Maybe I Should Just Let My Fantasy Football League Die

The fantasy football league I run, which is technically a cash league but whose members don't usually pay unless I beg and cajole, had its auction last/Wednesday night.  I was so jazzed for it.  I was afraid that I'd get so busy in The Fourth Department that I would be late for it, and when it got really crazy in the afternoon, I decided that I would just leave and leave the work till the morning.

I actually rallied to the point where I got out of there at 5 -- a half-hour later than my usual shift end, but an hour before the auction begins.  Good, I thought; I could get some fast food, bring it and have time to study before the auction begins.  Unfortunately, everybody was at Culver's for dinner that time of evening, and I waited 15-20 minutes before I got my food.  I got home in time, but only enough for me to pee, wash my hands, turn on and plug in my computer, and get to Yahoo! Sports before the clock struck 6.  No studying besides the Excel customizable cheat sheet courtesy of The Athletic.

But I made it!  And I'm going to talk to all the other guys in the league and we're going to talk shit to each other and rag on each other's bidding.  But the auction begins and there's only one other person on there with me.  All the others, at least to start the auction, have the two circular, clockwise-direction arrows, indicating they're auto-auctioning.  Two other owners quickly pop in and out, for some unknown reason.  And I know that two of the three who bothered to show up are my best friend's sons.

The other league I'm in (in which I am not the Commissioner) held its draft two days before, on Labor Night.  There were a dozen "owners" total, I think all of them showed up, and our draft got done in, say, 1:15 to 1:20.  With fewer players playing in our league, and all but two-to-four of them giving enough of damn to hop on for just a hot minute, we had no intriguing bidding wars where four, five of us would dare each other to top $70, $75, even $80 (which I "paid" for Jonathan Taylor) for three solid minutes.  We got done just under an hour when I thought we would go two.

I don't know where the hell everyone else went.  Now, of the eight of us (yeah, there are only eight now in this league), there usually are one or two people who didn't make it to previous auctions.  But this was way, way different.  We have never had an auction where so many people didn't show up.  And I don't know why.  I customarily select the night before the first Game of the NFL season -- so basically the first Wednesday in September -- to do our auction so we get the latest dirt on players, and most of them acted like they knew what day the auction was, didn't mind the time of the auction, and enjoyed themselves while we built our rosters.  But last night, our auction was a ghost town.

It felt, I'm afraid, like people just stopped caring.  They cared last Year, when we were getting out of the coronavirus pandemic, but not this Year?  It's hard to hold on to tradition, and our run is a long and a good one.  But if people in the league no longer view this as an event to look forward to ... well, then it's apparent that this fantasy football league is no longer enjoyable to them.  And if the other guys don't show up for the auction next year and the ones after that -- why should we even continue with this league any longer?