I just started playing fantasy football this past year, and while I love the NFL and follow it year round, I don’t have what fans would call fantasy knowledge. I watch and follow my team the Dallas Cowboys, and I watch highlight shows and the NFL network quit a bit. However, I don’t have the depth of knowledge required, nor do I really care about who the third receiver is in Jacksonville or Tennessee. So going into my first live online draft last year I got some advice from the guys around the gym that actually take fantasy football serious and I watched some fantasy football specials, but really I had no idea what I was doing. My nephew Brett told me to take Odell Beckham Jr. with my first pick (5th overall) but then after that it was a crap shot.
Add on top of this, the draft started at 8:30pm!!! Anyone who knows me knows most nights I’m in bed by 9pm so once the draft started, I took ODB then activated the auto pick function. Yup, I took some heat for this for sure, but are you telling me that somehow I can do more research and come up with better picks on the spot than the computer? Should I listen to a computer that takes into account the opinions of fantasy football experts and insiders or my picks that are either cowboys or a team of dudes I’d like to go drinking with? So I wake up with next morning, check my yahoo fantasy football app and there’s my team, ready for action. I recognized most of the names, some guys I’m not super crazy about but for better or worse, that’s my team, and this is the team that I will take the virtual field of play with for the next bunch of Sundays. Is life more about us getting what we want, or is it about making the best of what we have? As the cookie crumbled, this is my team. I wasn’t worried about not having Drew Bledsoe or Julio Jones, I was cheering for Eric Decker and Jamis Winston; the hand I was dealt.
When I met coach Andrea, our lives were very different then they are now. In fact, everyone that was around us, including members of both of our families, would have never thought we would have made it 10 months, never mind 10 years! But we did. Without bringing up too much of what was going on then, I was a complete basket case and Andrea was still failing the basic physical requirements to get on with any of the police departments in Alberta.
Yet, we’ve done very well together. Yes there were tons of tough times, and we know there are unfathomable challenges to come, but no matter what was going on around us in our own lives, we legitimately committed to each other. Even when we broke up for a short period, I wasn’t looking to upgrade or test the waters, we just needed some space to reboot.
I can’t speak for Andrea’s process through it all, but at a certain point of realization I removed all other possibilities. Period. It was glaringly obvious to me that this was the girl God wanted me to be with, so there were no other options or choices. I may be speaking from my own experience, but I’m probably not the only one who thinks this way. A certain part of a guys’ mind is always searching for better possibilities. Plan B’s if this doesn’t work out, fall backs if it goes side ways, that girl at Starbucks who smiled at you, whatever,there was always part of my mind that was looking and wondering.
Now I don’t want to start giving advice without coming clean. I’m no angel here, I may have a way of sharing random pockets of wisdom here and there, but the path to enlightenment is full of bad decisions. It is only when I get a chance to share experiences that others might be able to learn from that I am able to make sense of all the bad shit I did to really nice people. And to summarize something that doesn’t need to be detailed in a blog, I kissed a few girls here and there when I should have only been kissing one. That is all.
So I took all that “on the lookout energy” added it to the “kissing other girls” energy and then with the output it took to keep it all going, and I focused it on one thing, my girl. If you decide that she is really the one, then drop all that other crap and watch what happens. Support her, love her and only her, put yourself second, and watch 1. What your girl can do when she’s got a man like that in her corner and 2. What you begin to feel, and see that she’s the only one. Saying it and believing it is one thing, but when you feel it, there’s nothing better.
So how did my fantasy football team turn out? Well I was seeded second last at the start of the year in a 12 team league (I think), and was tied for first at the end of the regular season, but unfortunately lostin the first round of the playoffs. However, the record wasn’t important. In the end it was really was fun, except when I had to dump Decker. Wow that was tough. But I did learn a lot and learned to look at something I loved from another angle, because at the end of the day, isn’t that what its all about. xo fbk