In September, I received a message in a Student Life group chat asking who wanted to join a fantasy football league. In my four years working on the paper, I have promptly ignored all sports messages — fantasy football, intramural leagues, March Madness brackets — that came through. I love taking photos of sports, but watching them is generally not my thing. 

When I originally got that message this year, I marked it as read and went back to whatever I was doing at the time. A couple of days later, I got a text from my fellow photo editor, Ella Giere, asking if I wanted to make a fantasy team with her. My first thought was something along the lines of “immediately no, I have only ever sat through an entire football game once.” But after some consideration, I figured there was nothing to lose. It’s our senior year — why not give it a shot?  

Ella and I were added to the new fantasy football Slack channel, consisting of 10 guys and just one other girl. At this point, the extent of our combined football knowledge was that Travis Kelce is on the Chiefs, and that’s about it. So appropriately, Ella named our team the Taylor Swift Fan Club. 

The following week, we were at Student Life’s weekly Wednesday production night, which is when the majority of the editorial staff comes together in the Student Life office. Someone messaged in the fantasy Slack channel that we would be drafting our teams that night. This immediately sent Ella and me into a spiral — we only had about 30 minutes to prepare for this monumental occasion. Sitting on the couch together in the office, Ella and I spent our time studying: watching a lot of TikToks from the creator Mackenzie Brooks (@kenzbrooksbets), who teaches women who don’t typically follow sports about fantasy football. During this time, I furiously took notes about which positions to draft and in which rounds. This also required me to learn what the positions of a football team even are in the first place.

When the time came for the draft, all 12 teams convened in the office’s conference room. Sitting next to each other, Ella had the ESPN website pulled up and ready, while I had my notes app (with detailed TikTok notes, of course) and a screenshot of a ranked list of players. 

Throughout the draft, Ella and I were screaming names at each other (again, we were sitting right next to each other), enthusiastically high-fiving after each round, and taking long, deep breaths to handle the stress. After one round, Editor-in-Chief Riley Herron — former Managing Sports Editor and massive sports fan — said that we took a player he wanted, which gave us confidence because if he wanted the player, we knew we were doing something right. 

After learning from our research that you weren’t supposed to choose a tight end — Travis Kelce’s position on the Chiefs — in the first few rounds of the draft, we ultimately made the tough decision for the sake of our team to hold off on choosing him. Later on, Kelce got auto-drafted to someone else’s team, which was a massive blow to the Taylor Swift Fan Club. At some point during the rounds for choosing our bench players (after an entire two hours of staring at lists of football players), the two of us got bored and let it auto-draft the rest of our team.

Our first week in the fantasy season, we had a crushing defeat. Although this dampened our spirits, we were determined to do better in the future. Of the 12 teams in our league, most were either editors of the Sports section or actually followed football. Many times, someone would offer up pity advice to Ella and me because of our lack of sports knowledge. They would tell us when we made a mistake dropping a player, advise us on potentially unwise trade requests from fellow StudLifers, and so on.

While we started off with a loss, as the weeks went on, we found ourselves winning consistently. All of a sudden, in a fantasy league filled with sports fans and two Swifties, we were in first place, having won 11 of 12 games since week one. Week after week, we moved players around using only the projected points that ESPN provided, because we didn’t know what any of the other stats meant. And somehow, it worked out in our favor. By week 10, after being in first place since week three, we were the only team with a guaranteed spot in the playoffs already. 

I did not take this victory lightly. Each week, when I attended the Sports section’s meetings (for photo purposes only, because again, I am not a sports fan), I made sure to bring up my fantasy victories as many times as possible. When I went home for Thanksgiving, every single family member heard about it. The words, “This is my greatest accomplishment all semester” (I ran a marathon earlier this semester and still stand by this sentence) and “I should put this on my resume,” have come out of my mouth multiple times over the course of this football season to anyone who will listen to me.

I don’t actually know when the playoffs start or how they work, but I am determined to keep our first-place standing and win the StudLife fantasy football championship. While we would win absolutely nothing, the bragging rights alone are worth more than any prize we could have come up with. Plus, Ella and I are already in talks about participating in the StudLife March Madness bracket challenge next semester.