Chris Johnson wasn't the NFL MVP last year, but he was the MVP of a lot of fantasy football leagues. And really, that's what's important.

We all have that one friend who’s a stat geek. (Heck, it may even be you. Heck, it might even be me.) He’s good with math, obsessive over numbers, watches SportsCenter like its his job, and generally spends way too much time rationalizing and analyzing human performance and rattling off condescending tidbits like “Tom Brady didn’t have a good game last week? That’s typical; while he normally plays well against the Titans against a left-handed quarterback and a tight end who wears a number divisible by 6, he’s actually only a 15% passer in games called by Jim Nantz on second Sundays of a month.” Twenty years ago we made fun of people like this: math-nerd-wannabe-jocks who were missing the point of sports.

Today though, you’ll find these guys dominating fantasy football leagues (clearly indicating, by the way, that I’m definitely not a stat geek. At least not a very good one.) A child of the Internet revolution and the World Wide Web, fantasy football has blossomed into a billion dollar industry which is now mainstream. Last year the Indians had a fantasy league, the cast of The Office had a fantasy league, and while I’m guessing Barack Obama wasn’t in a league himself, I wouldn’t put it past his staffers. The point is, nearly everyone with even the slightest interest in football (and sometimes, not even then) are in a fantasy football league.

Why is everyone (including this guy) so into this phenomenon? I take a look, after the break.

• The time commitment is low. In our fast-paced, go-go-go lifestyle where we’re so stretched on time we have to read e-mail, check makeup and smoke in the car on the way to work, yet somehow find time to watch reality TV shows like Teen Mom, no one wants to sign up for something they have to devote a ton of time to to be successful. Fantasy baseball and basketball require near-daily lineup changes and modifications and minutes a day add up to hours a week.

  However, since there’s at most 16 games per week in the NFL and most of them are on the same day, fantasy owners only need to login, check their players for injury status, set their lineups and maybe pick a sub off the waiver wire. All told, this process can be as low as three minutes or maybe as high as a half hour. This is a reasonable time commitment.

  In most other games you’re rewarded based on how much time you put into it. This isn’t necessarily true in fantasy football. While it’s true that more research sometimes yields better results, often fantasy football is a game of luck. For example, most fantasy football owners didn’t pick up Brett Favre last year in their first round, but as it happened, the casual fan who saw a name he knew in the draft screen lucked out and Favre had the season of his life last year. Just like the actual game of football isn’t deterministic, neither is fantasy football.

• It’s an excuse to watch more football on Sundays. Before fantasy football, I might have watched the Browns or Steelers game, but that was it. The rest of the games weren’t that interesting to me. But if you have players from your team playing, even a Raiders-Lions matchup seems worth watching (or, in the words of Bill Simmons: Gradkowski! Stafford! It’s the NFL on FOX!). Additionally, telling your significant other, parents, or children that you have to keep watching the game because “I have players in this game, and I’m playing Johnson from the office, and he’s a real douche so I really want to win this week” is a lot more respectable than “this beer isn’t going to drink itself.”
• It creates a brand new set of socially awkward situations. Ever notice there’s that one guy in your league who seems disconnected? He always knows what’s going on with the NFL, but he forgets who he has playing, or he might forget who he’s playing in the league, or he might even start a player who’s out for the week. Want to know the truth? He’s seeing another league on the side. It’s not you, it’s him.

  Actually, he’s seeing your league on the side, because this isn’t his primary league, or the one he cares the most about. It’s no longer uncommon for people to be in more than one fantasy football league. You have one for your work friends, you have one for your college friends, you have one for your Sunday School class, you might have one for the high school friends who found you on Facebook (in all likelihood this is the one you care least about). Of all those leagues, you have one that you care about most. Maybe it’s because there’s the most prize money involved, maybe it’s because you see these guys every day and they’ll never let you live it down, or maybe it’s simply the league in which your best chance at winning resides. Whatever it is, the other guys in the other leagues know that they’re your backup league, your safety league, and might react differently. Most people who have other teams understand the situation and they let it slide. But there’s always the chance of that one guy who’s only in this league, and the night before he plays you he’s e-mailing the rest of the league asking them to help him stack his team so he can beat you. Again, it’s not you, it’s him.

  And what about that guy who won’t shut up about how his team did? Every league has one of these guys, and walking that fine line between being stuck in an infinite conversation and being arrested for assault and battery is one of the more subtle nuances of fantasy football.

• Girls play too! I’ve used the term “guys” most of this article but the truth is that more girls than ever are playing fantasy football. In Michael Scott terms, this is a win-win-win. First, if you’re in a random league on the Internet, that girl might think your team is so good that she wants to date you immediately (it hasn’t happened yet, but it has to at some point, right? And when it does, are you required to name your firstborn “Manning” or “Adrian”?). Second, if you’re in a league with your significant other, that significant other also has a reason to watch football all day Sunday, meaning you’re in the clear. And third, there is no greater joy than watching the one girl in your league who drafted her team on auto-draft and only logs in once a week to change her rosters wipe the floor with the guy who promised an undefeated season. Priceless.
• It’s another reason to go to Vegas! I was as shocked as you (read: I wasn’t really that shocked) to discover that there’s a company whose sole purpose is to book fantasy draft vacations in Las Vegas. Is this not the very essence of what makes America great? Here we have a game, a completely meaningless game, to which people not only devote hours and hours of their working week, but now are booking expensive airfare and hotel accommodations to fly to Sin City to draft their team that would probably get demolished by someone who just left their team on auto-draft. CAPITALISM, BABY!

  In all seriousness though, I’d totally take this excuse to go to Vegas if I had the money.

• There’s an app for that. If you’re launching a company or business in the early 21st century whose value is furthered by releasing an iPhone app, you’re doing it right. I set some of my lineups last year via the ESPN Fantasy Football iPhone app. It was quick, it was painless, and I was able to do the same research I do on my laptop before deciding. And I did all that from the comfort of my bed before falling asleep on the Saturday before, without getting up and finding my laptop.
• It’s infinitely customizable. If you’re the league master or you have access to the admin area where you change the scoring values, there’s a really good chance that no matter how bad you got beat, you can edit the rules so that you won instead (I don’t really recommend this, however; generally, people notice when Brady Quinn beats Tom Brady, and they don’t have to look very hard to find where you granted +40 points apiece for interceptions). More seriously though, there’s a ruleset to feed everyone’s favorite part of the game. My favorite recent twist is the trading of draft picks, making fantasy owners even closer to real owners and adding some strategy to the time between when your league is initially organized and the time of the draft.
• It shuts up the “I could run my team better than my team’s owner is” guy. When the guy who calls talk radio every day complaining that the Browns didn’t trade up to draft Jimmy Clausen or that they traded Braylon Edwards when he had so much potential can’t put together a playoff team himself, you have definitive proof that while he could (in the case of the Browns) run the team equally well, there’s no way he could run it better.

But lastly, and most importantly, it’s fun. There’s no more important reason than this. Fantasy football is a (generally) free way to compete with your friends while doing something you were already doing anyway (watching football). It keeps you in touch with friends you may not see much anymore. It gives you an excuse to get together once a year (for the draft). It gets you more involved in all the games. It gets you more excited about all the games. And in a week where your team loses, you can now gain solace if your fantasy team wins.

My name is Jimmy, this is my fifth year doing fantasy football, my drafts are this week, and I can’t wait.