Fantasy football draft season is right around the corner, and if you’re anything like 90% of the people who participate in these drafts every year, your event will be a bland, joyless affair. It will be held either at Buffalo Wild Wings or in your great aunt’s basement (because she has a ping pong table). Sometime before that draft begins, someone will push a button and ESPN, Yahoo, CBS Sports, or whatever mindless computer program that you have selected as the designated soul of your league will randomly select your draft order for you.
Shame on you.
Imagine you are at a diverse, expansive food tasting festival with nearly limitless choices available to tantalize you and stimulate your eager taste buds. You could get Thai, Indian, Mexican, and everything in between. You could order the greatest custom made pizza known to man, handcrafted by an Italian master chef. You could order a mouth watering steak that has been seasoned and seared to perfection by a 7th generation culinary artist who specializes in that exact thing. You could eat the best goddamn salad you’ve ever had (if that’s what turns you on—I try not to judge). The world at this moment is your oyster—and you could probably get oysters at this imaginary food festival too.
Instead, you decide to bypass all these delightful options. You grab a wad of unflavored tofu the size of a tennis ball off one of the side tables, cram it in your mouth, and wash it down with a glass of lukewarm tap water. Why? Because it was within arm’s reach and you’re a lazy asshole. You lack creativity, imagination, and drive. You’re a goddamn disgrace. This is the food equivalent of letting the computer pick your draft order, drawing names out of a hat, or any other similar process.
Is that who you want to be? I thought not. If you want to better yourself… if you want to better your league… read on.
I am well aware that entertaining ways to determine your fantasy draft order are floating around all over the place these days. Some I like. Some I hate. And some show great promise but need a little tweaking to reach their full potential.
Here are a few of my favorites (enhanced for your reading pleasure) listed in no particular order:
Slow Moving Animal Races
The co-host of my podcast (subscribe) was reading out a few possible “fun” drafting ideas recently, and one he brought up was “Snail Racing.” He said something to the effect of “you go to the store and buy twelve snails and race them,” blah, blah, blah. You get the picture. I have also heard this same idea except with turtles substituted for snails. I admit this sounds kind of cool.
Getting hammered and watching relatively slow-moving animals race for my amusement is a decent evening. But the people who came up with these ideas are the type of fun guys who just go through the motions at the end. If you want to come out on top in a draft order challenge like this, you can’t just let the snails fall where they may. You have to put in a little extra effort so you end up with Todd Gurley and not Eric Decker (assuming you decided to snag him in the first round—obviously you had suffered a serious head injury just prior to the draft in this scenario).
How To Win
I am a competitive guy. And most of the people I play fantasy football with are competitive guys too. And I can tell you right now that there is no way in hell that with something as important as the fantasy football draft order on the line that I would put my success or lack thereof in the hands of some sorry ass, soft, store-bought snail (or turtle). If you are as serious about winning this thing as you should be, you need to go out to your garden or your local woods and get your hands on a wild, feral snail that has been fighting for survival every day of its miserable life. You can put that on my tombstone if you want—that’s how strongly I feel about it.
Have you ever taken a good, long look at store snails? They’re stagnant, pampered, and slovenly. Wastes of space that have had their ever whim catered to—the Kardashians of the animal kingdom. You would be too if you lived your entire life in a cardboard box getting fed plenty of snail food all the time without having to work for it. You would too if you were having all the snail sex as you want because (let’s face it) there are like 200 other snails in that box with you and it would probably be tough to turn around withouthaving sex with someone under those conditions. (Especially since snails are hermaphrodites so I assume every snail in that box is fair game regardless of their sexual preference.)
Wild snails on the other hand have grown up hard. They spend every day being forced to avoid flies, millipedes, centipedes, leeches, beetles, rats, mice, weasels, squirrels, toads, salamanders, turtles, blackbirds, wild turkeys… not to mention the future human serial killer demographic who like to burn things with a magnifying glass—the list goes on. And if wild snails want to have sex (which takes from 1-3 hours usually) they will frequently do it out in the open, exposed to all these aforementioned predators. Every time they have sex, they know there’s a solid chance they will die—and they do it anyway because they’re bad asses. That takes serious snail balls.
Based on all these observations, I think it’s safe to say that a wild snail makes a bitch out of a store snail a hundred percent of the time in a race or any sort of combat. If your league is incorporating snails into its drafting process somehow, get out in the woods today and start looking for an ass kicker. Look out in the open—that’s where they like to have sexual intercourse sessions that are as long as The Godfather.
**You can also get snails through the mail, but I consider this risky. You just don’t know what you’re getting, and this is way too important to leave to chance. If the Mail Snail phones it in, you’re fucked, and you’ve got no one but yourself to blame. Also, you could do this with small children (but keep it on the down low because I suspect the state frowns on such activities). And just to be clear I mean racing them for sport, not sending them through the mail.
LUCK and LIQUOR
One of the ideas I found on the web that I was interested in was as follows:
You have twelve shot glasses in a row (I assume laid out by a thirteenth, impartial, non-league participant who is willing to blow his or her afternoon doing this public service). One of the glasses has tequila in it, the other eleven have water. You all drink and the guy who gets tequila gets his choice of pick. You repeat this process eleven times, and there’s your draft order. So, at the end everyone has had one shot of tequila? Wow, put the women and children to bed you animals. The only thing that would make this less boring is if instead of tequila you used Perrier.
What Would Make It Better?
What would be more fun than everyone taking one shot of tequila over the course of half an hour or so? One guy taking elevenshots in the same amount of time, of course. Obviously, with one significant change to this setup it would be made exponentially better. Make it so only oneof the glasses has water and the other elevenhave tequila. Everyone gets drunker and drunker as they fail to pick the lucky glass of water and by the end the poor bastards who are going to get the shitty draft spots are also going to be wrecked beyond belief. There’s even a chance they might pass out and someone could take a picture of them with a hamburger patty inserted between their butt cheeks so it kind of sticks out like a shark fin. (This may or may not have happened to someone I knew in high school.) In this scenario, the embarrassment of the season they’re going to have begins with constant heckling and ridicule on that very day.
What Would Make It Even Better
Use a coffee mugs instead of a shot glasses.
How To Win
Without an inside man (or woman), this one is hard to give yourself an edge in. If you agree to participate in a process like this, you are placing your fate squarely in the hands of the often unforgiving Fantasy Gods. You just have to hope if you end up so shitfaced that you do something humiliating that you have friends you can trust to not put anything too scandalous on Facebook—which, of course, they will. Because you deserve it.
Not impressed by these two options? You’ll love the next two ideas.
