Every summer, millions of fans draft their own NFL teams. Fantasy football reigns supreme. But other sports — baseball, basketball, even curling — draw fans to fantasy as well. Can they ever compete with football?
By Nick Sterling, Chris Cobb & Robert Sobus
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers
Most sports fans think about curling, the sport in which players use a broom to slide a stone on a sheet of ice, once every four years during the Winter Olympics — if they think about it at all. Not Scott Chu. He thinks about it regularly. And because of him, fans can play fantasy curling.
After attending the USA Curling 2019 National Championships in February, Chu, a fantasy baseball writer and podcaster, created his own spin on fantasy curling.
“I wondered, ‘Hey do they have fantasy curling?,” Chu said. “A few places like CurlingZone had games related to curling but they didn’t resemble what I was looking for. I was very fortunate to find a few Canadians in a fantasy baseball group I’m in. They helped come up with the scoring while I came up with the format.”
In the beginning, Chu hoped that he would be able to persuade at least 20-25 people to join fantasy curling. But to his astonishment, he got more than he asked for.
“You can imagine I was surprised when over 250 people joined,” Chu said.
Curling might be one of the most — if not the most — obscure fantasy sports around. But there are plenty of other sports like it that draw a small number of fantasy players — UFC, cricket, golf, fishing, even surfing and darts. Nic Turner, a PGA fantasy writer, said that only the biggest fans bet on more obscure sports.
“You definitely have to be a hardcore fan to [put money on] fights that have very little ‘stats’ involved,” Turner said.
But there is a market for fantasy sports that aren’t football. Fantasy NASCAR can be found on NASCAR.com, FanDuel, DraftKings and NBC Sports Predictor. NASCAR.com is far away the most popular place for fantasy NASCAR with more than 6,800 public leagues. NBC Sports Predictor began the season with just over 18,000 entries but the final race of the season saw over 111,000 entries.
Wilfred “Bill” Winkenbach created fantasy golf in the 1950s. Winkenbach is also credited with creating fantasy football and baseball. Fantasy golf is available on pgatour.com, FanDuel and DraftKings. The largest league on pgatour.com is the PGA Tour Experts. It currently has 28,677 members.
According to The Guardian, fantasy fishing is all about guessing which angler will catch the biggest fish. In 2008, Michael Thompson won more than $1 million by using fishing conditions to determine which anglers had the best chance to win. Since then, fantasy fishing has been moved to bassmasterfantasy.com. The new prize is a Bass Pro Shop gift card.
In fantasy, football rules
But none of these fantasy sports comes close to the popularity of football. According to the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association, 59.3 million people played fantasy sports in the U.S. and Canada in 2017. Of those 59.3 million, 78 percent played fantasy football. The next highest fantasy sport was baseball at 39 percent.
We surveyed 36 male and female people age 18 and older, some of whom are college students. Football was tops for fantasy among this group.
The most popular platforms for fantasy players were ESPN and Yahoo!
Why do those we surveyed play fantasy sports? Largely for social reasons.
And roughly half play fantasy sports for money.
Survey participants’ responses as to why fantasy football is the most popular? The NFL is the most-watched sport, and the league markets itself well. Fantasy football requires only needing to check your roster once a week. And it’s easy to find a league because so many people play.
Fantasy experts largely agree with that assessment of why fantasy football is king. RJ Kraft, a NASCAR fantasy writer, said fantasy football is a fun — and manageable — activity to play with friends and family.
“To play fantasy football is a four-month, one-day-a-week commitment at the bare minimum,” Kraft said. “You are also bound to know someone that plays fantasy football, which means you’ve probably been asked by a friend to be in a league at some point. The friendly competition, wanting to do something among friends/family contributes to playing — wanting to have bragging rights among your groups — and not wanting to feel left out of what everyone else seems to be doing can also contribute to being involved in playing fantasy football.”
Zachary Hanshew, who writes about fantasy basketball, said the NFL’s rivalries and stars will keep it on top.
“Football has staying power because of the urgency and importance of each game and, most importantly, the brand,” Hanshew said. “Teams unite us and rivalries are real in the NFL. Think Bears-Packers, Steelers-Ravens, etc. You certainly don’t get that in basketball, which is a star-driven league, and the MLB doesn’t have intense rivalries like the NFL does. The NFL is king, and that won’t change.”
Sports playing catch-up
NASCAR is one of the most popular sports — especially in the South. And Kraft sees fantasy NASCAR as a growth area, even if it remains well behind fantasy football in popularity.
“I think the easiest way to grow a sport’s fantasy status is to streamline the scoring as much as possible,” Kraft said. “In NASCAR, the change to the stage racing format helped to simplify scoring — which carried over to fantasy — and the creation of the garage driver in NASCAR.com’s Fantasy Live helped to promote in-race engagement with the ability to swap out an underperforming driver for a driver you had in reserve. I think the capability of in-race engagement would help grow other sports although it could be a tricky thing to navigate in sports where not every team plays every day.”
Other sports have a sizable fantasy following: basketball, baseball and hockey among them. Despite these sports being included in the “big four” sports, they are still a tier below football. One disadvantage these sports have is the time commitment required to play them. Football only requires setting a lineup once or twice a week. With the other three sports, participants need to set those lineups a few times a week, and many people don’t have time for that. Hanshew said the time commitment scares people off.
“Basketball, hockey and baseball have so many more games that keeping up with so many roster changes seems daunting to a lot of folks,” Hanshew said.
More than just setting a lineup a few times a week, these sports also have a much longer season than football. Kraft said that along with statistics plays into why they are a tier below football.
