Odds are great that if you’re a Footballguys subscriber, you know what the typical fantasy league looks like. While there are oddballs here and there, the community as a whole has long settled on certain standards. Teams start 1 quarterback, 2 running backs, 2 or 3 receivers, and a tight end. Sometimes there’s a flex position or a second quarterback. Sometimes individual defensive players are used instead of team defenses. Scoring awards a point for either 20 or 25 passing yards, with either 4 or 6 points for passing touchdowns. Rushing and receiving give a point for every 10 yards, and about half the time there will be an extra point for receptions. On occasion you’ll see tight ends getting 1.5 points per reception. All of these small differences wind up being mere variations on a theme; by and large, there are one or two accepted and acceptable standards, and leagues are tasked with choosing which of them they want to employ. Exceptions exist, of course, but the norm is so well established that it can be referred to simply as “standard scoring”.
How did we arrive at this widespread consensus, though? Fantasy football grew organically in various and varied parts of the nation, long before the internet became ubiquitous enough to serve as a homogenizing force. Why is it that this one very narrow variant survived, thrived, and crowded out the competition? Earlier this offseason I started reaching out to long-time fantasy football players whose leagues predated the internet and modern league management software. I have compiled their stories here into a narrative history of the evolution of fantasy football from the perspective of those who were around to see it change.
All Hail the USA Today
When discussing early fantasy football leagues, there is no other place to begin except for this: I spoke to perhaps two dozen different fantasy owners who told me two dozen different tales, but the words "USA Today" featured prominently in nearly every story I received. For early fantasy football leagues, the USA Today was their bible. Final scores could not be tallied until the Tuesday edition was on the shelves, containing the final statistics from the Monday Night Football game. If Monday Night Football ran late, sometimes full statistics wouldn’t be available until the afternoon edition. In the words of one owner, “The excitement for that Monday and Tuesday morning USA Today was like being a 9-10 year old kid again waiting for Christmas. Back then there were actually 3 different editions of the USA Today. Up in the top right corner you would want to find the edition that said Sports Final to be assured you had the Monday Night Game results; sometimes Sports Update would have it, but it was not a sure thing. Boy, I knew where every USA stand was in a 10 mile radius and what put out which edition and when it was available.”
Just how important was the USA Today? Consider one story I received: “The following is silly, but true: as of draft day, we did not know whether or not USA Today would have IDP stats. So we all agreed that we would draft both IDPs and team defenses, and for week one, we would submit lineups including both IDPs and Team Ds. After the week 1 boxscores came out, if they had IDP stats, then we would be an IDP league. If not, then we would play with team Ds.”
In short, if the USA Today didn't track it, then for fantasy purposes it might as well not have existed.
A Very Slight Difference in Mechanics
When talking about fantasy football twenty to thirty years ago, it’s striking how many of our current norms were originally designed to address logistical issues in a pre-internet society. The advantage of scoring 1 point per 10 yards, 20 yards, or 25 yards is immediately apparent; all totals are easily calculable by hand. Which is a good thing, because in the absence of league management software in the ‘80s and ‘90s, fantasy scores were calculated by hand. Forget stat corrections, many owners were worried merely about their commissioner doing the math correctly. Some enterprising commissioners leveraged the technology of the day to make their job eaiser, such as one told me “Fortunately I worked in a computer lab… (no hard disks in these machines – you had to boot them up with a hard “floppy” disk). We had Lotus 1-2-3 so I had to learn to spreadsheet and I still maintain one to this day for all of the league info. We had the dot matrix printer in the lab so once the numbers were entered it was easy to produce the results.” While today's technology has rendered many of these challenges obsolete, we still see their influence in the easily-divisible nature of yardage scoring and the stubborn existence of leagues that do not use decimal scoring.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, scoring was hardly a commissioner’s only challenge. Even basic communication and organization was difficult, and established precedent was nonexistent. One owner lamented “Most challenges running a league didn’t come from scoring; it came from trades and not having everything covered in the rules. Guys would find that loop hole and exploit it all in the name of trying to gain a competitive advantage. What a headache!!! The amount of time a commissioner would spend on the phone during the course of a week with trades, trade issues, and starting lineups was unbelievable.“
One idea that hasn’t exactly survived fantasy football’s migration to the internet is that of the supplemental draft. Without the ability to communicate with the entire league, some leagues never implemented first-come, first-serve waivers. A few leagues I heard from instead held a “supplemental draft” during the NFL season, (usually after week 4), where teams got together and drafted any players that today would have been hot waiver claims. One player even says his longest-running league has maintained its supplemental draft all the way to today, saying “See, having started the league in the pre-Internet era, “connectivity” has never been a pre-requisite to participating, and we still have teams that don’t look online to see what’s going on. You prepare for the draft but Drop/Add sort of means you have to be doing that kind of work all year, whereas the Supplemental is a one-time event.”
Among the various other oddities was a surprising one that cropped up from time to time: several of the leagues never even thought to follow a snake draft format. Instead, they used a so-called “straight” draft, with the same person picking first in every round. Perhaps my favorite anecdote regarding snake drafts came from an owner who relayed that “the draft was not snake. It was pull numbers out of a hat for the first three rounds, then snake afterward. So [in the] worst case scenario your first three picks are 16th, 32nd, 48th and potentially someone could be picking 1st, 17th and 33rd. Seems equitable. I fought with the commish over this, and finally he got stuck [with] the 15th in the 1st and 14th in the 2nd. The next year it was changed to full snake.”
