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The fantasy football commissioner: loved by some, feared by most. A good fantasy football league is made or broken on the skill and dedication of its fearless leader. If the commissioner is weak and falters in the face of Yahoo.com or ESPN’s sometimes esoteric fantasy systems, you’re going to have a bad time. With most leagues having a couple hundred bucks riding on them, you don’t want to leave that up to chance, which is why your next fantasy football commissioner should be a woman.
Before an angry lynch mob of guys from the ages of 20 to 35 show up at my door demanding my blood and my man card, hear me out. Women are better for the organizational management that comes with your average fantasy football team. You’ve seen the lead up to the season. It’s chaos. No one has any idea what’s going on until the night of, leaving some poor asshole stuck on auto-draft and taking Dexter McCluster in the first round. That, my friends, is a tragedy. The thing is, the best commissioner isn’t a hard ass who knows all the ins and outs of football scoring–most people use the default profile, anyway. The best commissioner is basically someone who can play mom for a bunch of people who will spend the next five months acting like children who haven’t been taught to share yet in preschool…except these children have fully-formed vocabularies and can probably drink their weight in alcohol.
A good commissioner is all about making the experience good across the board. You want a league that functions normally, has some legitimate scoring and team size rules, and doesn’t go too far into the weird, wild west of PPR leagues. A woman who knows something about football is not going to set up one of those monstrosities, because she knows it will bring a bunch of discord to the group. She’s more likely to defer to a group decision than to charge ahead with it like your average dude despot commissioner might. You know how those fights end. Why not resort to putting someone in charge who’s more likely to democratize the process, instead of keeping Commissar Stalin at the helm?
If your league is going to be anything more than an online place to make fun of each other over sports knowledge (or lack thereof) you definitely want a woman running things. Have you seen what happens when we, as guys, try to organize a major get-together on short notice? We get all the important stuff: booze, meat, more booze. However, we neglect some other equally important things that might keep us all from ending the afternoon near death from binging on alcohol and yelling at the TV because Tom Brady decided that this was the week to have a shitty game.
One of the other great benefits is that your league commissioner will probably not feel the need to turn into Skip Bayless or Stephen A. Smith every Monday to recap the week and criticize everyone’s game day decisions. Gone will be the days of Tolstoy-sized dissertations on why your selection of Julio Jones was a shitty move. Overall, women just aren’t as into direct conflict as we are, so Monday morning quarterbacking every team in the league is probably not going to be something she wants to do.
Probably the best perk is that if you have a guy who is constantly out of line, she’s pretty likely to shut him down. Women are like the Navy SEALs when it comes to arguments. They’ll win before you even know the battle has begun. Your average, belligerent league member is not going to be capable of winning that war of words, mostly because he’ll just repeat his complaints about a lack of two starting quarterbacks per team while she makes a solid argument for why a 14-team league can’t support three quarterbacks per team. Just like that, he’ll go back to complaining quietly on the league discussion board.
Do the smart thing this year and make your commissioner a woman. She’ll run your league with all the sense of the best NFL commissioners, but with much less drama. Plus, every league needs a good mom to keep us developmentally arrested man-children from killing each other over a waiver pickup or a trade.
Respond
Jack Quesinberry
Recent graduate from the University of Maryland working in the biotech industry. I like to spend my weekends in DC ensuring my future political career will be one filled with a number of great scandals and equally great Sunday brunches. My alter ego is Whiskey Ginger.
@JQwhiskeyginger
This sounds good and all, but if her team beats yours you may just be better off dying than face that humiliation.
Based on the title and your opening paragraph, this column just came off as complete blasphemy.
Blasphemy is what I do best.
What in the world is wrong with you, Ging?
Yes-no-yes.
If by “league commissioner” you mean making sandwiches during the draft, then yes, I agree with you completely.