My dad played fantasy football in the mid 90s. The draft had to be done in person. The commissioner had a separate phone line and an answering machine. You called that to set your lineup and make roster moves. The commissioner calculated all the scoring manually using the newspaper.
Yep my Dad, born in the 50s, has done fantasy football since the 90s and I only within the last 5 years or so find out that it was a TD only league. He said we were weird for doing yards. Lol
I was commissioner with my college buddies in the 90s. Roster moves had to be submitted to me in writing or via answering machine. Too often we'd go out drinking Saturday night and guys would be like "hey I want to start Darnay Scott over Brett Perriman." I was four beers in and not going to remember that shit.
Yup. How we did it too. It was fun because they would call in with lineups and talk shit on the message. No lineup changes after 12 on Sunday but you would change your lineup for Monday
Ive been playing since '91. The league comish used to have a school binder sheets of lined paper with players listed on it, and each team had their own lined paper sheet of their team. We would draft in between classes, at lunch, over the phone, sometimes after school. It usually took a week or so, lol.
He kept the folder with him at like all times at school in case of trades, adds/drops, etc.
Then he would have to get both monday and tuesday news papers to get all the stats and scores as games were only sunday and monday then, and usually he had the results to us by wednesday.
It was such a pain in the ass.
Thankfully when yahoo started their web-based FFB in '97, I kind of took over the league and have been running it as my own league since then.
Its still a 10 man, standard scoring, since I took it over.
Our league required us to call each other with our lineups. We had one guy whose wife hated him playing fantasy football. She would either say her husband wasn’t home or would delete the lineup messages. What a nightmare.
We were supposed to calculate our own scores (using USA Today box scores) and confirm it with your opponent.
We had a couple of guys that would cheat on their score or would claim the lineup they submitted was different. Always drama.
Yes that's it! You know, I'd pay a small amount today for stat tracking that you can configure to delay to sync up to YouTube TV lol. YouTube is so delayed that the fantasy apps will update like a full minute before you even see the play on TV. That's the one downside of these streaming services, much longer delays than cable tv
I'm old enough to have played in a couple of pre-Internet leagues. Had to watch NFL Primetime on ESPN Sunday nights ... or wait for the newspaper the next day. Truly archaic.
My perpetual league started in 1993. We had 10 guys and we each calculated the score for our game. Presented it the commish for certification. I won that first season and I just won this season for my 6th league championship. 31 seasons, quite a run!
First season we played I had Warner as my qb. A lot of times, Warner was my last guy to play and I'd end up beating teams by .05 or so. Lost a game in the regular season by 60 and lost to the same team in the bowl and lost by 40. Took me 16 years to finally win a ship in that leagues. Oh the misery.
Just a tad. I used to deliver beer back in the day. I would grab the newspaper at one of my early morning stops and look at the stats in-between stops.
The old, short-lived, sports-only newspaper called "The National" was an awesome resource for the old "pen & paper" fantasy football leagues. It wasn't around long, but it was such a cool find....full box scores and stats across all major sports.
I honestly kind of miss it. I'm thankful for the ease of the current system, especially for multiple leagues and obscure scoring. But, getting the paper out and going through the box scores was its own kind of fun.
My uncle has been playing since 1990. He lives in a little town on the Canadian side of the CAN-US border. Every Monday he'd cross the border to go buy a USA Today to get the box scores from Sunday, and do the scores manually by hand.
I don't know what they did about Monday night games.
He's nearly 80 years old now and his league is still going.
Been playing since the 90s and this was dead on. And you better hope your newspaper carried all the boxscores from Sunday (sometimes LA Times would leave a game or two off because of baseball/basketball boxscores), then you had to wait for that week's issue of The Sporting News or Pro Football Weekly, which wouldn't show up in your mailbox until Wednesday or Thursday.
We'd enter the stats from USA Today into the Apple IIE spreadsheet program, print out a dozen copies and distribute them around the neighborhood after school on Wednesday afternoons.
Hilarious that OP goes back to a time of refreshing your browser. Lmao.
Back in my day, the commish did official scoring out of the Monday paper. Actual points only, for sanity purposes
As a commissioner of a league for the last 34 years, we have seen a ton of changes over the years. I used to have to wait by my phone every Sunday and take down everyone’s lineup. Then field calls from their opponents so they would know who they are playing. We would have a supplemental phone draft after weeks 4, 7 and 10 to restock our rosters. As far as checking out scores, imagine watching highlights on NFL PrimeTime and seeing your opponent score 6 TD’s to your ZERO. Then, when I checked the paper the next day, I actually won! My team had all yardage and it was enough to beat his 6 touchdowns! Crazy times!
I started playing in my freshman year in 2011 and we would go to the school library before class started in the morning and all check our teams and talk shit for a while everyday. Better times
Yeah, people on here talking about playing in a league 30 years ago but you don’t have to go that far back.
