play once at UCLA. Everyone would be making fun of the owner of Duron Carter, while whoever had Bo Levi Mitchell would be quietly seething about his lacklustre yardage totals. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
Then for 2019 there would be so many questions:
Who would be the hero who drafts Manziel super high?
Does Mike Reilly go number one for another year?
When will the first Alouette go off the board?
Which young QB do you take a chance on?
Can Andrew Harris keep up this production for another season?
You would spend the off-season reading Jamie Nye, Brandon Williams, Marshall Ferguson and Derek Taylor just to try to get an edge on your comrades while scouring the news to keep track on any star receivers looking to make it in the NFL. Suddenly the CFL free agency would take on extra meaning because no one wants to be the person who says aloud “Chris Williams is still with the Lions?” in the middle of the draft. No one likes to be that person.
Those are the football reasons to start up a league. Your knowledge base will certainly jump up once you’re in the middle of it all but of course, that’s more of the ancillary benefit. I got to spend time with a friend of over 35 years who lives in Australia but still found a way to join the rest of us in Florida. I got to reminisce about getting cheap Argonauts tickets from the grocery store in 1991 to watch Rocket Ismail. More importantly, we all got to be in the same place for the 25th year in a row and feel like we did in the mid-1990’s. I can’t wait until next year.
