Fantasy League

by Mike Lupica

  The Bulldogs’ quarterback coach, David Bartlett, and their receivers coach Elijah Martellus, a former tight end in the league, showed up after an hour, and they ran some plays, asking Jack Sutton to cover Elijah, short and deep.

  Mr. Warren gave Charlie the full play-by-play over the phone as soon as Charlie was out of school.

  “He’s slower than he was, but not as slow doing football things as we expected him to be,” Mr. Warren said. “One of the reasons might be he’s about twenty pounds lighter than he was the day he hurt his knee, because he wanted to make himself real pretty for the camera.”

  “But he looked good?” Charlie said.

  Still not believing this might actually happen.

  “He looked good, Charlie boy.”

  “What did Matt think?”

  He heard the old man chuckle.

  “Not gonna lie, he was a little, oh, resistant at first,” Joe Warren said. “That’s why we held the workout at seven o’clock in the morning, so no one but those of us involved would be there. Matt said that we’d turn into laughingstocks all over again if it got out that we were now auditioning action stars, people would want to know when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were going to get tryouts.”

  There was a pause at Mr. Warren’s end before he continued.

  “But he liked what he saw in the workout. Then he got with our coach. And our coach said that he’d sign someone from reality TV if he thought the guy could help our team. And that he thought Mr. Sutton could help our team.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Charlie said.

  “Did.”

  “Huh?”

  “What we did, about an hour ago,” the old man said, “is sign Jack Sutton to a free agent deal, since it turned out the Jags had no future claim on him, never dreaming that he’d play football again. It will be announced in the morning unless some Twitterer finds out first.”

  “I can’t believe you actually did it!” Charlie yelled into the phone.

  “Believe it,” Mr. Warren said. “And then cross your fingers and keep them crossed that he does have some football in him when he starts hitting people and they hit him back.”

  “Got ’em crossed already,” Charlie said. “Both hands.”

  “And, Charlie?” Joe Warren said. “Let’s keep this between the two of us until we announce the signing tomorrow. Let’s us be in control of this story instead of chasing it, like we did with Tom Pinkett.”

  “Okay,” Charlie said.

  He knew that meant Anna would be surprised tomorrow along with anybody else when the news broke, and Charlie knew how much she hated surprises. But he wasn’t about to go against her grandfather’s wishes. The old man had never asked anything of Charlie until just now and he wasn’t going to let him down.

  “You really think Jack can still play, Mr. Warren?” Charlie said.

  “What I’m doing is thinking positively, Charlie boy!” Joe Warren said, his voice suddenly coming so loud out of the phone Charlie thought he’d accidentally put him on speaker. “We both have to tell ourselves that this is going to work out for all of us.”

  Deal, Charlie thought. He’d think positively enough for the entire city of Los Angeles.

  Twenty-Seven

  CHARLIE DIDN’T ATTEND JACK SUTTON’S press conference. He even asked Mr. Warren to keep him out of the story if there was any way for him to do that.

  The old man said, no, they weren’t going to start trying to hide things now.

  So what he told everybody when he introduced Jack Sutton as the newest Bulldog was that his friend Charlie Gaines’s mom worked in the movie business, that Charlie had seen Jack running in the new Vin Diesel movie, Charlie had mentioned it to him, and the Warrens had taken it from there.

  Jack Sutton said, “I’ve been accused of acting like a twelve-year-old plenty of times in my football career, but I’ve never had to publically thank one until now.”

  Jack told everybody that he hadn’t learned anything that he didn’t already know about football while he’d been retired, but he had learned a lot about himself, and how much the game meant to him.

  And how much he’d missed it during his time away.

  “I can’t go back and undo the things I did when I was younger,” he said. “And I know that everybody here is going to wait and see if I back up what I’m telling you today. But what I’m telling you is that I’m a different guy off the field, even if I plan to show the Warrens and Coach Fiore and Bulldog fans that I’m the same player I always was when I’m on it.”

  He smiled then.

  “I know a lot of the people in this room mostly remember me for being an idiot,” he said. “I plan to show all of you that I got a whole lot smarter once I thought football was taken away from me for good.”

  When Joe and Matt Warren stepped to the microphone together, Matt Warren said that this was a do-over for the Bulldogs, like they were finally drafting Jack “Sack” Sutton the second time around.

  One of the local reporters asked if this was another example of the Bulldogs taking advice from their seventh-grade assistant.

  Matt shook it off. “Then you better go tell our coach that he’s the one with a seventh-grade assistant, because once we worked Jack out, he was more enthusiastic than anybody about us signing him.”

  The media had some fun with the whole thing for a couple of days, Charlie’s role in the signing a big part of the story, one guy on KABC saying that this was like the kids’ version of Moneyball, Dan Patrick calling it “Charlieball” on his radio show. So Charlie was back in the spotlight again. People more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt this time around, willing to believe that if his advice worked with Tom Pinkett, maybe it would work with Jack Sutton.

  Bill Spencer wrote in the Times that if anybody else in the movie business spotted any possible prospects, by all means to call Joe Warren as soon as possible.