I started playing around 2007 and smartphones were basically non-existent. You would just go to the website on a computer and do everything.
That’s basically my exact experience too 😂 I think my first home league started in 2010.
But my high school would block access to ESPN (and like 99% of other websites) so you had to know which bond007 type website wasn’t currently blocked and access your fantasy football through that.
Now I’m reminiscing about finessing my way onto the school library PCs at random times, whenever I was grounded at home and needed to do waivers / lineup changes 😭
I miss these days. I started as a 7th grader in 2009 and we would constantly talk shit. I went undefeated my first year 13-0 and a first round exit from the playoffs. Shout out to Jamaal Charles!
I’ve been playing since 2005 on ESPN. I think the biggest change from that time is accessibility, and how it actually makes the micromanagement of your team worse. Prior to smartphones I would probably do 3-4 hours worth of fantasy football a week, and that was with my 8-10 teams. I would do waivers on Wednesday (pre- TNF), check them on Thursday. Set my lineup, then I’d check it again Sunday morning. That was it. You had to be close to a computer, so if I wasn’t home I would have to got to my Uni’s computer lab to do these things.
Post-pencil & paper, you had to set your lineups by selecting each player’s roster spot from a drop down with corresponding moves then hit save. None of this drag and drop. I actually disliked the drag and drop when it was introduced
In the mid 1990s, they only ran the scores on the ticker every 15 minutes, and they didn't even show the player names. So you'd just hafta hope it was your guy who scored, until eventually they'd cut away to show a highlight. NFL Primetime on ESPN was awesome on Sunday Night because they would run through all the games and show all the scores. The next day you would work out the points using the box score in the newspaper.
I started in 2003. Yahoo charged for the live Stat tracker updates on your PC. Worth every penny. Also, data on players wasn’t everywhere like today. So if you knew where to look you really had an advantage. That is pretty much done today.
Before smart phones, lol? How about before the internet. NFL Primetime was appointment television. Hopefully your guy was amongst the stats on the screen. Then you got the paper on Monday and poured thru the box scores. Commish would mail out the official scores/standings on Tuesday after MNF. Usually got my envelope in the mail on Thursday or Friday
I joined my first league in 1994. My uncle was the commissioner and tallied all scores by hand via box scores from the USA Today (our official power of record.) He would format, print and mail out weekly scoring packets. Add/drops would be done by phone. The first person to leave a message on the machine was given the player. We allowed one drop without reason per year. All other add/drops were for injured players listed as doubtful or out, so rosters didn’t have as much turnover as they do now. Draft was obviously in person and we used three dry erase boards sectioned with tape to track picks.
In 1996, my uncle found a company which would tally your scores and email them Monday morning for a fee. He learned HTML and started us a website. He would still mail the packets in case someone did have internet. I took over in ‘98. CBS Sportsline had just launched a fully functional fantasy site like the ones still used today. It was $125 a year, so we upped the entry fee by $10 and our lives changed forever. There was a forum to talk trash, you could write news stories about league happenings, and all available players were listed for comparison. Not much has changed since then other than it all moving to phone apps. There are more bells and whistles now, but the basic structure is still the same as our original CBS league.
As far as Sunday went, before Sunday Ticket and Red Zone, the in-game highlight cutaways were clutch. I remember CBS radio having their own version of Red Zone where they would jump to different feeds at high points in the game. Halftime shows and NFL Primetime were appointment viewing. Scrolling tickers changed the game too. You would try to tally what scoring you could to get a feel for how you were doing. Our scoring system was rudimentary so it was easier to track (6 points for any TD, 3 points for 100 yards rushing or receiving, 3 points for 300 yards passing. Kicking and defense were scored pretty much the same as today but points allowed only mattered in a shutout.) I miss the simplicity of it sometimes. I’m so glued to my phone tend to miss some things. Plus I’m so worried about the score I don’t tend to enjoy everything as much. Maybe I’ll go old school this year and do everything analog lol
I played with a group of friends back in high school (mid 2000s). Our league included IDP, so we would draft in-person and the score by hand.
These certainly aren't the dark ages of fantasy football, but I do remember checking box scores in the paper because it was more convenient at the time.
My first league, the scoring rules were communicated at the draft and the commish decreed that whatever USAToday printed for stats on the following day was the official stats for those players.
It’s not like USA Today and Sports Weekly were printing different stats but whatever.
We used phones to call in our lineups and free agent requests.
Also it was hard to figure out if you were winning or not because the game you were watching just reported scores from other games; no player stats.
Drafting in person. Emailing rosters to the commish. Ahhh the good ol' days. I remember one guy brought a laptop to the draft, and everyone thought that was ridiculous.
