I have been and always will be a sports fanatic. I live and die by my teams, and they can have a significant impact on my mood. In the past ten years, a phenomenon has swept across the sports world-fantasy football. It makes a sports fan's wildest dreams come true, as you draft and control your own team of professional football players. The thought of having complete control of a team of physically gifted athletes gets our (sports fans) blood pumping. Some count down to the months before the NFL season just so the leagues can begin. Your team performance depends on your players' actual performance on Sundays. Everything sounds all nice and great, but as many other things may, fantasy football can and sometimes does lead to Problematic Internet Use.
One issue with fantasy football that contributes to Problematic Internet Use is the additive features it holds. Each fantasy football website has a bevy of features that make it nearly impossible to leave the site. Injury updates, advice on the upcoming week, adding players, dropping players, live scoring updates, etc... These things are enough to keep a sports fan occupied for hours at a time while causing nothing but confusion for an outsider. This leads to both increased Internet use and the formation of in groups and out groups. I will revisit this point later.
In addition, one team never seems enough. I personally have three teams- one with my high school friends, one with my college friends, and one with my camp friends. Let me tell you- it is difficult enough to keep up with one team for a four to five month period with all that goes on in the NFL. The more teams one possesses, the more time they probably will spend online searching for moves to make their team better. And in my experience with fantasy football, it is pretty common that a person may have more than one team.
The final point I would like to make is that Fantasy football ruins Sundays. This is when the most Problematic Internet Use occurs. Many fantasy owners spend ALL DAY on their computer on Sundays, watching football on television while at the same time on their fantasy football website praying that their players come through this week and succeed. There are games at 1 pm, 4 pm, and 8 30 pm on Sunday; that’s ten hours of fantasy football observation online. Therefore, for the dedicated (and addicted) fantasy owners like myself, entire Sundays are wasted away by sitting at the computer watching fantasy football updates.
I would like to revisit my point about fantasy football causing increased internet use and the formation of in groups and out groups. This increase internet use is a problem as seen in Caplan’s Theory of Problematic Internet Use and Psychosocial Well Being, as people with psychosocial problems think they have bad social competence, leading to increased internet use, which eventually just worsens the problem. Some would say that people who spend all of Sunday staring at a computer for football updates have psychosocial problems, and that this obsessive use worsens their issues. The Caplan model describes a vicious cycle in which someone with psychosocial problems and negative social competence worsens their problem with increased Internet use, and fantasy football seems like a perfect example of this. In addition, as we have already seen and studied in the class, the formation of in groups and out groups leads to many negative interactions and problems between the groups.
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I for one have never understood the point of fantasy sports! I recently read an editorial in the Sun that suggested fantasy sports ruin the comraderie among fans because instead of cheering for one team (for me it would be the Mets) you are instead rooting for all the players that are on your fantasy team.
You do a great job of describing the idea of fanstasy teams and the aspects about them that make them unique and addictive. You related your points to Caplan's model interestingly. I do have a question though- how is it that people with psychosocial problems engage in the activity? I can easily see how this could be addictive, but I was always under the assumption that groups of friends participate in fantasy leagues together. In this scenario, if someone has a circle of friends to participate in fantasy football with, how bad can their social competance really be? It is interesting to think about how the actualy situation mgiht influence the application of Caplan's model.
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