Early Scoring: An Evolution
Another thing that stands out when discussing old leagues is how much variety there was between scoring systems. With no established conventions to copy off of, the earliest fantasy leagues made up whatever seemed to make sense to them at the time. In an effort to mirror the NFL, many leagues started out rewarding nothing but touchdowns. When yardage scoring began to enter the mix, it did so in several different ways. The traditional yardage scoring we see today, where every yard is rewarded, (or without decimal scoring, every tenth yard is rewarded), was one of just three common options for rewarding yardage. The second option is another that has survived in places to this day: point bonuses for reaching certain thresholds. A running back might receive a 3 point bonus for reaching 100 rushing yards, or a quarterback might get 3 points for hitting 300 passing yards. Where these bonuses have survived, they are usually just that- bonuses, above and beyond any other points those yards might be worth. Early in fantasy football history, however, they were often the only points given for yardage gained. A running back with 99 yards might score zero points, while one with 100 might score three.
The third method of introducing yardage is one that was still around a little bit a decade ago, but which has become quite rare today; distance bonuses on touchdowns. You see, box scores did not always include final yardage totals for every player, but they always included a scoring summary mentioning every touchdown, who scored it, and the distance it covered. By counting 90 yard touchdowns for more than 9 yard touchdowns, early fantasy leagues had a rudimentary method for rewarding yardage gained. It might be hard to believe, but twenty years ago, distance-based touchdown bonuses might have been the single most universal scoring rule in fantasy football. Eventually as box scores could more reliably be counted on to have yardage totals, yardage-based scoring became more popular; many leagues, however, retained their bonuses for touchdowns based on distance, essentially double-counting yardage on long touchdowns.
Another fun variant that has since joined the endangered list is “non-traditional touchdown” bonuses. “Traditional” touchdowns were defined as passing touchdowns for quarterbacks, rushing touchdowns for running backs, and receiving touchdowns for wide receivers and tight ends. Several leagues would give a bonus for any touchdowns scored outside of the position’s “traditional” method, such as a rushing touchdown by a quarterback or a receiving touchdown by a running back. Sometimes these were a modest 3-point bonus. Other times they were less modest. The first fantasy league I joined started in 2001, but its scoring was based on a league the commissioner had been in since the mid-‘80s. The league featured distance scoring bonuses for touchdowns, and on top of that it doubled the value of all non-traditional scores. In the most extreme example, if a player scored a non-traditional touchdown of more than 50 yards, it was worth 24 fantasy points! In 2001, wide receiver David Patten of the New England Patriots had a game where he scored a 29-yard touchdown rush, a 91 yard touchdown reception, a 60 yard touchdown pass, and a 6-yard touchdown reception. In my league’s scoring, with distance bonuses and “non-traditional” bonuses, Patten scored 77 fantasy points, 36 of them coming from bonuses alone.
But while certain themes might have been more common, early fantasy leagues were truly notable for their variety. Quarterbacks might have gotten a point for anywhere from 10 yards to 100 yards, (but always in easily-calculable increments). Several leagues made use of a “special teamer” lineup spot (also referred to on occasion as an “IST”). One owner casually mentioned “I think we gave 30 or 40 points for a kick or punt return TD”. Another owner gave 25, as well as 12 for a safety and 25 points for a successfully executed fake field goal, adding “I guess the thinking was to reward the "big" play.” One owner told me “rushing TDs were 6, passing and receiving TDs were 3. We figured a TD is 6, so we have to split it between the passer and the receiver. We quickly learned that that was out of whack, so the next year we changed rushing TDs to 5.”
Growth: The Common Denominator
Today, getting 11 dedicated owners to start up a 12-team fantasy football league is as easy as posting a thread on a message board or sending out a tweet. In 1989, things were not quite so easy, and many league sizes were determined essentially by how many people could be recruited. I heard often about leagues that started out with just 4 or 6 teams, and even one league with just 5 teams. A common thread is that small leagues rarely stayed small for long. One owner perfectly illustrated that phenomenon, saying “The word spread like wildfire. Guys were coming up asking me about this football contest I had and how they could get into it. Nobody had heard of fantasy football, but once you explained it they wanted in. In 1986 we opened it up to 10 teams. We could have done more, but we thought 12 was too many, (little did we know)… By 1988 we had such a large waiting list to get in, we opened it up to a 20 team league with two separate 10 team drafts. Finding a place large enough to draft became an issue. One year we held the draft at our Village Council Chambers— the mayor’s son was in the league. The Lions Club where we had held the draft earlier ran us off; they said it sounded like gambling.”
With the benefit of hindsight, these early results would presage the explosive growth of fantasy football once the internet lowered the barriers to discovery. These early leagues were revolutionary and wildly different from the leagues we’re all used to today, but even though we might have to squint a bit at times, we can still see the lasting impression that these pioneers have left on our common hobby. Whether we started playing fantasy in 1984 or 2014, we are all now united by a shared passion. It is our duty to be as welcoming and helpful to future generations as those trailblazers were to us, as fantasy football continues its expansion throughout society and realizes its manifest destiny. Between the rise in popularity of dynasty leagues and the advent of daily fantasy football, the game is heading off in new and exciting directions, but as we forge ahead into the future, we should take a moment to remember our past.
I would like to extend a special thanks to the dozens of owners who contacted me and shared their stories, as well as to all of the early pioneers of fantasy football; we owe them all a huge debt of gratitude.