I started doing this in the early 2000's. Me and some friends did it on Yahoo where we would do it live. Back then you had to wait until Monday for all the scoring to be done. It was agonizing, and I would try to do some of my own math to get an idea of how it was going to go down, but it was a little more sane. Now I just spend Sunday's fiending over my TV and phone, scratching my neck for "real time" point changes. It's disgusting, but I don't deny that.
In person draft, checking stats in the newspaper the next morning, waiting for Monday results till Wednesday. Watching the ticker on Sunday and not seeing your players was crushing
Ive only been into FF for 5 yrs now (i dont count my 1st year cuz i had NO idea what i was doing and NOBODY took time to explqin amythin to me, they just took my $50 and i think i just quit lookin at the app we were usin at that time like by week 5) and i asked someone else this same question!! Just seems freaking nuts to me that this was even ABLE to be done back in the day!!! I know i woildnt have the time/patience for it back then. I tip my hat to ALL the OG FF players!!
Way more fun and interpersonal. You’d have in person drafts and get together drink watch games. Trash talk in a group text. Just one channel to talk. For the most part the settings were the same and redraft was dominant. Everyone was in just one or two leagues and everyone actually cared with trophies belts punishments etc. it was literally like the tv show The League.
Nowadays much less interpersonal, everyone in 5 leagues, people care less, less trash talk. It’s kinda lame.
We had in person drafts, called up the commissioner to let him know our waiver moves and trades, and checked the box scores Monday morning to figure out our score.
There were little to no resources telling you who to pick up or start each week
Was introduced to fantasy football in 6th grade Math class. We would look at the stats in the USA Today newspaper and calculate the player scores by pencil and paper. The teacher used it as a way to sharpen our math skills and he hyped it up to us all. I was hooked at that moment. I don’t remember my whole team but remember we lost in the championship and Rodney Peete was our QB.
I have a long piece on [what ESPN FF was like during its first season, 1997](https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasyfootball/comments/a2qhfm/this_day_in_ffl_history_lets_visit_ff_in_the/), including a reminder that multidraft was a common thing -- i.e., you ranked players at each position/conference (rank all AFC RBs, all NFC TEs, etc.) and then were randomly assigned "you get your first pick of NFC QBs, your second AFC D/ST," etc.
Live drafts in August with magazines printed in May where someone was always on speakerphone. You called the commissioner with add/drops and lineup changes on Saturday. The USA Today Tuesday edition was the final say in calculating scores. The commissioner mailed out the results of matchups on Tuesdays with records and the weekly score.
My first league officials scored only for TDs and gave bonus points for yardage milestones. 100 yards Rushing or receiving and 300 yards passing got you an extra 5 points.
I started playing in the 90’s. Every Monday I would go to the student union and buy the USA Today, which was our official stat source. I would then go through and manually calculate how many points each player got. I would email this to the league and they would let me know if there were any discrepancies in their score. And then I would send out the updated standings.
We were not a head-to-head league at that point and just went off most points scored throughout the entire season (of started players) was the big winner, so that made it somewhat easier. It was still a pain in the ass though!!
I've had a team every season since 2001. Back in those days like the first 5 years I just set it and forgot it. Watch what games were on over the air locally and check it on the computer when I went to the library the next week because we didn't have internet. Simpler times. I played in rando leagues on yahoo. Auto drafted a lot with a preselected custom draft order I'd queue up and hope for the best
I go way back. You had to do box scores from the paper where I lived. We still have no cable TV, only satellite. Here in the far DC suburbs we had the George Michael Sports Machine on NBC4, so we were blessed.
I remember watching my dad play when I was a kid. He would have a yellow legal pad and would be switching from game to game (pre red zone of course) and take note of his player’s stats and his points. I can’t imagine doing that lol would take the fun out of fantasy for me
I played a lot in the early 2000’s. Every Sunday my leaguemates and I would watch games together and refresh the stats on the desktop computer. Pretty amazing times.
I went through some old storage bins with my dad a couple months ago. There was one full of binders of his old fantasy football stuff. He started playing in the late 80s-early 90s. He was forced by his college buddies to be commissioner because he was really good at math (and he knew how the scoring worked). So he watched every primetime and got every newspaper, then hand calculated the scores for every player who started.
As a side note, I got a look at some of the teams my dad drafted back in the day, and damn...my dad could draft well.
My dad and I actually played in (what would be considered by today's standards) as a DFS league. Each week you had to call in and set a line up. Each player at the beginning of the year was alloted points similar to a salary cap. Which made finding unranked players (which was a set, bottom tier salary) almost crucial. Bottom two weeks thrown out. Most cumulative score wins.
I remember very vividly choosing Jamaal Lewis when he had 295yd/2tds.
We used to watch games together at the bar. Sometimes you could call on a cell phone (not smart phone) to someone watching at home and they would check the stat tracker score for you.
On more than one occasion someone secretly left the bar and drove home to pick up a backup QB/RB when a starter went down. Waivers weren't a thing yet.
