The Failed Jocks Football League

For the last decade, the first week of September has meant two things: the opening of bowling season (which I’ll get to in one of these future blogs) and the Fantasy Football Draft. Except for a year’s hiatus, BowlingJoe has been making the annual late summer trek to Canyon’s in Bothell to try and outsmart a league full of other self-proclaimed football geniuses and win tens of dollars in valuable prize money.

The league is aptly called The Failed Jocks Football League, or FJFL, a name which Bowlingwidow invented for me when I was league commissioner. However, now that I think about it, a few of our teams are “owned” by the high school aged kids of our original members. I’ll let them have a free pass for now. I figure that by the year 2016 they too will reach the status of fully vested Failed Jocks.

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The Failed Jocks Football League: hard at work at the annual draft

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For the last few years, I’ve had a partner in this fantasy mayhem. He’s a loyal Washington State Cougar graduate and fan (and even remains so after last week’s savage beating at the hands of U-Cal) so we’re known as The Wazzahulas. And being a Central Washington grad myself, I figure that being tied to the only Pac-10 team east of the mountains is appropriate.

Everyone arrived at the draft on or before the designated time and most of us had our required supplies directly in front of us: beer, soda, appetizers. Oh, yeah, and the lists of available players with rankings that only football geniuses like us could develop.

In this league we get to keep two players from last year if we choose to. We kept running backs Frank Gore (SF) and Steven Jackson (St. Louis). Both were disappointments last year but are expected to be productive and have comeback years. Yeah…..that’s what I was thinking a couple of days ago when I saw a highlight of Steven Jackson taking a big hit for a loss and watched his helmet come off and fly across the field.

We’ll all be shooting to knock off last year’s regular season champion E. Chelsea (inexplicably, this league is loaded with guys who actually enjoy watching, playing, and coaching soccer). And in our “try and win your entry fee back” playoffs last year it was one of the kids and the Friday Night Lights team that prevailed.

Add Boyz Club, Boom and Nut, Who Dat?, Loose in the Palouse, The Bottom Line, Not Them Again, and On the Boards, and there’s our ten team league. Speaking of team names, BowlingJoe is really glad that we’ve managed to take the high road and keep the monikers clean. A long time ago in a league far, far away some schmuck decided to name his team Full Chub. A manly but nonetheless tasteless label.

The season is now officially underway, and our underachieving Wazzahulas are officially 0-1 after a ten-point loss to E. Chelsea. Next week we’ll send our squad back out to the pretend gridiron and take on the Boyz Club. The owner of the Boyz Club is a successful high school girls' soccer coach who is just starting his season and has a lot on his mind. Hmmm…..maybe if I can get him talking about his school team he’ll forget about submitting his FJFL lineup and we’ll default our way to the win column.

Let the strategy and dirty tricks begin!