Fantasy Football

Week 4 of the NFL. Week 4 of Fantasy Football. It's glorious. And the feelings we (the collected men and women of FFLs everywhere) have about our sometimes dubious but always entertaining pastime, its rise and future are perfectly summed up by Bill Simmons of ESPN.com in this wonderful little column on the Eagles-Cowboys game and it's fantasy implications. Highlights:

Recalling a league from the early 90s: On Tuesdays, Camp bought USA Today and painstakingly figured out everyone's point totals, wrote them out by hand, then mailed them to us … not by e-mail, by regular mail. Like, they showed up in our mailboxes Friday. That's how you found out whether you won or lost, unless you called Camp (which most of us usually did). For some reason, we totally trusted Camp's scoring, even though he was probably doing it after 12 beers and eight Marlboro Lights. For a waiver-wire system, I think we just called Camp and said, "Hey, I want to pick up (fill in the name)," to which Camp always seemed to say, "I just picked him up 10 minutes ago." And that's how it went.

...and on pitching a fantasy column to his editors in Boston back before FFL was cool: I worked for the Boston Herald in 1995, I pitched a weekly fantasy column to my editors that August; I might as well have been pitching a column about drinking and driving or trying to sleep with underaged girls. They couldn't have said no fast enough.

Profundity at its greatest.