home > what now? > fantasy becomes virtual reality

What else is next:

Fantasy becomes virtual reality

Professional Help
Former refugee part of search to improve aid

May dating rest in peace
Why post-college singles are choosing hook-ups over saying 'I do'

By Dave McGrath

It’s a 28-3 ballgame with 1:21 left on the clock. The football game between the Seattle Seahawks and St. Louis Rams is effectively over and has been for a long time. But not for everybody. While the remaining fans in the stadium are fighting like salmon, streaming toward the exits in hopes of beating the traffic, around the country thousands are on the edge of their seats, clinging to every last play.

As Seattle tailback Shaun Alexander gets five consecutive late-game carries to wind out the clock, breaking out for a 24-yard touchdown as time expires, those fans leave their seats as if they were aflame and shout words of elation or disgust.

In the world of pro football, those last points are meaningless.

But in the realm of fantasy football, the score made all the difference, as teams playing with or against Alexander saw their fantasy fortunes change like the Wisconsin weather.

“The feeling you get when you pick up a win on a last carry, or when a game hits overtime, that’s just priceless,” says fantasy football lover Chuck Priore, who runs an office league at an engineering firm. “It only happens once a season or so. You just hope it doesn’t happen to you. Still, it’s what makes it great.”

This is fantasy football and, one cubicle at a time, it is fast becoming one of the favorite ways to participate in sports. “Participate” is a loose term, though, as the fantasy faithful never pick up a pigskin. Instead, they hold drafts and assemble rosters of real players, as if they were NFL owners. Their fake teams, then, win or lose based on the statistical performance of their players during real games.

More and more people rush to join every day, from the hardcore gridiron disciple to the casual fan. And leading the charge is Rotowire.com, a Los Angeles- and Madison-based company that pioneered the practice of supplying fantasy-relevant statistics.

“When I was in college it would literally take me hours to look up all the statistics for players and then analyze who was a good pick and who wasn’t,” says Peter Schoenke, founder and president of Rotowire.com., named after the slang term for fantasy sports – rotisserie, or roto. “A couple of my friends and I thought that we weren’t the only ones, so we started making a website with all the info catalogued and such. It just took off from there.”

Schoenke and his two Rotowire partners are humble, everyday Joes in all aspects of their lives except one: in the dimension of fantasy sports, they are kings. They are a lifeline to millions of fantasy gamers who would be drowning in a sea of misinformation without them. Simply put, they are the authority in fantasy sports.

“Our basic goal is just to help fantasy lovers out by giving them the best information that we can,” says Mike Doria, one of the site's content editors. “We know the demand, because we are part of the demand ourselves. We know that if we have the most up-to-date and accurate info, people are going to come to us for advice.”

The trio of Schoenke, Doria and Tim Schuler work in a modest downtown Madison office and feed fantasy fanatics with their daily requirement of news, projections and advice. Leaning back in deluxe office chairs, the three constantly throw verbal darts across the room at one another while ESPN News plays continually in the background, usually on two televisions at once.

They run the Madison bureau almost exclusively, employing only a handful of interns from the nearby University of Wisconsin-Madison to help serve the glut of fantasy-hungry customers.

“Being in Madison, the internship program, it’s exceeded our wildest dreams,” Doria says. “We’ve been blown away by the response.”

“We wouldn’t have started this all up if we hadn’t been hooked to the competition in the first place,” Schoenke says. “To a degree, if we weren’t doing this for work, we’d be doing it ourselves trying to get our teams ahead.”

By fantasy nuts, for fantasy nuts. Anyone who spends more than the average NFL huddle time on the grounds of the Rotowire headquarters is sure to hear opinions, laments and bragging about sporting events that don’t actually exist.

“We live in a fantasy world, literally,” says Doria. “It’s sure a lot better than reading government press releases or something. If we were updating something like depressing news stories or giving advice on what this latest capital budget proposal, I think we’d all have moved on long ago.”

