The independent newspaper of the University of Iowa community since 1868

The Daily Iowan

The independent newspaper of the University of Iowa community since 1868

The Daily Iowan

The independent newspaper of the University of Iowa community since 1868

The Daily Iowan

The ultimate fantasy (betting)

The+ultimate+fantasy+%28betting%29

The day fantasy leagues might not be the best thing for your bank account’s sanity.

By Kyle Mann
[email protected]

Fantasy football at this point has taken America by storm, offering the pseudo-managerial experience of drafting NFL players in order to compete against a league of one’s peers.

It started as a fun endeavor, primarily for bragging rights, and inevitably evolved into small(ish)-time gambling with monetary compensation often among friends.

Well, fantasy now finds itself at a pivotal point. Where fantasy outlets traditionally used a one-time draft at the beginning of a season to build one team for the length of the season, several new outlets offer the opportunity to draft a new team each week for potential cash prizes. If you watched any football over the weekend, you probably saw the ads, all infinity of them.

I appreciate fantasy; I have a team myself. But what’s shining through is that the fantasy structure we’ve come to know and love has been hijacked by big business preying on America’s affinity with football and the innate appeal of easy money.

New sites such as FanDuel and DraftKings seem to have spawned overnight, and while they make a point to assert uniqueness based on their week-by-week format, the biggest difference that comes with them can be found in the way they’ve been marketed.

Fantasy is no longer about fun, and the days of the sly, unspoken-yet-understood element of gambling are long gone.

The DraftKings and FanDuel commercials are relentless in their stressing the prospect of winning thousands or even millions of dollars using their sites, which raises the question: Given the NFL’s ban on commercials regarding Vegas during games, why are these overtly gambling-centric ads allowed on the air?

Until now, I would have stood up for a business’ right to air its commercials when and where it thought it would best reach its target market. But with these, all of a sudden I get it.

“At DraftKings we play for glory, for bragging rights, for fantasy football supremacy,” one ad begins. “But we also play for this: the Giant Check.”

“With FanDuel,” another encourages, “you can turn your fantasy football skills into real money.”

“It’s like the best adrenaline rush ever,” Arman K. said about FanDuel.

My personal favorite over the weekend, however, was a testimonial from a couple, in which the woman tells us that she heard her significant other screaming and shouting in the other room. What happened? Did the fancy china break? Did Little Timmy bump his knee? Nah. With all the sincerity and affection reminiscent of an eHarmony commercial, he says “I told her, ‘I just won.’”

Can we think about this for a moment? The picture that this onslaught of fantasy ads is painting portrays adrenaline-seeking grown men acting like children over fantasy-football victories, motivated by a miniscule probability that they hit the big one.

I get fantasy. It’s fun to think you’re smart about football, and bragging rights or even monetary rewards can be fulfilling achievements at the end of it. But pushing a product that is so primarily motivated by the money aspect of it is a dangerous game.

You know what comes with weekly drafts? Weekly entry fees. If you lose? That drives you to make your money back. A couple weeks of that (which is far more likely than winning), and guess what: You’re in the hole, and as a bonus, you may have just developed a gambling problem.

It seems that this new, budding era of fantasy football is less about the thrill of the game and becoming more and more a fleeting search for wealth and salvation.

I like fantasy football as it is, and I also don’t have any qualms with gamblers. But so long as I feel like I’m only catching glimpses of a football game in between seemingly three-hour long fantasy-football commercials, we should at least recognize that it’s not strictly all fun and games anymore, and the ads themselves are more than just super annoying.

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