Are You Ready For Some (Fantasy) Football?

It's Tuesday, September ninth. I'm in two fantasy football leagues this year. I did one draft last night and the other about a week ago. I've been playing for over a decade. There is literally an FX sitcom about fantasy football — it ran for seven seasons, it's called The League. The whole thing is an institution. But here's what I didn't know until this week: fantasy football is older than the Super Bowl.

In March of 1962, a man named Wilfred Winkenbach was on an east coast road trip with the Oakland Raiders. Winkenbach went by Bill. He was a limited partner in the team — he had a small ownership stake. That week the Raiders were in New York, and Winkenbach was holed up in the Milford Plaza Hotel with two other men: Bill Tunnell, the Raiders' public relations manager, and Scotty Stirling, a sportswriter for the Oakland Tribune.

The three of them spent a rainy weekend hammering out rules for a game. Each person would draft real NFL players onto an imaginary team. Those players would earn points based on what they did in actual games. You'd go head-to-head against your friends each week. Whoever had the most points at the end won.

Winkenbach had done this before. In the nineteen fifties he'd invented fantasy golf and fantasy baseball — same concept, different sports. He was the kind of guy who, according to people who knew him, talked about sports constantly. At work. At the health club. Everywhere.

The following summer, in August of nineteen sixty-three, the first draft in fantasy sports history took place in the basement of Winkenbach's house in East Oakland. The league had eight teams. It was called the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League — a name so absurdly long that everyone just called it GOPPPL, pronounced "gah-pull." The very first pick was George Blanda, the Hall of Fame quarterback and kicker. That pick was made by a man named Andy Mousalimas.

The scoring in those days was, well, different. Offensive touchdowns were twenty-five points. Field goals were twenty-five points. Extra points were ten. And a special teams or defensive touchdown got you two hundred points. Kickers were wildly overvalued — though to be fair, a kicker once won NFL MVP in nineteen eighty-two, so maybe they were just ahead of their time.

Running the league was a grind. There was no internet. No apps. No push notifications. Winkenbach, the commissioner, would spend Sunday evenings calling the sports desks of the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, and the San Francisco Chronicle — all of whom received game statistics by wire. He'd stay on the phone as long as they'd let him, scribbling down numbers. Then he'd calculate everyone's scores by hand. Monday at lunch, the eight owners would meet and Winkenbach would announce the winners and losers.

The punishment for finishing last was real. Winkenbach had a trophy made — a wooden football face wearing a dunce cap. The original league rules even spelled it out: "Lack of skill or study will afford the heaviest loser the yearly trophy, symbolic of the loser's ineptness in this grueling contest."

The obsession was also real, right from the start. Winkenbach and the other limited partners would sit together at Raiders home games. For the first few weeks of the season, according to Stirling, their main concern wasn't how the Raiders were doing. It was how their GOPPPL teams were doing.

GOPPPL might have stayed a private club of eight Raiders insiders forever, except for Andy Mousalimas. In nineteen sixty-eight, Mousalimas opened a sports bar called King's X on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. And in nineteen sixty-nine, he did something nobody had done before: he took fantasy football to the public.

He created six divisions at the bar. People could come in, draft their teams, and compete against strangers. He also modified the scoring system — and got himself kicked out of GOPPPL for doing it. The old guard didn't appreciate him messing with Winkenbach's original rules.

It didn't matter. The demand was overwhelming. Mousalimas had to create a waiting list just to get into a league at King's X. Bars across the country started calling him, asking for the rules. Calls came in from Hawaii. In nineteen seventy-four, King's X launched the first known Ladies' Division.

For the next two decades, fantasy football spread through bars and friend groups and workplaces, but it stayed analog. Commissioners compiled box scores from the newspaper. They mailed out weekly standings. They calculated points by hand. It was a game that demanded serious commitment — which meant it stayed small.

The internet changed everything.

In nineteen ninety-seven, CBS SportsLine became the first major website to offer online fantasy football. It cost money — ninety-nine dollars and ninety-five cents per league. But the computer did all the math, updated the scores in real time, and even let you draft online instead of crowding into someone's living room. Two years later, in nineteen ninety-nine, Yahoo made its fantasy football product free. Participation exploded.

That's when the NFL started to notice that fantasy football wasn't just a hobby — it was changing how people consumed the sport. Fantasy players didn't just watch their home team. They watched everything. Every game, every touchdown, every meaningless fourth-quarter drive in a blowout. Because some third-string running back on a team they didn't care about might be on their fantasy roster.

The numbers back this up. A recent YouGov survey found that fantasy football players are three times more likely than the average NFL fan to watch thirteen or more hours of football per week. Nearly a third of fantasy players describe themselves as very heavy viewers — consuming more than thirteen hours weekly. These aren't casual viewers. They're the league's most valuable customers by every metric.

And the NFL adapted. In two thousand nine, the league launched NFL RedZone — a channel that whips around every game on Sunday afternoon, showing every touchdown live, hosted by Scott Hanson. RedZone was built explicitly for fantasy players. The tagline was practically "see every touchdown from every game." If you had five players spread across four different games, RedZone let you track all of them at once.

Thursday Night Football? Same logic. More primetime games meant more viewing windows, more ad revenue, and more reason for fantasy players to stay glued to the screen. The league pushed for mandatory injury reports — not just for gambling transparency, but because fantasy players needed to know if their running back was questionable for Sunday. The NFL's rule changes over the decades — opening up the passing game in nineteen seventy-eight, protecting quarterbacks and receivers — made offenses more explosive and more predictable. That's fantasy catnip. Critics have argued for years that the league literally changed how football is played to make it more fantasy-friendly.

The money is staggering. The fantasy sports industry in the United States generates more than ten billion dollars a year in revenue. As of twenty twenty-two, nearly thirty million Americans played fantasy football specifically. Fifty million Americans play some form of fantasy sports. And the NFL itself doesn't get a direct cut of your league's entry fee — but it doesn't need to. Fantasy football makes the NFL's television rights more valuable because it turns casual fans into obsessive viewers who watch for seven hours every Sunday. When the NFL's total revenue cleared twenty-three billion dollars last year, fantasy football was a big part of how it got there.

The perfect bookend to this story came in August of twenty twenty-five. ESPN acquired NFL Network, RedZone, and the NFL's official fantasy football platform. In exchange, the NFL got a ten percent equity stake in ESPN, valued at roughly two and a half billion dollars. The league that once didn't even acknowledge fantasy football now trades pieces of its broadcast infrastructure for a chunk of the company that runs the official fantasy game.

The last surviving original member of GOPPPL was Andy Mousalimas — the guy who took the game public, got himself kicked out for changing the rules, and then proved he was right. He played his final fantasy season in twenty twelve. He was eighty-eight years old.

Bill Winkenbach's grandson once wrote about his grandfather: every Sunday, more than twenty-six million players come together because of one man. That's not quite right. The number is bigger now — closer to thirty million in the US alone — and the credit belongs to more than one person. It belongs to Winkenbach and Stirling and Tunnell in that hotel room. It belongs to Mousalimas behind the bar at King's X. It belongs to the engineers at CBS SportsLine who figured out how to automate the math, and the product manager at Yahoo who decided to make it free.

But the core thing hasn't changed since nineteen sixty-two. You draft players you believe in. You watch them perform. You live and die with their touchdowns and fumbles. You talk trash to your friends. Fantasy football didn't just survive the transition from pencil and paper to smartphones. It reshaped the entire sport it was built on top of. A game invented by a part-owner of the Raiders, in a hotel room, before the Super Bowl existed, now drives the business decisions of a twenty-three billion dollar league.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.