NFLBy Ben Koo on

Last year, the draft dates of my three fantasy football leagues were already locked in. In fact, one had been finalized in June, one in July, and then one in early August. As of Tuesday, none of these leagues had finalized a draft date. Although all three leagues will hopefully move forward, there are five league members between those leagues who won’t be playing this year.

On Monday, I tweeted about the apparent lack of enthusiasm for fantasy football this year, and similar feedback began to roll in.

If you’re like me (someone who has decades worth of fantasy football experience and throws a few hundred dollars at the hobby each year without thinking twice), last year, you may have bought a magazine, printed out a cheat sheet, and were monitoring preseason games to figure out key position battles and identify key sleepers and breakout rookies. Fall was right around the corner. You were excited.

But this year is (obviously) quite different. We’re currently dealing with a pandemic, a contentious presidential election, and racial injustice protests. Even putting those events aside, the sports world is also substantially different. Each year, NFL camp starts and the anticipation for the upcoming season quickly grows. Baseball’s short-lived grip on the media’s attention loosens before giving way. The tsunami of excitement for football, both college and NFL, continues to build at an impressive rate. This year, less than a week from September, that excitement for the upcoming season appears to be a mere ripple in the water.

In fact, without any preseason action, I’d argue that the NFL is not even on the podium in terms of sports media attention right now. The NBA and NHL playoffs are, for the first time ever, basking in the late summer attention usually reserved for football. Regular season baseball is getting significantly more coverage, thanks partly to the continuous flow of games being suspended because of positive COVID-19 tests. The shitshow of the college football season and its future seems to have relegated the NFL to second fiddle between the two major football organizations.

We can also see the lack of preseason interest manifesting in viewership for HBO’s Hard Knocks. In 2018, viewership was 781,000. Last year, it increased to 879,000 viewers between linear and streaming. This year’s premiere dropped all the way under 300,000 on linear, and fell further for the second episode.

Rotowire president Peter Schoenke told me “everyone is off their usual pattern this year with football, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a catchup spike of signups and drafts closer to the season.” Schoenke also pointed out that because of when Labor Day falls this year, the NFL season starts five days later compared to last year, so fantasy football services and websites have an extra five days to play catchup.

But not everyone shares the same optimism. A source not authorized to comment at one of the larger fantasy football providers told me that “alarms are starting to go off. If you told me that this year will be a 10% dip in activity, I think we’d all take that in a heartbeat and hope it comes back next year, but I think it’s going to be worse.”

Des Bieler tackled this topic for the Washington Post, and found more of the same.

“It’s ugly,” Joe Dyken, who runs the website Fantasy Football Nerd, told The Washington Post via email. “We are down 60% from where we were at this time last year.

“Referring to the fact that the pandemic radically altered the schedules for other sports leagues, Daugherty added, “I think a lot of sports fans — like myself — kind of base their internal calendar off of sports, and this year all the signifiers are out of whack.

“At a time where you should be getting hyped about a third-round rookie’s long practice touchdowns, instead we are getting playoff hockey tweets at noon on a Wednesday. We are missing those subtle nudges that say, ‘Hey, it’s time to start your fantasy preparation.’ ”

What would a drop in participation look like, and why would it happen?

Some of it will be tied to uncertainty, meaning that some leagues don’t want to move forward because they’re not sold the NFL season will move forward as planned. Another reason is that many of us are social distancing and staying away from the office, which is where a lot of leagues get put together. How many work leagues won’t happen because nobody is at the office organizing a league? How many leagues will take a year off because they’re made up of a group of friends who get together every year in person, and a distanced draft just isn’t the same?

Individually, there is also financial uncertainty, with millions unemployed as a result of the pandemic and millions more worried about their ongoing employment. Opting to not participate is a pretty easy way to cut back for those affected. Leagues with people dropping out for financial reasons may replace them with some who play in other leagues, but that wouldn’t increase the amount of active participants.

Even if most leagues move forward and existing fantasy players fill open spots, this still has a major effect. This outcome means that fewer people overall are buying magazines, consuming fantasy related content, and tracking the performance of NFL players on game days. It’s also reasonable to expect players to be more passive if they’re still playing, thanks to the hyper speed news cycle and the consumption of that content as opposed to fantasy content.

If fantasy football participation does take a noticeable hit this year, what would the long term impact look like? Schoenke believes it would be a one year dip and that “most fantasy football players indicate they are in it for life, so players that sit out for whatever reason this year would likely return.” Schoenke also believed that any drop might have a positive effect for daily fantasy, as football fans who missed out on season long fantasy football may decide to jump into DFS. Dustin Gouker, Head of Content for Legal Sports Report, took the same position when I spoke with him.

“Sports betting and daily fantasy should be pretty immune from the effects of the pandemic on sports. You can react to postponements and illness pretty effectively. But season long fantasy becomes much more of a crapshoot if you figure players and entire teams could end up missing games in a given week because of COVID. Playing fantasy leagues for real money has to be less appealing to the average fan in this environment.”

If there is a lift in both betting and DFS, perhaps the silver lining is that two markets will grow because of fantasy’s decline, while any dip in season-long fantasy football may just be short-lived. But either way, sports media companies and fantasy-specific services and content providers are going to have to brace for a rough fall. Until this season, the fantasy industry has been consistently growing and has seemed recession-proof, and this is likely going to be the first big hit the industry has taken. How big of a hit remains to be seen, but hopefully it won’t cripple the industry and have a long-term impact.

About Ben Koo

Owner and editor of @AwfulAnnouncing. Recovering Silicon Valley startup guy. Fan of Buckeyes, A's, dogs, naps, tacos. and the old AOL dialup sounds

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