So it is indeed that time of year again.

The time of year when I cease having a boyfriend. He gets suspiciously replaced with a screaming, rabid football fan.

PVDD not only watches football, he commissions a fantasy football league, the Felonious Football League. He’s got two team owners that live in other states, so the draft is a little tricky.

For those of you (like myself) that are not familiar with the fantasy football phenomenon, it basically works where a league has anywhere from 8 to 20 teams. Standard leagues will normally have like 12 teams. Each team in the league is represented by a team owner. Every year on Labor Day, PVDD holds his draft. This is where each of the team owners picks the players on his or her team. Now, each team owner gets a “keeper”: a player from the previous year that they get to sort of reserve in advance and is not available for the other team owners to draft.

In the draft, players are picked by rounds – each team owner picks a player and then the next and so on. It goes basically from 1 to 20 and then 20 back to 1 and so on. Obviously, the team owners that are close to the beginning of the draft order will get the best players first. Each team owner will usually grab a stud running back first, since there are only a few guys that get a ton of yards and touches, and they are almost always running backs. That’s how points are scored for the team based on the stats for the players you start. By the end of the draft, you should have at least one kicker, one or two quarterbacks, one or two running backs and one or two wide receivers. PVDD also has his owners pick individual defensive players. This means that the team owners will draft defensive team members and not just a real life team’s defensive team as a whole. So by the end of the draft you should also have a well-rounded defensive team as well.

So PVDD spends hours drafting up a manifesto and making the league schedule, keeping track of who’s starting who and if real life players get injured and whatnot. Every week, all the teams in the league will match off against another team, with four teams on a “bye” where they don’t play (byes only occur during week 4 and week 10). If your team is playing in a game that week, you want to check that you start players that are playing in real life games – otherwise you miss out on potential points. Points are earned based on the yards your players run, their catches, tackles, and so on. At the end of the year, there are cash rewards awarded after the “playoffs” which are between the division or wildcard winners. The winner of the Felony Bowl last year (the single female team owner, thankyouverymuch) got about $800. There’s a Last Man Standing award too, where each week the lowest scoring team is out of the running and so on until the last week it’s down to two players for the award and the higher score wins that prize. That award is that you just get your entry fee back (about $75).

So last year during the draft, I was pressed into service as the long distance communicator. We set up shop at the local blogging bar, and I got the two remote team owners on IM, and told them the players that were picked and related their picks to the rest of the people. For someone who has had no experience in football and almost zero familiarity with the player names, you can imagine to some degree the madness that ensued, especially after the lovely barmaid continued to keep me in drink.

This year I anticipate the draft with a little more excitement. Last year’s football season actually ended up being pretty fun, rooting on the Seahawks and I even ended up learning a bit about the game and the players. Who knows, maybe one of these years I’ll have a team of my own!