The National Football League postseason is building toward its Super Bowl, but for many fans the most important competition ended last month.  All over America, fantasy football players drafted teams in August before spending September through December reducing thousands of our planet’s largest and most athletic men to mere commodities, laboring mentally to assemble and manage rosters they likely followed more closely than that of any individual NFL team.  This is no marginal activity; by now the Venn diagram describing NFL fans and fantasy football players would be two circles that overlap almost completely.

Twenty-seven million people play fantasy football, which is now a billion-dollar industry. Fantasy commentary and scores are increasingly interlaced within standard NFL coverage. People may share nothing else in common except for an obsessive love of professional football, a tenuous bond given the rivalries between favorite teams, but in our little leagues we provide one another the fantasy of joining the class of team owners and personnel managers, exploiting NFL players as our labor force rather than worshiping them as heroes.

Fantasy sports developed from small groups of fans obsessed with the statistics-heavy game of baseball. Now fantasy contests exist for every sport, even bass fishing, but fantasy football is the current king. Groups of interested football fans form themselves into leagues.  While people do play with strangers online, the most common situation (or the one that at least feels more common because it involves real world social activity) involves people forming leagues with other people they actually know, much like forming a team for a bowling or softball league.