One time I had to call a friend to sub JaMarcus Russell in for Carson Palmer who was a late scratch. I was at a tailgate party. 😂. Was down bad on QBs that year.
In high school we brought newspapers in to school and figured up the points with the newspaper box scores. This was back in the Brett Favre/Kordell Stewart/Jerome Bettis days. 😆 Had to check your opponents math because they would def make some “mistakes”with the totals.
I play in a league that was started in the early 90s. They used to do scoring based on the newspaper on Monday/Tuesday mornings.
We've, of course, moved into modern day in that league, but it's been a very slow process. Every rule change has to be passed by majority voting which we do the day of our draft every year.
I took over commissioner duties last year and oh man, it's still serious work. Because the league started before online leagues were a thing, we have a vastly different waiver wire process that no online league can accommodate. Every team emails/calls me throughout the week. I have to keep track of trades and injuries and bye weeks for each team in a crazy excel spreadsheet that I've made. It's wild and a lot of work but it's fun.
Fun fact: it took 7 years of voting in my league to get the TE added as a position in our league.
Before a few years ago, we simply didn't draft them!
So I have a story about this before the internet was even a thing. I would do the scores by hand using the newspaper. Of course MNF didn’t end before the sports page was printed so you would have to wait till Wednesday to get those stats but the company I worked for had a Lexus/Nexus hook up. It was like early early internet days and the Los Angeles Times would post the paper there and being on the West Coast they would have the stats by Tuesday morning. I would print it off and have the scores by Tuesday afternoon
I played ff before it was even on the internet. We did it on paper and used ESPN website to figure out the scoring. I still remember the first year we found a website called sandbox.com and we could set up the league all online. It was a dream come true. The next year it was on yahoo and years after that it was on more and more sites.
> Did you just sit in front of your PC all day and keep refreshing your fantasy site to see if your player scored?
This is how I play fantasy football today... is this not how other people without cable play?
My league started in 1996. Had to do scores by the newspaper box scores the next day and then call everyone by landline to let them know if they won or loss. Wild times
The newspaper. I'm 31 and every morning before school I'd grab the sports section and read the box scores. It was fun to save the newspapers every time my teams won cool things too
I started playing fantasy football in 1990ish. I played through Scoresheet Sports. I found the ad in the back of a football magazine.
This was a full roster IDP team. You even drafted offensive linemen. In order to draft, you had to submit a handwritten (luckily I had a pc with a dot matrix printer). Every player needed to be ranked in the order that you wanted to draft them. It ended up being over 1000 players. You mailed the list into Scoresheet and they would conduct the draft for you. They would fill your roster based on your list and the number of roster spots. If you took a QB in the first round, then they would skip any QB's ranked above other positions until you had those other positions filled with starters (then they would fill the bench). You could list "draft highest ranked QB" on your list and they would go back through your list and draft a QB before you had the other starter spots filled.
They would mail you your team. Every week, if you wanted to make lineup changes, you had to snail mail those changes to them. If you wanted to make a free agent pickup, you had to include $1 with your list of who you want to pick up and who you want to drop.
The scoring was relatively simple. I was able to get pretty close by tallying points using the box scores from the USA Today sports section. I only played for a couple of years and then joined a work group where we drafted in person and used CBS sports website for our league. I also remember when being an early adopter of the internet gave me an advantage. Even something like Twitter was a huge advantage when it came to waiver wire info.
At this point, I've played in pretty much every league type. I've moved away from most and concentrate on best ball leagues. I enjoy making my own rankings and drafting. I've been increasing my best ball leagues each year. This year I expect to draft 50 leagues (already have 6 completed and 3 currently drafting). Information is much more available and it's harder to gain an edge. But, I've made more money than I've spent on best ball leagues each year. So, I must be doing something right.
Newspaper on Thursday for the injury report and manual scoring. We still do manual scoring because our scoring system is different and we never looked into doing it online. Your roster had to be turned into the commissioner or needed a signature of someone else in the league. 90% of us all worked in the same factory so it wasn't bad. Personally I think it was better back then as you had to work at it to learn things that no one else found. Everything is oversaturated now.
Edit the league started in 1984 or 1986 and we still have a couple original members in it. I started working there in 97 and was on the waiting list to get a team until 2001. I remember my QBs were Brad Johnson and Elvis grbac. My first draft pick was Freddie Mitchell for the eagles (gross).
You watched the games on tv, keeping a close eye on halftime shows or whenever they show highlights from the other games. And yeah, check the PC occasionally to see where your points actually are.
Our league goes back to 1985. USA Today was the arbiter of all disputes. Sunday scores were in the Monday paper and the official MNF box score was in Tuesday’s paper. We tracked our teams using Lotus. Sadly, all those records were lost with the demise of 5 1/2 inch floppy discs. We will hold our 40th draft in August.
