Is This Just Fantasy?

Last weekend I undertook the masochistic exercise of tuning in to Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s, the Emmy-winning fantasy football advice show that preludes the NFL games every Sunday on ESPN. Every week, Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s features a panel of fantasy football experts who explain their weekly player rankings, sleeper picks, and provide minute-by-minute injury updates with a repetitiveness that evokes Chinese water torture, even for a person with moderate interest in fantasy football. In a way, superfluity is the core existential problem facing all ESPN programming these days, and Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s is no exception. As with much of ESPN’s other content, the show offers very little information that can’t be found online in a more streamlined fashion, rendering the show’s bloated, three-hour runtime ridiculous and unnecessary. I’d originally intended to watch all three hours of Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s, but I turned it off at the one-hour mark, right after the second update on Marcus Mariota’s hamstring. Admittedly, I probably don’t fall within the show’s demographic — I imagine it’s better served as background noise for techno-illiterate dads — but the ever-expanding role of fantasy football content among ESPN’s programming is nevertheless fascinating in what it says about the network’s relationship with the NFL.

Its sheer banality aside, there’s something mildly discomfiting about Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s. Recently, ESPN revealed its discomfort with its personalities deviating from sports-talk when they censured Jemele Hill for her tweets labeling Donald Trump a white supremacist. Appeals that ESPN commenters “stick to sports” have always been absurd — sports don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s only reasonable that they be subject to the same cultural forces that permeate the rest of society. Later in the week, Trump’s disparaging comments about Colin Kaepernick would make any idealistic notions about compartmentalizing sports seem laughable. After Roger Goodell issued an expectedly tepid response to the President, it became abundantly clear that neither the NFL nor ESPN were interested in ruffling any feathers — and that’s exactly the space where Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s thrives. Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s offers the ultimate “safe space” for viewers who bemoan politics’ infringement on their sports. It’s a format that perfectly marries ESPN and the NFL’s interests in having prolonged conversations about football that never risk becoming overly extracurricular. On Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s, players are reduced to stat lines so that they literally do exist in a vacuum — it’s the “stick to sports” fan’s ideal realized. The result is three hours of awkwardly antiseptic conversation about a league that’s riddled with scandals, produced by the network predominantly tasked with holding it accountable. The show creates a bizarro world where the only appropriate time to mention Cam Newton’s recent misogynistic comments is when Matthew Berry suggests that Newton’s PR struggles might inspire him to play better (unbelievably, this actually kind of happened). In this regard the show functions less as an entertainment product than as a commercial for the NFL.

The conflict of interest between ESPN and the NFL predates Donald Trump, of course. The relationship between sports and sports media has always been codependent, but with the advent of the internet as the preferred medium for analysis, ESPN’s ratings are more reliant on live NFL games than ever. Monday Night Football has been one of their biggest ratings draws for years, and they finally got exclusive rights to air their first playoff game in 2015. Live sports remains one of the last reasons to still have a cable subscription, and NFL games drive viewership like no other product. It’s no wonder then that this conflict of interest manifests itself in some pretty bizarre ways. The company suspended Bill Simmons several years ago for calling out Roger Goodell for being “a fucking liar”, even though all evidence at the time suggested that he was in fact lying about his knowledge of Ray Rice’s elevator video. After her first series of anti-Trump tweets, Jemele Hill was likewise suspended for suggesting that fans boycott the NFL and its sponsors. So while the company promises straight-talk across its platforms, it’s shown a clear preference to eschew controversy when it comes to the NFL. Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John is obviously far from the most malignant result of that preference, but it’s absolutely still a product of ESPN’s desire for more sanitary NFL content.

So it’s not surprising that this year ESPN upped its fantasy football coverage to include a daily half-hour fantasy football show plus a 28-hour fantasy football marathon to begin the season. Another advantage of producing fantasy football content is that it’s relatively low-stakes and has an absurdly short lifespan. The rate at which it becomes obsolete is faster than almost any other genre of sports news, so there’s always an urgency to create new material that can be quickly digested and then just as easily forgotten. Nevertheless, the 28-hour marathon did manage to produce one memorable moment when they held a real-life auction draft that featured a white auctioneer holding up panels featuring mostly black players’ faces on them so that a mostly white audience of “owners” could then bid on them. The optics were exactly as bad as they sound. What was intended to be a cutesy sketch inadvertently became an exact recreation of a scene from the movie Get Out. The skit was so ludicrously gauche that it approached comedy. In fact, had it been intentionally comedic, it could have been interpreted as a cutting satire about the quotidian dehumanization of black athletes in the media. ESPN apologized for the bit almost immediately, but it still revealed the specific type of obtuseness that’s donned when entering the fantasy vacuum. It was a reminder that even the most hermetically sealed off version of sports is still not exempt from the context of our social realities, no matter how much ESPN would like it to be.

Several years ago, ESPN announced a new partnership with the WWE that prompted all sorts of handwringing over whether or not the network was compromising its journalistic integrity by covering wrestling’s fictional storylines. There were legitimate questions about to what extent ESPN should provide WWE with this type of advertising, but maybe some of that handwringing should have been reserved for the proliferation of fantasy football coverage as well. After all, the fantasy vacuum offers its own type of fiction. The veneer of fiction in wrestling (termed “kayfabe”) creates a more obvious distinction between real life versus in-ring stories, but fantasy football also provides a membrane that similarly bifurcates what happens on and off the field. The difference is that if ESPN ever decided to devote several hours per week to covering WWE’s in-ring storylines, that would at least raise a few eyebrows. They’d be justifiably labeled as shills for the WWE. The same criticism could be made about Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s, which essentially amounts to a three-hour, kayfabe-only NFL show.

The point isn’t that there’s anything inherently insidious about Fantasy Football Now sponsored by Papa John’s, nor fantasy football in general. The analysts themselves are harmless and affable. They aren’t shills for the NFL and they shouldn’t be required to cover the NFL in a more holistic way — that’s not the show’s responsibility, and it’s not what it promises. The expansion of fantasy-related shows doesn’t necessarily come at the expense of journalistic content, and there are plenty of other writers and personalities working at ESPN who aren’t afraid to speak truth to power when it comes to the NFL. There’s nothing conspiratorial about ESPN covering fantasy football, and if the demand didn’t exist, then those shows wouldn’t be on. But it’s still worth examining how fantasy football coverage accomplishes ESPN’s ancillary goal of eliding the NFL’s off-field issues in order to satisfy the “stick to sports” demographic. So without any kind of detraction, we can probably look forward to another ostrich-headed 48- or 72- or 144-hour fantasy football marathon next year. Hopefully they can find a sponsor.

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