Welcome to The Fantasy Sports Junkie.  This site is born out of my love for sports and fantasy sports.  When I say “love” I’m not talking about the type of love I have my wife or kids, but the type of love you have for a hobby, like wood working, scrap booking or just about anything that you enjoy spending free time.  I don’t and never will have 27 fantasy football teams!

I’ve been playing fantasy sports for about 17 years now.  The game has come a long way in 17 years.  The first league I played in was the 1993 NFL season.  My first pick was Barry Sanders.  Despite his on field greatness, he wasn’t a great fantasy player.  One week he’d run for 220 yards, the next week 25 yards.  He was hot and cold, not the type of consistent player that justifies the #1 pick!  I also had Jim Kelly (I’m a Bills fan) as my QB.  A good NFL QB, not a good fantasy QB.  Anyway, back in the day, we submitted our line-ups on paper to the commissioner and anxiously waited for the commish to manually tabulate the results with the USA Today sports page.  A far cry from where we are today with instant on-demand scoring.  It was one and done with the 1993 season.  A combination of military commitment (Navy) and user-unfriendliness initiated a three year hiatus from the game.

In 1997, the year that I consider to be the start of the modern fantasy sports era, when major internet sites first appeared to automate the draft, roster management and scoring.  I was in heaven!  I was a bit of a sports  stat nerd growing up and fantasy sports was meeting my need for stats.  In my early years I satisfied my passion with baseball and football cards.  I created a game complete with rosters, scoring, contracts, league standings and playoffs.  I entertained myself for hours.  More on that in another post, I recently found some documents from those years, very entertaining.

So, back to the modern era of Fantasy Football.  In 1997 I was in college at the University of Buffalo and we started a 10 team league on Sandbox.com.   Sandbox had been around for a couple of years at this point, but it was the first year I think they really got aggressive with marketing.  It was free, but we got what we paid for.  Performance was awful, but after the first few weeks of the season, it was decent.  We’ve moved around from Sandbox to Yahoo to NFL.com to CBS and back to Yahoo.  Sadly, Sandbox.com is closing their website effective January 7th, 2011.  The core players from that first season in 1997 are still playing today and I’ve managed to win 5 of the 13 years.  No one else has won more than twice!  I’m in the running for my 6th championship this year, the playoffs start next week.  We also now have a baseball league, which I blew the championship in the last week and we’ve also tried basketball and hockey.  My main interests lie with football and baseball.

Back to the reason I started this site, as an outlet for my passion for sports, fantasy football & baseball and aspiring graphic designer.  What?  graphic designer?  By graphic designer I mean “outlet to taunt my friends when I beat them by creating my very own fantasy sports championship t-shirt”.  Nothing says I crushed you in fantasy football like a 5-time fantasy football championship t-shirt!

What you can expect from this site:

• Fantasy Sports News, mostly football and baseball
• Fantasy sports tips – What am I doing to win, what sites am I using and rationale.
• Fantasy Sports T-shirts – T-shirts for your Fantasy Baseball Team, Fantasy Football Team, celebrating  your championships, taunting someone in your league, etc…  If you want it, we can make it.

Come along, enjoy the ride and let’s have some fun.  Contact us if you have questions, comments or suggestions.