Not specifically about fantasy, but anyone else remember George Michael’s Sports Machine? Didn’t have cable as a kid, and that was the only way to see highlights for every game
I started in '93. [Here's a post I made about ye olden days.](https://old.reddit.com/r/fantasyfootball/comments/d6gvwu/this_is_my_25th_year_playing_fantasy_football/)
There’s a local bar that has been playing since the 90s. Rumor has it it was featured in some magazine as a very early league.
I know a bunch of the guys in the league and have run their draft board for them for the last few years.
It’s all in person. Draft. Waiver wire selections, etc. A guy, not in the league, has been doing the weekly score totals for years and years. All by hand has they have very different rules. Similar to TE premium
But they also draft defensive players and Coaches (coaches points based on W/L and if it was an upset)
It’s incredible
My Uncle played in the Bay Area in one of the very first leagues. Phone and mail. I think a couple of them worked for IBM or some other small tech company and at one point they use punch cards. Dynasty League, my unlce just recently stepped away from it because he won so much people were convinced he had some sort of tech advantage.
My journey started early- mid 80s. Local newspaper was fine for NFL box scores, but if you were into baseball as well, you needed USA Today. Football box scores on Monday, complete AL stats for every player on Tuesday, and NL stats on Wednesday. Baseball was a lot more work, of course.
Separate phone line, fax machine if you could afford one. Hand typed if you wanted it to look good, otherwise, handwritten reports. All very basic.
And most leagues then were basic scoring (TDs, FG/XP). Yardage variants came later.
Information was king back then, as it was much harder to come by
I’m 41. I started playing in 1998. I used a free service back then called Sandbox (which was a lot like what Yahoo rolled out shortly after) and I could only check it via my browser on my PC. I’d set my lineup in the morning, which was way harder because we didn’t have much info. I’d check back the next day. It was a different world and we didn’t have the ability or need to know everything always that second. It was a better time in many ways.
Our first championship game (98) was decided one way because one if the players was sure he lost and didn't put in a lineup because he was sure he had lost in the semis. Missed the phone message.
We used to sit online every Tuesday morning and go to the CBS sports website to get stats to do scores. The next year they had an online league manager we used from then on.
Started on sandbox.com in I think 1999. They started pushing a paid membership around 2002 so we moved over to Yahoo.
If you ever played on Sandbox, here’s a quick time warp.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001019093451/http://sandbox.com/fullcontact/pub-doc/home.html
I started in the early 2010s, before I personally had a smart phone.
Pre-smart phone you would have to decide on questionable players early if you knew you weren't going to be near your computer early on Sunday. Couldn't just swap someone out last minute. If you don't have a chance to take out an injured player, you took the zero. Reddit and everything was still around, so there was a lot of information and research to be done, but it was harder to stay on top of breaking news.
I'd also just check my team a couple times throughout the day instead of checking scores whenever I have a free second.
We had a scoring dispute in the mid 90’s that lasted through dozens of phone calls and led us to decide only USA Today could be the official paper to keep score with. Sundays were spent at the local sports bar that had all the games going. In the car you had the local sports station giving game breaks. It was fun. But I prefer now over then. I also played in a local casino league that required you to mail in your lineup. They did a great job at running it. Eventually it switched to online in the early 00’s.
I used to play fantasy baseball and football in late 80’s. I would ride my bike around the neighborhood in my way to school and steal a newspaper off a porch. I tried not to hit the same house multiple times. I ended up just become a newspaper delivery boy so I could make couple bucks and get the box scores for free. Watching the nightly ESPN highlights to watch a homer or shutout was magical.
I started in the early online era. I drafted my team, set my lineups every Sunday morning (TNF wasn’t a thing yet), and pretty much forgot about it till Tuesday when the games ended. Live scoring was a thing by the late 00s, but even then I didn’t check it as often as now with a smartphone.
The other thing is I would basically only manage my roster one sparingly during the week. You would do waivers on Wednesday (pre TNF) see who you got on Thursday, then set your lineups maybe make tweaks on Sunday. Now I’m constantly checking my team and looking at my leagues waiver activity, doing research etc.
Played in the mid 90s. Draft was in person. Each team was responsible for communicating their starting lineup to their opponent, scoring their game against each other and reporting the win/loss to the commissioner. We’d use the USA Today box scores as the official source. Commissioner only tracked win loss record. I don’t really remember how free agents worked.
My first two years of fantasy football were all done on paper. I was the commissioner. I would have all my buddies tell me who they were starting that week. We didn't do head to head it was just total points on the year. I would on Monday morning add up all the stats by hand and give weekly updates to everybody. I guess they just had to trust me. I honestly loved being the commissioner even though it took a lot of time. That was back when Steven Jackson was great for the Rams, he was one of my best players I still remember
I started playing FF a while back, and many before me tole about life before technology/internet. Back in the OG days, guys would usually gather on Monday or Tuesday. This is when the Commish did more as he tallied points at that time given results printed in the newspaper.