  As for Anna? All she said the next day was “Wow, Gaines, now you can keep a secret almost as well as you can play fantasy football.” She left it at that, which Charlie took as good. If there had been a football around, he would have happily spiked it.

  Jack Sutton’s first game, first since he’d unretired, was against his old team, the Jaguars, at Bulldogs Stadium. It could not have gone better if Charlie had been writing the game story himself before the game was even played. Sack Sutton lived up to his nickname right away, getting his first sack in more than two years, recovering a fumble, in there for about three-quarters of the Bulldogs’ snaps on defense. Somehow played, as just about everybody said or wrote afterward, as if he’d never been hurt and never been away and—oh, by the way?—had played middle linebacker his whole career.

  “A Hollywood ending for a guy who’d retired to Hollywood,” Al Michaels said on Football Night in America. “Now everybody can’t wait until next week to see what he’s got planned for a sequel.”

  “Forget about a sequel,” Cris Collinsworth said. “This might turn out to be a series for the L.A. Bulldogs.”

  The Bulldogs were 3–2, everybody officially treating them like the surprise team of the NFL season so far, Charlie not believing how well things were going.

  Until things started to go wrong.

  A little bit at first. Then a lot.

  Against the Seahawks, Jack covered the wrong guy when he was supposed to be covering the tight end. The guy was wide open, and the Seahawks got handed a gift score that cost the Bulldogs a game they ended up losing by a point. A tough loss against a divisional foe vying to make the playoffs.

  The week after was worse: a penalty for a late hit, at home, one the whole sport ended up talking about, just because nobody could believe what they’d seen from a guy who had cleaned up his act so perfectly.

  The Bulldogs looked to have their game against the Rams won. With under ten seconds left, the Rams’
quarterback was trying to get out of bounds at midfield, hoping to get one more play for his team, one Hail Mary heave into the end zone. Bulldogs about to clinch the win, leading 17–15.

  Jack Sutton chasing the QB.

  Maybe wanting to end the game right there by causing a fumble. Problem was, this was the Jack Sutton who was a couple of steps slower than he’d been in his prime, even with the occasional flashes of his old brilliance he’d shown so far in his comeback.

  That Jack Sutton trying to catch up to the play.

  The runner beating Jack to the sideline. By a lot. One foot deep into that fat white stripe that means you’ve made it out of bounds. And either Jack couldn’t stop himself, or just didn’t see that the guy had made it out of bounds.

  But what everybody in the stadium, and everybody watching on television, saw was Sack Sutton shoving a helpless QB with both hands, knocking him into one of his assistant coaches.

  The Rams players standing there went crazy, flags flew, the stadium suddenly got as quiet, Charlie thought, as the school library.

  Fifteen-yard penalty, personal foul.

  Ball went from the fifty to the Bulldogs’ thirty-five. From there the Rams’ kicker nailed a fifty-two yard field goal as time expired.

  St. Louis 18, Los Angeles 17.

  Not just a bad loss, but a bad division loss, as bad as you could possibly have.

  Charlie was at the game, sitting where he always sat, with Mr. Warren and Anna. Mr. Warren didn’t say anything when the game was over, nobody in the suite said anything.

  Or moved.

  It felt to Charlie as if it took Matt Warren about fifteen seconds to get from his suite next door to his father’s, Charlie seeing him before anybody else did, seeing how fast he was moving, worried that Matt Warren was about to get flagged for a personal foul, just because of the look on his face.

  Matt Warren stood in front of them, Charlie and Anna and his father, arms crossed, face red. He looked at his father first, then shot a quick look at Charlie.

  Then back to Joe Warren.

  “I should have known better,” he said, spitting out his words. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. But I went along one more time.”

  His dad didn’t say anything. Charlie wasn’t even breathing.

  “The great Sack Sutton,” Matt Warren said. “At least when he was totaling cars and busting up clubs, the only person he was hurting was himself.”

  That was it, all he had. He turned and walked out, almost bumping into the only other person in the suite who was moving in that moment, one of the waitresses.

  Charlie feeling in that moment as if the real loser at Bulldogs Stadium was himself.

  Just like that the twelve-year-old who had encouraged the owner to sign Tom Pinkett and then Jack Sutton wasn’t the most adorable football boy in town anymore.

  The headline the next day over Bill Spencer’s column in the Times read this way:

  BOY AND HIS DOGS SACKED FOR LOSS

  The next night even Mr. Fallon took some rips at Charlie and the old man on his radio show. After he tried to soften the blows by telling his listeners how much he loved Charlie, reminded them that he coached Charlie on his son’s Pop Warner football team, reminded him that he was the one who started letting Charlie give his fantasy picks on the show.

  “With all due respect, I’ve never met a kid who loves football more, or tries harder on the field,” Steve Fallon said.

  Charlie braced himself, just knowing that whatever came next wasn’t going to be good, because it was like his mom had always told him, nothing good ever came after “all due respect.”

  “But my job,” Steve Fallon continued, “is to give my opinions about the big issues in the world of L.A. sports. And unfortunately, Joe Warren has made Charlie Gaines, as great a kid as he is, into an issue. The two of them decided to bring in Jack Sutton, and now Sutton might end up costing the Bulldogs the first playoff spot in the team’s history. The truth is, the kid’s latest fantasy pick has turned into a total nightmare.”

