Kyle Rudolph is now in his ninth season with the Minnesota Vikings, who drafted him in 2011. He has had a stable career with just that franchise, but he was involved in at least one significant trade: in his father’s fantasy football keeper league.
“My dad actually did not draft me when I came out,” Rudolph said. “One of his buddies did, and my dad traded for me, so I’m on his team to this day.”
The image of a father rooting on his son because of the fantasy implications is amusing to think about, but Rudolph’s endearing anecdote might be reasonably common nowadays.
The 29-year-old tight end is part of a generation of players who grew up as fantasy leagues were becoming part of the mainstream sports culture in the US.
No discussion of the modern NFL and its popularity is complete without acknowledging this phenomenon in which fans compete for championships of their own as owners of virtual franchises.
“I think it’s probably, as an offensive skill player, the most common thing that you hear out in public: ‘Hey, I had you on my fantasy team last year,’” Rudolph said. “Fans are all about it and it’s really changed kind of the landscape of the sports fan.”
From 2007 to 2017, the number of people playing fantasy football more than tripled, from 13.8 million to 42.7 million, according to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association.
On Sunday last week, ESPN’s fantasy app drew 8.3 million unique users — its biggest day ever — according to ESPN and Adobe Analytics.
Networks, Web sites and even NFL teams seem to understand the draw of fantasy leagues and their importance to fans.
“Anything that’s good for overall NFL fandom is good for the individual clubs,” Detroit Lions vice president of marketing Emily Griffin said. “We consistently hear from [fans]: ‘We want more fantasy stats, we want more out-of-town scores.’”
When Rudolph describes his father’s league, it sounds almost prehistoric compared with the Internet-powered drafts and stat trackers of today.
“They started playing in 1979 when they were seniors in high school,” he said. “Obviously at that time, you don’t have computers and Internet, you get the scores on TV afterward and get the newspaper to get the box scores, and it was points only, so it didn’t matter how many catches, how many yards, how many carries.”
Rudolph said that his dad’s league still keeps score by hand, but the Internet has obviously revolutionized the way many people follow their fantasy leagues and research players.
“There were certain things that, just, the Internet was made for,” said Rob Phythian, a cofounder of Fanball, which in 1993 began producing the magazine Fantasy Football Weekly. “The Internet was made for league management, right? It was a natural.”
Phythian identified three turning points in the growth of fantasy football.
“The first one was, I think we can take some credit for improving the content to make it more current. The second one’s league management online,” Phythian said. “The third was the leagues and the big marketing channels embracing fantasy. That came later, it didn’t come first. It came, I would say, 2003ish, where they finally gave up on saying that it’s gambling and understood it was like office pool on steroids, really.”
Now that sports betting is legal and operating in nearly a dozen states, the next innovations might blur the line a bit between that and fantasy sports.
The growth so far has already been substantial, and that is evident every weekend during the season. A sports bar on an NFL Sunday might include several different kinds of fans. Some might be watching their favorite team and some might just be glancing from TV to TV, looking for their fantasy players. Some might be trying to do both.
“The generation before ours, you were a fan of whatever team or wherever you lived or wherever you watched,” Rudolph said. “Now people are growing up being just fans of players because they have them on their fantasy team, and it’s amazing how fantasy has really changed the landscape in sports.”
Yu Yao-hsing on Tuesday nabbed Taiwan’s only goal in the final round of qualifiers for the 2027 AFC Asian Cup, as they fell 3-1 to Sri Lanka at Taipei Municipal Stadium. Early goals from Sri Lanka in the first half left Taiwan struggling to get on the board, and Christopher Tiao’s own goal at 53 minutes sealed the team’s fate in the third round of qualifiers. While acknowledging that the defeat, Taiwan’s sixth in Group D, was disappointing, head coach Matt Ross said he saw reasons to stay positive about the team’s development. “There were lots of positive signs in terms of the
“I don’t remember the moment, but ever since I was a kid, that’s the first thing I loved,” two-time NBA All-Star Isaiah Thomas said of his lifelong romance with basketball. However, that journey unfolded against the limitations of his size in a game where height often dictates opportunity — a reality he confronted throughout his career. At 175cm, Thomas is less than 2cm taller than the average Taiwanese adult male, while NBA players during his career stood at about 200cm on average. Compared with the NBA’s average career length of less than five years, Thomas’ 13-season career stands out as
INDIGESTION: Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup for a third consecutive time after a 4-1 defeat to Bosnia on penalties in a loss Gattuso said was ‘difficult to digest’ Coach Graham Arnold on Tuesday challenged his players to “shock the world” after Iraq became the 48th and final team to qualify for the FIFA World Cup with a nerve-shredding 2-1 win over Bolivia in an intercontinental playoff in Mexico, as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Sweden and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) also secured their places at the finals. Iraq, whose preparations were disrupted by the war in the Middle East, sealed their first appearance at the finals in 40 years and are to play in Group I against France, Senegal and Norway. Goals from Ali al-Hamadi
Dakar and Rabat have longstanding ties, but relations have been strained since the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) final, which Senegal won in mid-January before being stripped of the title, which was transferred to Morocco. Now, the AFCON trophy is something of a thorn in the two countries’ sides. On Rue Mohamed V, the street where Moroccan vendors are based in the Senegalese capital, a police van is parked. “The police have been on high alert since the Confederation of African Football [CAF] decided to award the title to Morocco, but there have been no incidents,” a local resident said.
RSS