There were other injuries with serious fantasy repercussions, but if you don't play fantasy football, I might be losing you already, so let me explain: If your team owns McNabb, Colston or Jones (and many league-leading teams have at least two of them), this was like having a perfect year, the best year of your life, even, taken away from you on one bloody Sunday. Forget your amazing work success and how you bought Google at $100 and your raging love life and how all your buddies envy you. Now you've found out you're being audited and you have mold in your walls and your girlfriend used to be a man.
And your buddies are so tired of your good fortune and swagger that all they can do is laugh at you.
Fantasy football, you see, is the greatest, most primal form of competition that guys face every year. Most of us aren't professional athletes, professional gamblers, million-dollar-deal closers or, thankfully, in Iraq. So this, perhaps sadly, is our best chance to kick ass, show off our savvy and prove that our friends and rivals are unworthy idiots.
It's why I check the waiver wire more often than I check my stock portfolio, why Rotoworld.com is the website I've visited most this week. Clearly, I'm not alone. Consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas recently reported that almost 37 million people spend about 50 minutes at work each day dealing with their fantasy teams. That could be resulting in as much as $1.1 billion a week in lost productivity, but more realistically, it's just taking time away from looking for funny karaoke videos on YouTube or playing that Scrabble knockoff that's so popular on Yahoo! games.
But regardless, when this many people invest this much time into whether it's worth trading Peyton Manning for Frank Gore when you have Drew Brees as your backup quarterback (yes, I did this recently! See, I'm a total genius!), a black Sunday like November 19 can really change everything.
So many teams that once seemed unstoppable are now extremely vulnerable, and many players seem resigned to the fact that this kind of thing will always happen. That's why so many of us aren't ever surprised when something completely goes wrong at the silliest time, when you get a ticket five minutes from your house after you've driven cross-country, or get food poisoning the day before the biggest party of the year. We play fantasy football, so we live in a world of pure possibility that's often interrupted by minor disappointments and then sometimes totally wrecked by major catastrophes.
This is how we choose to live, so we must be strong when it happens. We can't let our friends think that we're weak.