If I get kicked out of my fantasy football league team this year, I’m placing at least 85 percent of the blame on the New Rochelle soccer team.
I spent this past weekend making the rounds upstate; on Saturday, I drove up to Endwell to see the Bronxville field hockey team take on Cazenovia in the state semifinals. The following day, I drove down to Middletown to see the Huguenots win the Class AA crown against Fairport with a 2-1 win.
The one thing I did not do, however, was set my fantasy lineup.
With three defensive players on bye, and the majority of my top draft picks like Lamar Miller, LeGarrette Blount and Kirk Cousins on the bench since they had byes the week before, I trotted out an anemic, incomplete squad and handed a win to my opponent who, like me, was in the midst of a heated playoff race.
If you judged solely by my friends’ reactions, you would have thought I killed somebody.
Now, I understand it.
We play for quite a bit of money, and the fact that I made no effort to put a team together this week may have really hurt the chances of a few of our other “owners” to recoup their league fees.
I apologized to them sincerely, but in my heart, I still blame New Rochelle.
Sure, maybe more of it has to do with my technological ineptitude. For the life of me, I just couldn’t figure out how to adjust my roster from my phone because I haven’t used Yahoo’s app all year. As I waited on the sidelines for the game to start, I tried frantically to manipulate my roster, to no avail.
But then 1 p.m. hit, and the fantasy week—and the championship game—were off and running.
For the next two hours, I watched the Huguenots play a beautiful game. Their crisp passes and strong defensive challenges interrupted only by the occasional email from one of my friends to call me horrible names that can’t, for sake of decorum, be listed here.
By the time they were done celebrating their championship win, and I was done conducting my postgame interviews, it was after 4 p.m. and any chance I had to put a competitive team together was just about gone.
I lost an easily winnable game, dropped out of the playoff race and all week long, I’ve been defending myself against allegations of collusion and tanking.
Maybe some of it was my fault, maybe some people in my fantasy league take things a tad too seriously, but I remain steadfast in my belief that it’s mostly New Rochelle’s fault.
But watching them celebrate that title, tears streaming down their face as they embraced a wild, adoring fan base? Something tells me that those guys are going to be able to live with that.
