The 35-year-old fantasy football league keeping one friend group together
By Hannah Keyser, CNN
New Brunswick, New Jersey (CNN) — It’s the last Sunday in August and at a steakhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, men who are old enough to have grandchildren are wearing football jerseys and accusing each other of cheating at a game before 10:30 in the morning.
They’ll start drinking before 11 a.m, break for burgers a little after noon and plan to be here all day. It’s a tradition that predates children and marriages. In 1992, eight friends formed a fantasy football league. They called it Sigma Pi, for the Rutgers University fraternity where they met one another.
“It was before the internet, before websites and rules and standardizations. We used to open up the USA Today on a Monday and get the stats and do it by hand,” says Dave Koval, the now 61-year-old who’s been the commissioner the whole time. “And we’ve been going ever since.”
“I thought it was way better when it was guys getting together, watching the game, arguing. ‘Your guy sucks, he’s no good!’ You know, that kind of stuff,” says Scott Page, the league’s resident curmudgeon. “Over the last 30 years, it’s migrated into this computer-phone-tablet-internet kind of a league. But it was more fun back in the day.”
Wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey with his own name on the back over the number 60 – a gift from when he reached that illustrious age this year – Page is lamenting the most typical tragedy: Getting older. It’s a feeling all too familiar, the loss that is no longer being in your early 20s, unencumbered by anything that might interrupt plans to spend every autumn weekend focused on the fantasy football league formed among your fraternity brothers.
But for one weekend later in the summer, that feeling of loss eases for this group. Maybe it’s not quite a time machine back to your 20s, but at an age and in an era when many men struggle with social isolation, an annual fantasy football draft might be the next best thing.
For Page and his cohort, it’s a bond that started long before the option even existed to trash talk over text or draft your team for the next fantasy season virtually. Page is an avowed luddite in this space, refusing still to bring a laptop to draft day and instead relying on packets of paper notes. The other guys in the league tease him about this obstinance, joking that they’re going to go revert to auto drafting the remainder of their team.
“Yeah, auto draft,” Page sighs with an eyeroll.
But for all his griping, Page understands this: Getting together even just once a year with a regularity that can be relied upon is special.
“This is as close as men can get and still be friends,” he confides quietly.
Something they can count on
Now there are 12 teams. Six of the eight original owners are still part of the league, bolstered by newcomers – well, maybe they should be called “newcomers.”
Like Mark Pascal, who was in the same frat at Rutgers and joined the league in 1994. Pascal owns this steakhouse, as well as the wine shop next door and the Italian restaurant upstairs. He’s hosted the draft most years for most of that time.
Technically, he’s no longer really in the league. Back in 2004, he bequeathed his team to a chef at the restaurant when his wife insisted he pare down his fantasy commitments. But since he hosts the draft, he’s stayed on as something of a consigliere.
“We’ve been friends since we were 18 years old. I’m 61 years old. So most of the people in this room I’ve known for at least 30 years. And, you know, you just pick up,” he says. “Literally, it’s as if we had seen each other two weeks ago.”
It’s harder to get everyone together as they get older. People retire and move away. They used to see each other at weddings. And then to meet babies. A stretch of children’s birthday parties. Eventually those kids graduated or started getting married, and the league attended those, too.
“Now, we see each other at our friends’ parents’ funerals,” Koval says. His father passed away this summer at 99 years old, one of three parental deaths among the league owners recently.
“This is the happy occasion,” Koval says. “Where we get to tell stories about what we did in 1985 when we were in college.”
“We’ve all had ups and downs in our life, but what the league gives you is something you can count on,” Pascal says.
Mobile sports betting – a solo activity where an essentially frictionless interface combined with potentially drastic financial ramification can have addictive or disastrous impact – is booming. But fantasy sports, an almost quaint precursor to the instantaneous forms of gambling proliferating now, remains hugely prevalent. The Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association estimates that 19% of American adults, over 50 million people, participate in fantasy sports.
A constant, after all these years
And football is far and away the most popular.
Presumably some of those people are chasing the same financial reward that drives gambling. But for many others, fantasy football is more like a religion than a slot machine. It’s about the culture and the community and the continuity. It’s about winning and glory and getting your name engraved on the trophy, but not necessarily about money.
It was originally $100 to be in the league and now it’s about $130. Rather than keep pace with inflation and growing incomes, they’ve deemphasized the financial aspect.
“If I spent one-tenth of the time I spend on fantasy on the stocks, I’d be rich,” Koval grumbles loudly about the commitment of being commissioner when he comes under fire for having an advantage in the role (He has won 11 times). “I wouldn’t be here, I would be on my yacht.”
And, actually, maybe it’s not even about winning at all.
“This is the highlight of the season. The actual playing, it’s nice if you win and everything like that. But this is what I look forward to every year,” said Ed Sullivan, who has a reputation for being the unluckiest owner in the league.
Sullivan says it isn’t the 30 years he’s been in the league that makes him feel old. It’s seeing how everyone else has aged in that time.
“Nick was my best man at my wedding,” he said. “I was there when the baby was born. I’ve watched his kid grow up and now he’s sitting in the room.”
The next generation
Nick Mosso is one of the original members from ‘92. He’s 62 years old now. A couple months ago he had a pulmonary embolism. Many of the members of the league learned about it at the draft.
Mosso said that isn’t why he’s invited his son to step in as a co-owner on his team this season. He jokes that he’s been trying to retire from the league for years and they keep pulling him back in, but it doesn’t seem like the other guys fully believe him. Either way, they’re happy to have Dominic Mosso, 22 years old, join the tradition.
“I’m hoping that if this evolves, he forms a camaraderie with everyone,” the elder Mosso said of his son. “With my friends, but more so with the next generation.”
Dominic is the third son to join the Sigma Pi fantasy league. There’s Jim Calandra and his son Jimmy. Chris Pascal – Mark’s older brother – and his son, Brian, who is now 37 and has been in the league since just after he graduated college in 2012. A picture on Chris’ phone shows a nine-year-old Brian holding the same trophy he’ll now challenge his dad for.
“I feel like I grew up in fantasy football culture,” Brian Pascal said.
His father has a particular appreciation for long-running fantasy leagues. In addition to this Sigma Pi football league, Chris Pascal is the commissioner of a fantasy baseball league that’s even older.
“We go back to ’89,” Pascal said. Four of the six original owners from that league still participate.
He’s heard that some men his age are lonely.
“Yeah,” Pascal says, considering the thought. “Not me.”
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