  When the show ended a minute later, Charlie immediately got a text message from Anna.

  How do u like being a member of the family so far?

  Twenty-Eight

  THE WEIRD THING WAS, CHARLIE was still killing it in his fantasy leagues the way he always had, solidly in first place in every league except for one head-to-head league, stuck behind a kid he knew only as the owner of a team called Dream Team. He was one of those guys who loved trash-talking Charlie online even though Charlie refused to respond. You got guys like that from time to time, and this kid would send the same message each week:

  “You will never beat me.”

  Whatever. Charlie was beating everybody else. He had never thought there was any magic to the whole thing, just common sense. Charlie knew how fantasy football had changed as the NFL had become more and more of a passing league, knew that all the changes to protect the quarterback and to put more passing offense and scoring into the game had changed the landscape of fantasy football forever.

  Teams were throwing the ball more and quarterbacks were putting up greater fantasy point totals week by week, year by year. Charlie loved going back into pro football’s past to measure just how much things had changed, not just to see it with his own eyes, but with his own numbers. For example: In 2002, Brett Favre was one of the great quarterbacks of his time in the NFL. He attempted 551 passes that year, which was good for fifth-most in the league. But when you looked at the league ten years later, that was the same number Sam Bradford of the Rams attempted in 2012, which only placed him eleventh in the NFL.

  It wasn’t just pass attempts. Before 2011, Charlie knew, a quarterback had only thrown for five thousand yards twice in league history. But then three guys did it in 2011 alone—Drew Brees, Tom Brady, and Matthew Stafford—and Brees did it again in 2012.

  In 2003 Peyton Manning led the NFL with 4,267 passing yards. Nine years later that would have only been good for ninth-best in the league.

  In Charlie’s world, the numbers never lied, or let him down. In 2013 five quarterbacks threw more than thirty touchdown passes. Back in 2002, though, only one quarterback did it and only one did it a year later. And over the same decade the number of thousand-yard rushers had gone down as the passing stats just kept piling up.

  The first couple of rounds of a fantasy draft used to be reserved for the league’s top running backs. No more. Touchdown passes had increased in value from four to six points, and wide receivers were getting a point per reception. So now more and more quarterbacks and receivers were going earlier and earlier in drafts, which was really just common sense, and simple math. The days when you could make what you thought was a safe early-round pick for a running back were gone, gone, gone.

  That wasn’t just math to Charlie, it was science, and hardly rocket science, not if you worked at it the way he did. And one thing Charlie knew was that nobody was ever going to outwork him or outresearch him.

  Another thing paying off for Charlie, the way it usually did: He had waited until his later rounds to go for defense, because no matter how much studying and homework you did, it was still difficult to predict—starting with the injury factor—who the dominant defenses were going to be from year to year. ESPN.com had the New York Jets ranked thirty-two out of thirty-two teams in the preseason, and halfway through the season the Jets had a winning record due mainly to their defense.

  In fantasy leagues, you got defensive points based on how many points your defense gave up. If your team gave up zero to seven points, you got ten points; seven to thirteen, you got eight. Then you added in the points not just for tackles but for sacks, interceptions, and defensive touchdowns. The number of tackles was obviously huge for your defense, which is why if you had a star like Luke Kuechly of the Panthers making a lot of tackles week to week, your defense became a consistent point-getter for you, made you fe
el like you had a star quarterback on your defense the way you needed one on offense.

  And Charlie looked at more than stats when evaluating his own defensive guys; he looked at schedules, too. Which teams had the weakest ones. Which teams were going to be going up against rookie quarterbacks.

  It was all working for him again, working in all his leagues. There was his “keeper” league, where you could keep players from the previous year. Charlie was also in a rotisserie-style league, where your ranking wasn’t determined by your won-loss record, but rather by an overall average of your team’s statistics.

  Rotisserie leagues, he knew, probably were a better indicator of who truly had the best team over a regular season, then into the playoffs. But for the sheer fun and competition, Charlie loved going head-to-head. Feeling like he had a big game every single week. Charlie just flat-out liked head-to-head leagues the best, the challenge each year of looking for the best defense exactly the way you looked for the quarterback who could light it up for you.

  Then once the season started it was your quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, tight end, kicker, and defense against somebody else every week, straight up, the final score usually looking like a big NBA score, 120–110 or something like that if you won.

  If you tried to explain it to non-fantasy guys you would see their eyes start to glaze over, like you were trying to hypnotize them or put them to sleep. He’d tried with his mom, just once, over dinner, and she’d finally told him she’d double his allowance if he’d stop.

  Oh, he had his swings and misses, sometimes big ones, everybody did. But he was still the guy the other kids at Culver City Middle came to for help. In that world—his old world—he was still the king.

  Just not the real world.

  Charlie had found out—the hard way—that picking the wrong guy or the wrong guys in fantasy didn’t hurt the way it did when the games counted, when it was the NFL and mistakes really could cost your season. More than ever, he understood just how much pressure Matt Warren really was under, every draft, every year, every personnel decision.