“Hockey, baseball and basketball are at least five to six months and the games are all spread out in those respective sports,” Kraft said. “Those sports, at least in most leagues I’ve been in, are head-to-head scoring but it’s usually a total of say 12 statistical categories and a few of those are sometimes more in the weeds variety of stats.”
Predicting player performance is also much harder in these sports than in the NFL. In the NFL, fans know how many points certain players could potentially score. For example, elite quarterbacks have the potential to score 20 or more points each week. And depending on the team’s offensive style, running backs and receivers also have the ability to have 20 points or more each game, especially if the league is a point per reception league.
In other sports, especially baseball, it can be more difficult to predict how many points players will have. In baseball, except for pitchers, all the points come from offensive stats (singles, doubles, triples, home runs and RBIs). The old saying goes, hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in all of sports. The best players go hitless occasionally, sometimes for consecutive games.
In basketball, it’s a little easier than baseball to predict player performance, but there are some challenges. It’s an 82-game season, so some of the star players may not give it 100 percent each game. Nowadays, players take games off for “load management” and that takes a beating on your lineup. Most of the points are offensive stats (points, assists and offensive rebounds), but there are points awarded for defense (rebounds, blocks, and steals). So if a player is having a not so good scoring night they can still collect points for defensive stats.
The allure of daily fantasy
Daily fantasy sports like DraftKings and FanDuel are becoming more and more popular. FanDuel, founded in 2009, and DraftKings, founded in 2011, are one-day fantasy leagues. Both sites offer the four main sports (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL) along with soccer, college basketball and college football. DraftKings also offers golf, MMA and tennis.
There are two main ways to use these websites. The first is a head-to-head challenge where you can challenge a friend or a stranger. You create a lineup just for that day, and you have to bet money. Creating the lineups aren’t as easy as it seems. On DraftKings there is a $50,000 salary cap and FanDuel has a $60,000 salary cap. The best players have the highest salary and the lowest salaries belong to the weaker players.
The other way is through one-day leagues, similar to the user setting a lineup but there can be thousands of opponents to play against. The user with the most points wins that league and the top prize. A certain amount of users can still win money depending on what place they finish. Unlike the head-to-head challenges where users can pick how much money to bet on, each league has its own entry fee. The more money you bet and the less users there are in the league, the more money you can win.
Some fans prefer daily fantasy over traditional formats for a variety of reasons. It’s a one-day commitment and you can get paid that day.
“In the traditional format I can play with friends, but it’s not every day,” said Taylor Weaver, a regular DraftKings user. “Also knowing I can win money every day makes it more exciting. And knowing there are leagues I could win $1,000 or more is very intriguing. The most I’ve ever won was about $30 off a $5 entry.”
Weaver also said that DraftKings has its own challenges that the traditional format don’t have.
“The salary cap is definitely something that is challenging,” Weaver said. “Every day there is a strategy I have to think about. Some nights I can use multiple high-priced players and others I can only have one or two. To me, the key to being successful is being lucky on the cheaper players because the high priced players will be taken, but not everyone is going to have the cheaper players that score a lot of points that night.”
Hanshew plays FanDuel all the time and likes it because if he knows his season is over in his season-long leagues he can put down money and still win. He said it’s attracting the casual fans who once didn’t care to watch a meaningless game.
“[FanDuel and DraftKings] are bringing in casual fans who would never have paid attention to players and teams in-depth are now reading articles, seeking out lineup optimization tools and consulting statistics to help them make informed decisions to win money,” Hanshew said. “They have a renewed reason to care about an otherwise meaningless game…They’re playing daily fantasy, which in turn could lead to them playing season-long fantasy as well. It’s a snowball effect, and the daily aspects of FanDuel or DraftKings have been huge for the fantasy industry.”
How can other fantasy leagues grow?
Daily fantasy, if anything, has made football even more popular. Will any sport catch up? Scott Pianowski, a Yahoo! Fantasy sports writer, said it’s unlikely.
“It’s not going to happen anytime soon as nothing is close,” Pianowski said. “Good places to start are a combination of low-barrier-to-entry games that appeal to newer players mixed with hybrid formats that appeal to intermedia and skilled players.”
Added Hanshew: “The most important factor is popularity. Knowledge of the game applies, too. Everyone knows about fantasy football and baseball. Fantasy basketball and hockey still aren’t widely known.”
The easiest way for a fantasy sport to be recognized among players is to get the word out. Marketing techniques can better help generate buzz about the sport.
“I think marketing is huge for other fantasy sports to grow,” Turner said. “Advertising at sporting events have helped and partnerships with certain websites or leagues will help. It only makes sense to get the word out as much as possible.”
That would be an uphill battle for curling, a sport that few people know well. CurlingZone, the premier curling stats provider, partnered with Chu to help bring fantasy curling to life. The scoring structure is focused on how teams rather than individual curlers fare. This is different than most fantasy sports that rely on individual player stats.
Fantasy curling includes both men’s and women’s leagues. The current market for curling is not popular in the U.S., but that could change.
“The primary market for the game is in Canada,” Chu said. “Other markets like the US and Japan may find enjoyment as it gives you a reason to watch teams you may not otherwise have been interested in. It gives curling fans something to talk about.”
While fantasy curling may never generate as much buzz as fantasy football, Chu believes it has its niche.
“ Curling is not as popular as other fantasy sports and that’s OK,” Chu said. “Something interesting from our first contest was how many people played who don’t play other fantasy sports.”
Chu is grateful that he was able to bring curling fans together and generate more excitement for fans looking to join.
“All I had was a Google Form, a Google Sheet and energy,” Chu said. “Now we have fantasy curling.”