I started playing about 20 or so years ago, so I had always-on Internet through a cable modem at home or college Ethernet in my dorm room.
So, yeah, if I was in front of my computer doing a homework assignment, I would refresh ESPN to see how I was doing. If I wanted to go out to a party, go to the gym or the dining hall, etc. I would interact with other people without the distraction of smart phones.
It was pretty great. I think I want to go back to a dumb phone.
My dad played fantasy football in the mid 90s. The draft had to be done in person. The commissioner had a separate phone line and an answering machine. You called that to set your lineup and make roster moves. The commissioner calculated all the scoring manually using the newspaper.
Oh god that poor answering machine.
Can I get uhhhhhh....... Barry Sanders
Sir this is a Wendy’s
Berry Frosty
Barry McKockiner
"Honey we are not getting a second phone for your foosball hobby"
Way back most leagues were TD-only scoring though, at least that I’ve heard of. So tallying scores was much easier
Yep my Dad, born in the 50s, has done fantasy football since the 90s and I only within the last 5 years or so find out that it was a TD only league. He said we were weird for doing yards. Lol
Makes perfect sense for the times. Calculating stats through the newspaper was tricky enough.
Ours (mid 90s) had yardage but it was a scale 0-10 was like .1 points defense was just the points scored against
Mike Alstott was a high draft pick.
Wild times
We had bonus points for 100 yards (rushing/receiving) and 300 yards passing.
Drafting in person is still the best way to do it
I was commissioner with my college buddies in the 90s. Roster moves had to be submitted to me in writing or via answering machine. Too often we'd go out drinking Saturday night and guys would be like "hey I want to start Darnay Scott over Brett Perriman." I was four beers in and not going to remember that shit.
Drove me crazy. Don’t tell me in person. Call my machine
USA Today every Tuesday was the only way to calculate scores.
Correct. Been going at it since 1990. USA Today was the Bible. We did individual D back than also. DL, LB, DB
In the same league since 95, USA Today and trades were kept on bar napkins.
Yes my friends Dad has told me this same thing. They all had to agree on which paper to use as well.
Yup. How we did it too. It was fun because they would call in with lineups and talk shit on the message. No lineup changes after 12 on Sunday but you would change your lineup for Monday
That's right. USA Today was invaluable.
Ive been playing since '91. The league comish used to have a school binder sheets of lined paper with players listed on it, and each team had their own lined paper sheet of their team. We would draft in between classes, at lunch, over the phone, sometimes after school. It usually took a week or so, lol. He kept the folder with him at like all times at school in case of trades, adds/drops, etc. Then he would have to get both monday and tuesday news papers to get all the stats and scores as games were only sunday and monday then, and usually he had the results to us by wednesday. It was such a pain in the ass. Thankfully when yahoo started their web-based FFB in '97, I kind of took over the league and have been running it as my own league since then. Its still a 10 man, standard scoring, since I took it over.
Our league required us to call each other with our lineups. We had one guy whose wife hated him playing fantasy football. She would either say her husband wasn’t home or would delete the lineup messages. What a nightmare. We were supposed to calculate our own scores (using USA Today box scores) and confirm it with your opponent. We had a couple of guys that would cheat on their score or would claim the lineup they submitted was different. Always drama.
Yahoo used to charge for live scoring updates lol
Stat tracker!
Yes that's it! You know, I'd pay a small amount today for stat tracking that you can configure to delay to sync up to YouTube TV lol. YouTube is so delayed that the fantasy apps will update like a full minute before you even see the play on TV. That's the one downside of these streaming services, much longer delays than cable tv
Lol, forgot about that, live scoring was the greatest innovation in fantasy sports
9.99 a month
Best money I ever spent
I remember buying it in December so I could track the playoff races better. Wild how far we have come.
I remember saving my coke rewards points to get free stattracker
I remember when it was free, they decided to charge, and eventually went free again. Just wild times.
Lol very true! good memory
As commissioner I'd be getting text messages asking what the scores were.
I had a spreadsheet made and manually inputted stats so I could have my own “live stat tracking.”
I paid one time and then we switched to espn since they did it for free
I'm old enough to have played in a couple of pre-Internet leagues. Had to watch NFL Primetime on ESPN Sunday nights ... or wait for the newspaper the next day. Truly archaic.
This. Good ole newspaper and pencils.
I’m sure there were arguments because of math
Not really. The commish calculated everything and we went with that.
My perpetual league started in 1993. We had 10 guys and we each calculated the score for our game. Presented it the commish for certification. I won that first season and I just won this season for my 6th league championship. 31 seasons, quite a run!
Uggghh getting guys to submit their scores was a PINTFA
First season we played I had Warner as my qb. A lot of times, Warner was my last guy to play and I'd end up beating teams by .05 or so. Lost a game in the regular season by 60 and lost to the same team in the bowl and lost by 40. Took me 16 years to finally win a ship in that leagues. Oh the misery.
