Last-Place Punishments

Photo: USA Today Sports

The primary goal in fantasy football has always been to win a championship. To bring home the trophy. Maybe win a few bucks. Lord your fantasy dominance over your league-mates for an entire offseason. But in recent years, a secondary goal has emerged in more than a few leagues—don’t finish last.

Because more and more fantasy football leagues have instituted a last-place punishment of some sort, whether it’s just a goofy trophy or something far more nefarious.

The goal of last-place punishments is two-fold. Ostensibly, it’s primarily to keep the league’s bottom-feeders from “ghosting”—keeping even the most struggling fantasy managers engaged all the way through the end of the regular season.

Of course, the actual goal is to (in the nicest way possible because we aren’t monsters) humiliate our friends. It’s an opportunity to revert, for just a little while, back to the days when the first kid who fell asleep at the slumber party woke up with their face covered in Sharpie, um, stuff. An opportunity to be childish, juvenile, and petty. To set aside adulting for a little while.

In other words, it’s fun.

In a perfect world, every league would have some sort of last-place punishment—especially “home” leagues comprised of friends and co-workers that draft in person each year. If you’re considering adding a last-place punishment to your league (and you really, really should), here are a handful of options to consider—in ascending order of heinousness.

LAST-PLACE PUNISHMENTS

DEFCON 5: The Last-Place Trophy

This first one is as easy as it is relatively harmless—the team that finishes in last place gets the sort of trophy that no one wants. Maybe it’s a skunk that says, “You Stink,” like the one the team that finished in last place in the King’s Classic Dick Butkus Division received this year. Or a toilet bowl. It gets handed out at the draft, the same as the championship trophy, everyone has a good laugh, and so on and so forth.

This isn’t a bad place to start, and it’s a good punishment if you aren’t sure how well that last-place league-mate will handle being mocked and derided, if only for a bit. Frankly, if their skin is too thin to laugh at a skunk trophy, then your league-mate is a stick in the mud and needs to learn to laugh at themselves.

Dial It Up a Notch

Rather than a trophy, the last-place team has to buy vanity plates for their car/truck/tank/whatever. Champion picks what the plates say, and they stay on until the following year’s draft. That’s actually a nice segue into the next punishment.

DEFCON 4: Good Old-Fashioned Public Humiliation

You have no doubt seen some permutation of this punishment on social media. It’s the most versatile of the options listed here—the possibilities are endless, and the humiliation meter can range anywhere from “Not too bad” to “Oh man, that’s effed up.” But the gist of it is always the same—the last-place finisher has to proclaim their suckage—publicly.

And there has to be photographic or video evidence.

It could be as easy as just having them stand outside their house or at the corner holding a big sign that says, “I suck at Fantasy Football.” If your draft is at a local watering hole, said last-place finisher has to wear a t-shirt (Preferably of the most garish color imaginable) saying, well, you know—and tell the server that EVERY time they come by the table. The last-place team has to take a giant stuffed animal to dinner at Applebee’s—while wearing the shirt and (again) reminding the wait staff how terrible they are at fantasy football. They have to walk through the grocery store (again, in the shirt), remarking to EVERY cart they pass that they shouldn’t have drafted so-and-so in Round whatever. The possibilities are endless—so long as it won’t get them arrested or fired, anything is fair game.

We’re at the point where the loser needs to have a sense of humor—and the punishment needs to be clearly outlined and agreed on ahead of time. We’re also at the point where things really start getting fun.

Dial it Up a Notch

The “Walk of Shame.” Everyone gathers at the last-place manager’s house. He then must walk up and down the street in nothing but shorts and flip-flops with a sign around his neck that says, “Loser” while all the other managers ring bells and say “Shame.” Yes, it’s a Game of Thrones rip-off. Wonder if their neighbors will get the reference?

Hey. I never claimed to be a nice person.