By VANESSA McCRAY
TRAVERSE CITY -- Cheering used to be all that football season required from its fans.
The athletes did the training, the coaches did the scheming and the commentators did the prognosticating.
Not so, now. Fantasy football is upon us.
Pigskin buffs crunch statistics, scour injury reports and draft their own roster of players.
"We know it's coming, and we enjoy it. It's almost like a little fraternity of those guys," said Scott Conway of Traverse City.
Today is the first Sunday of the NFL's regular season. For some area football fans, that means their favorite fantasy season also is underway.
The hobby of millions, fantasy sports give regular fans a chance to feel like part of the big leagues. In fantasy football, groups of players, or "owners," form leagues and each owner picks a team of real NFL players whose individual game day performances are measured. An owner accumulates points based on real-life statistics. Various leagues set different rules, but, through one mechanism or another, owners' scores are compared against others in the league. By the end of the season, a winner claims bragging rights and, sometimes, cash from entry fees.
But for fantasy die-hards, there's so much more to it than that.
Participants said fantasy football makes games, even ones they otherwise wouldn't care about, more interesting. There is camaraderie and competition, drama and trash-talk.
Conway is the commissioner of a league, and anticipation for this season has been building. Yes, they also play fantasy golf, hockey, baseball and auto racing. But football is the one that counts.
Summer is a chance to fine-tune league rules, on, say, free agency, and research players. All of it leads up to the big day: The draft.
On a Saturday in August, Conway's league, made up of co-workers and family, gathered at his house for an elaborate kick-off to the fantasy football season. The dining room transformed into draft headquarters. League members from Illinois and Wisconsin made the trip. The dining room table was taken out, the pretty rug rolled up and everything on the walls was removed except pictures of their children, said Michele Conway, Scott's wife. They ate and played flag football, but the main event was the draft. A clock told each owner how much time he had to make a decision, and a large board displayed draft picks.
"You would think they are running a country," said Michele, of all the rules and regulations.
Fantasy sports are big. Nineteen million adult Americans play, said Greg Ambrosius, president of the Fantasy Sports Association. Football is the most popular with magazines and Web sites devoted to it.
"When you tell your wife you have to get together for a fantasy football draft, she rolls her eyes..., but she understands, 'I can't fight this one,'" he said.
Not that it doesn't have detractors. The Web site womenagainstfantasysports.com offers a forum for fantasy widows to vent frustrations and sells T-shirts with slogans such as "I Thought I Was Your Fantasy."
There are far more men than women who participate in fantasy sports, though the number of female football fans has grown, Ambrosius said. Fantasy leagues, too, are thriving. Actual sports leagues embraced the concept about four years ago when they discovered fantasy players were their "customer base," he said. Prior to that, "They felt we were a bunch of nerds who would call up for injury reports," he said.
The Internet also is a reason for the fantasy boom. Participants once had to check newspaper box scores to figure out players' statistics and add up scores. Now, online sites keep track instantaneously.
Suttons Bay High School football coach Joe Trudeau remembers the "old-school" system for keeping track.
"We did, like I said, all the score sheets by hand for years and years," he said. "I still do score sheets on Sundays."
The average fantasy participant spends 37 minutes a day on the hobby, Ambrosius said.
Todd Thompson of Lake City is in a league with Trudeau. Thompson had his first fantasy team more than 20 years ago, and joined three leagues this year. He watches sports shows nightly to keep up on facts that will help manage his fantasy teams. On game days, he has three TVs tuned to various contests.
"People hate to watch football with me that aren't into fantasy," Thompson said.
In the last five years he noticed fantasy sports grow into a widespread cultural phenomenon.
"It's kind of neat to watch it. Before, you would talk to people about it, and they would look at you like you are from another planet," he said.
Conway, a Chicago Bears fan, opens his house on Sundays to his league. His wife Michele doesn't have a team in the league and doesn't think she wants to. She knows her husband loves sports, and the football rituals are part of family life. Their daughters don jerseys, or "football dresses," and Michele has a Bears apron to wear on Sundays.
"I am very, very fortunate that I've got a wife, Michele, that allows me to do the things that I do. She lets me get away with quite a bit," Scott said.