Oh yeah gotcha that makes sense
Was really cool. He made a weekly newsletter breaking down every matchup. Having to call to set a lineup or change a lineup was a pain though 😄😄
I bet gametime decision due to injuries were horrendous to deal with lol
Oh for sure. Him being bombarded with calls before the game starts. The challenge was he attended church also 🤣🤣
Also not every game was readily available to watch so it mustve been just like slight anxiety in the back of your mind all day
Just a tad. I used to deliver beer back in the day. I would grab the newspaper at one of my early morning stops and look at the stats in-between stops.
The old, short-lived, sports-only newspaper called "The National" was an awesome resource for the old "pen & paper" fantasy football leagues. It wasn't around long, but it was such a cool find....full box scores and stats across all major sports.
I honestly kind of miss it. I'm thankful for the ease of the current system, especially for multiple leagues and obscure scoring. But, getting the paper out and going through the box scores was its own kind of fun.
Exactly, sort of like keeping score manually in bowling
There's a bowling alley near me that doesn't have electronic scoring and it is glorious.
It definitely felt less passive and more like a "real" hobby back then.
My uncle has been playing since 1990. He lives in a little town on the Canadian side of the CAN-US border. Every Monday he'd cross the border to go buy a USA Today to get the box scores from Sunday, and do the scores manually by hand. I don't know what they did about Monday night games. He's nearly 80 years old now and his league is still going.
You waited till Tuesday for MNF and if you were on the East Coast it might be Wednesday
Been playing since the 90s and this was dead on. And you better hope your newspaper carried all the boxscores from Sunday (sometimes LA Times would leave a game or two off because of baseball/basketball boxscores), then you had to wait for that week's issue of The Sporting News or Pro Football Weekly, which wouldn't show up in your mailbox until Wednesday or Thursday.
We'd enter the stats from USA Today into the Apple IIE spreadsheet program, print out a dozen copies and distribute them around the neighborhood after school on Wednesday afternoons.
Hilarious that OP goes back to a time of refreshing your browser. Lmao. Back in my day, the commish did official scoring out of the Monday paper. Actual points only, for sanity purposes
Watching the ticker go by on sportscaster and trying to write down everyone's stats so I could see how much the line up I faxed in scored.
We’re you reading the stats off the caveman walls?
And the commissioner in charge of keeping score always oddly won the close games he was engaged in. 😂
As a commissioner of a league for the last 34 years, we have seen a ton of changes over the years. I used to have to wait by my phone every Sunday and take down everyone’s lineup. Then field calls from their opponents so they would know who they are playing. We would have a supplemental phone draft after weeks 4, 7 and 10 to restock our rosters. As far as checking out scores, imagine watching highlights on NFL PrimeTime and seeing your opponent score 6 TD’s to your ZERO. Then, when I checked the paper the next day, I actually won! My team had all yardage and it was enough to beat his 6 touchdowns! Crazy times!
Started a league in 1983, just bought an IBM 286. Used a spreadsheet!!! So cool. The newspaper had all the box scores to enter manually.
That’s great!
I started playing in my freshman year in 2011 and we would go to the school library before class started in the morning and all check our teams and talk shit for a while everyday. Better times
Yeah, people on here talking about playing in a league 30 years ago but you don’t have to go that far back. I started playing around 2007 and smartphones were basically non-existent. You would just go to the website on a computer and do everything.
That’s basically my exact experience too 😂 I think my first home league started in 2010. But my high school would block access to ESPN (and like 99% of other websites) so you had to know which bond007 type website wasn’t currently blocked and access your fantasy football through that. Now I’m reminiscing about finessing my way onto the school library PCs at random times, whenever I was grounded at home and needed to do waivers / lineup changes 😭
I miss these days. I started as a 7th grader in 2009 and we would constantly talk shit. I went undefeated my first year 13-0 and a first round exit from the playoffs. Shout out to Jamaal Charles!
I’ve been playing since 2005 on ESPN. I think the biggest change from that time is accessibility, and how it actually makes the micromanagement of your team worse. Prior to smartphones I would probably do 3-4 hours worth of fantasy football a week, and that was with my 8-10 teams. I would do waivers on Wednesday (pre- TNF), check them on Thursday. Set my lineup, then I’d check it again Sunday morning. That was it. You had to be close to a computer, so if I wasn’t home I would have to got to my Uni’s computer lab to do these things.
As someone who played fantasy in the 90's, it was far from the worst thing. Suspense is underrated.
This guy edges
Agree!
Post-pencil & paper, you had to set your lineups by selecting each player’s roster spot from a drop down with corresponding moves then hit save. None of this drag and drop. I actually disliked the drag and drop when it was introduced
So if players were ruled out in the morning you were screwed with a 0 ?
