With the ending of the fantasy football season, I think this is the perfect time to take a moment and reflect on the end of something that many people have devoted maybe too much time to over the last few months. I know I myself spent at least half an hour a day researching and trading only to lose in the championships with a 14-0 regular season streak, but that is just how it goes sometimes. While upsetting, I can at least take some solace in the fact that I have once again avoided my league’s punishment, something that has grown worse and worse over the years. However, now that the dust has settled at least in my league, I find it right to go over some of the worst fantasy punishments that I can even talk about.
Preface
At least in my league, we had a wheel of punishments we had gathered throughout the previous year. The loser got the pleasure of spinning it at the fantasy party after the season ended, with the option to re-spin for twenty dollars, which went to the winner’s pot split 50/50 between first and second place.
While an acknowledgment of the usual boring punishments is somewhat adieu (24-hour Waffle House, punishment TikTok account, milk mile), I firmly believe that punishments should be creative. That’s not to say a normal punishment can’t be creative, but rather that my league takes things to a completely different level.
The Punishments
My league’s punishment wheel has been refined over the years by a collective of extremely creative (and somewhat sadistic) people who start imagining the worst punishments the second they clinch playoffs. The severity of these punishments has changed over the years, going from “Oklahoma drill vs. a varsity football player” and “dump hot sauce in your dress shoes before school,” to this year’s options, which were more like “get left in El Paso and find your way back,” “league mates fund a plane ticket to a random destination (which you also have to find your way back from),” and the all-important “get hogtied, gagged, blindfolded, covered in mayonnaise, thrown in the back of a car, and left in an alleyway in downtown Dallas.” Not entirely sure where the last one came from, but it gives you an idea of the scale of our punishments. The first two came from us overhearing some seniors last year having that as their punishment
Obviously, not all of the punishments were like that. You still had the usual ones like “get a buzz,” “dog cage,” and “wear thigh-high rainbow socks for the rest of the school year,” but our list at least varied, with some filler between the big ones. A short list of my personal favorites includes “loser dresses up as a deer and gets hunted in the woods,” my take on the milk mile: “The Five Chip 5K,” where the loser has to run a 5K and eat a One Chip Challenge at each kilometer, and “go to Fortis MMA and fight every Dagestani there.”
However, our heinous punishments don’t hold a candle to some I’ve heard come from other leagues. Some of these are either genuinely just torture or too stupid to say on this platform. One that I remember being told was that the loser simply gets waterboarded, which made me seriously question the sanity of the people involved.
This league had a wheel similar to ours, but with slightly more sociopathic punishments. Luckily for their loser, he got off with a classic: going on a blind date with an earpiece. Unfortunately, I have a good feeling that his league mates will not be holding back on this one.
Of course, the loser could always skip a bad punishment for a monetary sum, which was an intended part of the process and one that the winner and I were very excited for, given that we assumed a large sum would come our way. However, things didn’t quite work out for everyone in my league except the loser, as he only spun twice, landing on “get a buzz” (skipped) and then “60 Buffalo Sauces in 60 minutes.” In this punishment, the loser must go to a Chick-fil-A and ask for a buffalo sauce every minute for 60 minutes. If he gets kicked out, the timer pauses until he can find another establishment to start the process again. It was an extremely lackluster letdown of a punishment, given the negligible cost to the loser and the fact that he has almost no social fear whatsoever.
Going Forward
While disappointed with my league this year, I am hopeful that next year we can make even more creative ideas, and that the loser will actually be punished for the crime of sucking at fantasy. I am of the opinion that if a fantasy league has a punishment it should be one with creativity, spice, and the quality to strike fear in those who dare to land on it, which is why I implore any of you who are in a league that you won’t lose to tell the commish to add some of mine to your wheel or just ask me (I’m always cooking up new ones).
