Fantasy Football and Corporate America
Historically, the standard corporate office team building and bonding experiences centered around retreats involving ropes courses, trust falls, and ziplines. Today, we’ve moved onto something a bit more competitive. Fantasy. Football. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m sure some people still enjoy a good trust fall or a zipline that goes slower than a turtle in mud. For the past 20 years, corporate America has been swept up in the endless wave of fantasy football and inner-office trash talking. How have these two vastly different segments of American culture become so perfect for one another? Let’s look at the areas where they overlap.
Corporate offices have deliverable deadlines, team meetings, quarterly report monitoring, and an obsession to over-analyze every aspect of any important business decision and/or the numerous potential outcomes. Combine that with a hilariously consistent push by marketing and sales departments for something new and fresh and outside-the-box. Remember Pepsi Clear or the Pontiac Aztek? That’s like drafting a kicker in the 1st round (Oakland Raiders, anyone?) in the same NFL draft that someone took Tom Brady in the 6th round. Head scratching decisions for sure.
Fantasy football has all of these in droves. If anything, fantasy football team managers probably brought many of these same daily corporate responsibilities and obsessions to their own fantasy team management. There are fantasy football drafts, where team managers prep for their draft day by over-analyzing every potential player at every potential draft position. Just when you thought that attention to detail was done, there is also a weekly lineup analysis during the season, where a roster’s potential fantasy point potential is compared against available waiver wire additions. There are also trade deadlines and players you once thought of as golden, only then to be sold on your league’s open market in exchange for someone else’s mistake/opportunity. There are catchy team names that would make any marketing department cringe, created using football and cultural puns so eyerolling they make dad jokes look downright Shakespearean.
Of course, who can forget the water cooler trash talk that would rival most actual football locker rooms or Real Housewives dinner parties. The best part? Absolutely no football experience is required. Simply a consistent attention to detail of your current roster and weekly fantasy reports. Sound familiar? It should. Staying abreast of constantly shifting market conditions has a kindred spirit in fantasy football. There are podcasts, network TV shows, software apps, or even your neighborly word-of-mouth advice to help you put together the best fantasy football team. I once read a ten-year projection of the best NFL wide-receivers, and that “report” was probably 10 or 12 pages, including graphs and a vast spreadsheet printout going over multiple years and over a hundred players. For someone in corporate America, that might sound pedestrian, yet that report’s data will immediately become out of date and irrelevant as soon as teams change out coaches and players and have their own NFL Draft each season. But guess what? Now a new updated Fantasy Football report will be needed, and just in time to feed the fantasy football machine.
If that’s not corporate America for you, I don’t know what is.