Life Lessons through Fantasy Football

Potentially my Achilles’ heel as a therapist is my overreliance on sports analogies.  Starting my career in a college town led to an assumption all my clients followed football.  Over the years I have been able to adapt some of the analogies for clients who avoid sports, but some just don’t translate well.  While this analogy could easily be adaptable, part of its joy for me is tied to the origination of my realization, which was through fantasy football.

Why Fantasy Football Hit Me With a Life Lesson

Since high school, I would sign up for fantasy football or basketball as just something to do with my friends.  I never really followed too closely or understood its deeper strategies.  My results were expectedly lackluster and my ambivalence remained.  Then in 2019 I was in grad-school and my patterns continued.  But something was different, my team was winning all of its games.  After a few weeks it was #1 amongst my league of friends.  Here I learned of (and the truth of) the saying: “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”  I dove in, my team was good, but it could’ve been better.  I looked into the strategy, sent trades, picked up players nobody had and poured in to improving my team.  

Thanks to some of these moves, and despite some poorly chosen ones, I made it to the finals that year.  It was a pretty even matchup.  Every week there are different sections of games, 1 on Thursday night, a large portion at 1 pm on Sunday, a smaller portion at 4:20 pm on Sunday, and then 1 Sunday night and Monday night.  Most weeks a match will be up in the air until at least the end of the Sunday night game; however, my suspense for this week did not last as it was over before the end of the 1 pm games.  My team was on fire and his team laid a stinker.  I won!

As the games progressed his team improved a little and mine cooled off, but it was never close.  To stoke my ego further later in the week (after I had already spent my winnings) I looked to see if there was any chance he could have beaten me…  and there was, if he made all the right moves with starting some players and sitting others, he would have barely eked out a win.  This was disappointing for some reason, as I guess it meant my team wasn’t infallible.

One of those moves was to have his quarterback be Ryan Fitzpatrick from his bench and to sit Deshaun Watson.  For those who don’t follow football, Ryan Fitzpatrick has two nicknames, Fitzmagic and Fitztragic.  He is a volatile player who could be great some weeks and terrible some other ones.  This week happened to be a flip of nicknames into Fitzmagic.  If you don’t follow football you may still know who Deshaun Watson is.  This is before all those terrible allegations and at a time while he was perceived as a good person, and a great football player.  

When the ‘Right’ Choices Still Don’t Work Out

This is where the lesson comes in (only the side objective here was to flex about my 2019 fantasy season), that sometimes, the obvious seemingly right moves might not be right.  Life happens, and there’s chances.  Later in fantasy seasons I’ve had amazing teams lose to a bunch of scrubs.  There are no guarantees.  Just making the right choices doesn’t cement the desired result.  

The Relief That Comes From Focusing on Process

Luckily, the outcome of this realization wasn’t a fatalistic pessimism, but instead a relief of pressure.  I can’t control the outcome, so why stress it.  All I can do is focus on the process.  What are the seemingly right choices that give me the best odds of success.  There’s always going to be unexpected occurrences (like Ryan Fitzmagic throwing for 5 touchdowns in a game) beyond my control.  That’s okay.  All I can do is do my best and accept where the chips fall.

A Bonus Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

P.S.

From this I learned a lesson the hard way of what not to do.  Realizing that sometimes these unexpected occurrences happen, the next season I smartly put Patrick Laird as my starting running back for a game.  I was deep in my investigations and thought he was due for a brilliant unexpected performance.  Even if you follow football closely you probably don’t know who Laird, the 3rd string running back for the Dolphins at the time, is.  He did not have a brilliant performance, putting up basically 0 points for my fantasy team in a match I lost by 3 points.  I went on to miss the playoffs that year by 1 game.

This led to another realization.  If my opponent from the 2019 championship played Fitzpatrick instead of Watson and lost because of it, that would’ve been a lot more painful than losing the way he did.  I now try to make decisions I would regret the least if it goes poorly.  That applies to who I play at running back on my fantasy team, but more importantly how I show up for my wife, friends, and clients.  

How This Ties Back to Therapy

In my therapy practice, I’m focused on the process.  I want us to have goals where all the steps are in our control.  The results are above our paygrade and that’s okay.  I’ll focus on what our part is and how to do it as we walk the path of living a good life.