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If FX’s “The League” taught us anything in life, it’s that nothing is more important than Fantasy Football. Nothing. Fantasy Football comes before work, family life, the birth of your children, honeymoons and weddings, and even defiling your friend’s loft by filming a porno in it, just because. It not only causes Americans to give a shit about more games than just their team’s, but it also forces us to endlessly check sports wires, news organizations, and endlessly tinker with our lineups during the week.
If any of this sounds like you, well, you might be one of the millions of Americans that will be costing employers $13 billion dollars by endlessly reviewing player statistics and managing your rosters at work. Billion. With a B.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the Chicago-Based consultancy firm which calculated the estimate, admits that it “fully acknowledges the absurdity” of trying to put a firm dollar amount on lost work output from Fantasy Football alone.
“We are not trying to demonize fantasy football,” CEO John A. Challenger said in a statement. “It is important to understand that there are more distractions than ever in today’s workplace. If it’s not fantasy football, it’s the latest Hollywood gossip, shopping on Amazon, or checking Facebook.”
Assuming that each employed participant spends two hours a week on fantasy football while on the job, which is a very conservative estimate, it works out to approximately $13.4 billion over the course of a 15-week fantasy schedule.
However, the firm adds that fantasy football is at the forefront of employees’ minds, the subject of workplace “water cooler” conversations and could even possibly slow down a company’s Internet speed as bandwidth goes to tinkering with lineups and researching players. “It’s a massively popular phenomenon that cannot be ignored,”
Employers need to suck it up. I had my first fantasy draft of the season last week, while I was on vacation, and I camped out in my hotel lobby to participate, because it was the only place I had “reliable” internet. And that “reliable” internet caused me to spend $185 out of my $200 allotted in my auction draft on LeSean McCoy, Aaron Rodgers and Reggie Bush. You don’t hear ME complaining.
Side note: Auction drafts are fucking bullshit.
[via Chicago Tribune]
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The question is are we spending 2 hours messing around with fantasy football in addition to the hours of dicking around on the internet we already do, or are we replacing 2 hours of dicking around doing other non-productive stuff with fantasy football? I, for instance, dick around all day. So throwing fantasy into the mix isn’t costing my employer anything extra – I’m already 100% unproductive.
Hey now, there is nothing unproductive about reshuffling your lineup. Don’t be so hard on yourself.
One word: “escapism.” Note to employers: make work not suck, we’ll probably want to do more of it.