The group constantly updates their website with the latest fantasy news and expert projections, usually beating the competition, such as RotoWorld.com. The updates are not only housed on Rotowire.com, but instantly take the place of other websites that now use Rotowire to cater to the fantasy crowd, like Yahoo.com or ESPN.com.

“There’s no doubt that fantasy sports are growing bigger everyday,” Schoenke says. “We like to think that we were part of that, with us having embraced the internet from the beginning as a tool.”

Fantasy football has been around in some incarnation or another since at least 1962, when a trio of Oakland Raiders associates began the Greater Oakland Pigskin Prognosticators League. But it didn’t exactly take off from there. Instead it was 35 years of hard road for fantasy sports, as it faced numerous hurdles along the way.

“Fantasy sports players used to be looked upon like just these huge dweebs who would sit in their basement and play out the game,” Schoenke says. “Fantasy fans were looked upon like Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts.”

Once that myth dissipated, the problem was the leagues themselves. The NFL, Major League Baseball and other professional leagues frowned upon fantasy sports, likening them to gambling. But eventually the NFL realized how fantasy gamers were in fact the exact audience they were trying to reach and have since embraced the phenomenon, with NFL.com now, even hosting its own fantasy leagues.

“In the late ‘80s, [baseball Hall of Famer] George Brett joked about having a good fantasy sports day and he really caught some heat for that,” Schoenke notes. “Today, [Washington Redskins tight end] Chris Cooley talks about how his scoring two touchdowns sank his own fantasy team. It’s really crazy how far its come.”

The growth in recent years has been shocking. According to a 2004 Harris Poll, 29.6 million people participated in fantasy sports that year, with the number expected to grow by 5 million in each of the next two years. By that estimate, approximately 39.6 million individuals are drafting, trading and updating rosters annually.

The University of Mississippi conducted a study revealing that of that 39.6 million, a whopping 93 percent plays football as the fake sport of choice. That would place the number of fantasy football participants in 2006 squarely at 36.8 million, or slightly more than the population of Sudan, the world’s 33rd most populous country.

“We’ve always dealt with the high-end users, the hardcore fans,” says Schuler, Rotowire’s chief operating officer. “What we are seeing now is a big increase in more causal users and a significant smattering of women joining, families joining. We’re getting more non-sports fans who got into sports through fantasy. It’s just very mainstream now.”

With mainstream success, though, comes mainstream attention, specifically questions about how the time vacuum of fantasy affects everything from family life to office productivity. A recent study by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. showed that during the National Football League’s 17-week season, the cost for employers to pay unproductive workers could be as high as $1.1 billion each week.

“I don’t believe in the numbers. But in a way it’s cool hearing exactly how big we’ve gotten,” Doria says. “It’s hard not to take pride in something like that, since we feel we had a lot to do with the growth in the industry.”

Schoenke simply saw it as the next hurdle that fantasy sports had to clear, and as part of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA), he challenged many of the study’s findings.

“These are the same guys that said that the NCAA men’s basketball tournament was costing us about a zillion dollars,” Schoenke argues. “Their logic and numbers are by no means exact or scientific.”

In fact, the guys at Rotowire.com believe that it is beneficial in some respects for employees to take a few minutes out of their day for leisure.

“People taking a couple minutes out of their day isn’t a bad thing at all,” Schuler asserts. “Having fun at work, no matter in what capacity, is what makes work bearable… I do it, and I work in fantasy sports. It’s really a necessary good.”

In the end, it is important to note that even the people over at Challenger, Gray and Christmas are in agreement with the Rotowire crew: after the FSTA stood up to the study, a final section was added to the findings stating that while they believe employees aren’t as productive during fantasy football season, they are happier.

“Employers should avoid squashing employees’ brief participation in fantasy football during work hours,” Challenger, Gray and Christmas said in the release. “The potential damage to morale and loyalty resulting from a fantasy football ban could be far worse than the loss of productivity caused by 10 minutes of online team management.”

“I’ll tell you what, it makes me a lot happier and content to be at work,” says Priore. “In fact, I look forward to going on Friday, because that’s all we are going to talk about... And if I win on the weekend you wouldn’t believe how fast I’ll get there on Monday.”