Fantasy football just arrived in the last few years, right?

Well, no.  But it has grown exponentially in the last several years.  Many people erroneously assume fantasy football morphed out of the rotisserie baseball scene from the 1980’s.  While the development of fantasy baseball has certainly shaped the current landscape of fantasy football, the origins of fantasy football actually pre-dates fantasy baseball. 

The first fantasy football league was formed in the early 1960’s by sportswriters in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with several Oakland Raiders employees.  Their league was called the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPPL).The account recorded in Fantasy Football Index describes that the game was created on a road trip to New York, when Raider’s part owner Wilfred Winkenbach, along with two Oakland Tribune reporters, developed the original idea and a scoring system.  Offensive skill-position players were chosen, with points awarded based directly on their real-game accomplishments on Sunday.  The game system allowed for head-to-head competition, providing wins and losses amongst league teams.  While the league did receive some publicity, and inspired a few other leagues to start, the time-consuming nature of the game did not allow it to find a large following (the Internet would solve that in the future).Interestingly, the highest scoring fantasy player in that inaugural fantasy season of 1962 was George Blanda.  Blanda threw for over 2,800 yards and 27 TD passes and also kicked 11 field goals and 48 extra-points.  Shockingly, he also threw for a whopping 42 interceptions, which in some fantasy scoring methods nowadays, would incur a huge penalty.With the explosion of Rotisserie Baseball, in part because of baseball’s long-standing celebration of the statistics of its game, fantasy sports began to become more widespread through the eighties.  I dove head first in fantasy football in 1992.  But more on that later….