As much as I love fantasy football, being the commissioner of your league absolutely sucks. While everyone else gets to focus solely on their lineup, you have to babysit a bunch of grown toddlers who you have to email 36 times per day. If you’re the guy who has to run your league, this article is for you. These are your struggles. You are not alone. We’re in this together and we will make it through. Godspeed, commissioner.
1. Your league fees could be as little as $20, but it never fails, you’ll always have one or two guys that you have to chase down like a collections agency to get their money. “Oh can I give it to you next week?” NO! It’s $20, not your firstborn child.
2. If you add a slot for a defensive player, the guys who get points from it love you, but the guy who lost because Sean Lee got hurt calls you an idiot (every day) for even considering it.
3. You get this text, call, or email at least once per week: “Hey I’m at _______ with no WiFi and I forgot to sub out Eli Manning who’s on bye this week. Could you do me a huge favor and fix it for me? Thanks!” The best is when you get that message from the guy you’re playing that week.
4. If you make the teams too big, everyone complains that the draft lasts too long, but god forbid they have to do a little research for a #3 wide receiver. Sorry you’re not in a 4-team league where AJ Green is still a free agent.
5. Do you do point fractions and know that, at least one week, you’re going to lose by half a point, or do you just do whole numbers and know that, at least one week, you would have won if you did fractions?
6. You’ve gotten a text at 2am asking you to approve a terrible trade you know will piss off the rest of the guys in the league. Now you have to decide if you want to deal with texts all night if you deny it, or an angry mob in the morning if you allow it.
7. At least one jerk will give up on his team after week 6 and stop updating his lineup. So now, you have to decide if you want to update it to make it fair for everyone playing him, or basically give all of his opponents a bye week with a free win.
8. If you happen to get the #1 pick in the draft, everyone thinks you rigged it.
9. If you happen to get any good draft number, everyone thinks you rigged it.
10. You study charts, graphs, and listen to every fantasy podcast to make sure you’re ready for the draft. Two of your picks get hurt or benched in preseason while the guy who autodrafted ends up making the playoffs.
11. Once you’ve been eliminated you have to keep maintaining the league and distributing the money even though you now hate everyone that still has a shot at the championship.
12. You spent a week going back and forth to the trophy shop getting the perfect victory symbol for your league’s champion. You will never win it.
13. If you set it up so trades have to be approved by the league, it takes forever because your dumb friends won’t log in and check, but if it falls solely on you, everyone will hate you forever.
14. The one year you finally set up a live draft at your house, everyone has to work and you’re left sitting in a room alone with unlimited chips and an Arian Foster cardboard cutout.
