Every year since 1990, I have played in a Fantasy Football League with a group of guys from the place where I first worked straight out of college. While the team’s owners are still largely the same, how the league operates has evolved significantly over the past 33 years. Those changes were mostly driven by technological advances. The implementation of recreational competitive tennis has also progressed a lot during the intervening time. This weekend, I am taking a step back to consider if it has changed enough.
Coincidently, the first year I participated in this particular fantasy football league was also the year that Tim Berners-Lee published the first web server and graphical browser. At the time, the World Wide Web consisted of a few connections between a handful of research institutions and government agencies. Most people didn’t have access, and there wasn’t a lot of information relevant to football anyway.
In 1990, drafting fantasy football teams required that each individual owner purchase pre-season magazines and pay close attention to the pre-season football games. We scoured the print newspapers to try to glean information about how NFL teams and players might perform in the upcoming season. I found the USA Today pre-season guide to be particularly useful, and I always purchased one off the newsstand.
Our particular league’s official source of stats was the box scores in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In those days, it was not unusual to have discrepancies from paper to paper. In season, every Monday would find us huddled over our desks, manually calculating whether our teams had won. If Monday Night Football was relevant to the outcome, it would be watched with rapt attention.
When the market for fantasy football information was first recognized, experts in the industry sprung up peddling “cheat sheets” to help fantasy owners draft teams. The name is not coincidental, as purchasing information was regarded as a crutch for people who did not know much about the sport. Currently, there is a plethora of credible player-ranking information available for free. The stigma of using those sources no longer exists.
The calendar governed and constrained the way we did everything back in 1990 and for several years thereafter. For example, dropping and adding players had to be done during the workweek when we were all in the office. There was no option to make a quick roster adjustment on Sunday morning if a player was unexpectedly unable to play.
The USTA unveiled the NTRP system and League Play feeding into National Championships during the 1970s. It made sense for the system to conform to a yearly calendar at the time. NTRP ratings and tournament ranking lists were printed and mailed out to players and organizations on a yearly basis. It was simply the only viable way to do it during the pre-internet era.
Now that we have computers and instantaneous information access, I wonder if annual NTRP ratings are an anachronism from a bygone era. USTA League rules and operating procedures are rooted in ideas and assumptions that may no longer be valid. Considering the technology available at our fingertips, I think USTA League might look very different from the de facto implementation if it were to be redesigned from scratch today.
Perhaps it is time to consider updating USTA League for the modern era. It is an interesting thought exercise in any case.
Here, here! Great point.