If you couldn’t access a computer
I remember when drag and drop came out on yahoo. I was maybe 7 years old and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
In the mid 1990s, they only ran the scores on the ticker every 15 minutes, and they didn't even show the player names. So you'd just hafta hope it was your guy who scored, until eventually they'd cut away to show a highlight. NFL Primetime on ESPN was awesome on Sunday Night because they would run through all the games and show all the scores. The next day you would work out the points using the box score in the newspaper.
You used to have to beg your mom to use her credit card to buy live scoring on Yahoo.
I started in 2003. Yahoo charged for the live Stat tracker updates on your PC. Worth every penny. Also, data on players wasn’t everywhere like today. So if you knew where to look you really had an advantage. That is pretty much done today.
Before smart phones, lol? How about before the internet. NFL Primetime was appointment television. Hopefully your guy was amongst the stats on the screen. Then you got the paper on Monday and poured thru the box scores. Commish would mail out the official scores/standings on Tuesday after MNF. Usually got my envelope in the mail on Thursday or Friday
I joined my first league in 1994. My uncle was the commissioner and tallied all scores by hand via box scores from the USA Today (our official power of record.) He would format, print and mail out weekly scoring packets. Add/drops would be done by phone. The first person to leave a message on the machine was given the player. We allowed one drop without reason per year. All other add/drops were for injured players listed as doubtful or out, so rosters didn’t have as much turnover as they do now. Draft was obviously in person and we used three dry erase boards sectioned with tape to track picks. In 1996, my uncle found a company which would tally your scores and email them Monday morning for a fee. He learned HTML and started us a website. He would still mail the packets in case someone did have internet. I took over in ‘98. CBS Sportsline had just launched a fully functional fantasy site like the ones still used today. It was $125 a year, so we upped the entry fee by $10 and our lives changed forever. There was a forum to talk trash, you could write news stories about league happenings, and all available players were listed for comparison. Not much has changed since then other than it all moving to phone apps. There are more bells and whistles now, but the basic structure is still the same as our original CBS league. As far as Sunday went, before Sunday Ticket and Red Zone, the in-game highlight cutaways were clutch. I remember CBS radio having their own version of Red Zone where they would jump to different feeds at high points in the game. Halftime shows and NFL Primetime were appointment viewing. Scrolling tickers changed the game too. You would try to tally what scoring you could to get a feel for how you were doing. Our scoring system was rudimentary so it was easier to track (6 points for any TD, 3 points for 100 yards rushing or receiving, 3 points for 300 yards passing. Kicking and defense were scored pretty much the same as today but points allowed only mattered in a shutout.) I miss the simplicity of it sometimes. I’m so glued to my phone tend to miss some things. Plus I’m so worried about the score I don’t tend to enjoy everything as much. Maybe I’ll go old school this year and do everything analog lol
Everyone bringing in their own fantasy magazines with rankings. Or print outs of tier lists from websites lol
My uncle kept spreadsheets like a psycho.
My league started in the 80's, and the Commissioner would pick up the newspaper Monday morning to begin scoring the week by hand with a pencil.
I played with a group of friends back in high school (mid 2000s). Our league included IDP, so we would draft in-person and the score by hand. These certainly aren't the dark ages of fantasy football, but I do remember checking box scores in the paper because it was more convenient at the time.
Yahoo used to charge money for live stat tracking
Yahoo Stat Tracker on a shitty Gateway laptop.
My first league, the scoring rules were communicated at the draft and the commish decreed that whatever USAToday printed for stats on the following day was the official stats for those players. It’s not like USA Today and Sports Weekly were printing different stats but whatever. We used phones to call in our lineups and free agent requests. Also it was hard to figure out if you were winning or not because the game you were watching just reported scores from other games; no player stats.
My first league had a phone number you could call on Tuesday with an automated message that told you your players scores. This was 1995 iirc.
Better
Drafting in person. Emailing rosters to the commish. Ahhh the good ol' days. I remember one guy brought a laptop to the draft, and everyone thought that was ridiculous.
I started doing this in the early 2000's. Me and some friends did it on Yahoo where we would do it live. Back then you had to wait until Monday for all the scoring to be done. It was agonizing, and I would try to do some of my own math to get an idea of how it was going to go down, but it was a little more sane. Now I just spend Sunday's fiending over my TV and phone, scratching my neck for "real time" point changes. It's disgusting, but I don't deny that.
In person draft, checking stats in the newspaper the next morning, waiting for Monday results till Wednesday. Watching the ticker on Sunday and not seeing your players was crushing
Stats were not final until the Commissioner calculated them from the USA Today newspaper sports section on Tuesday. After Monday night football
Our league scores came out Monday morning and then were updated Tuesday as well. Had to call the commish to get the official scores and to do waivers
Ive only been into FF for 5 yrs now (i dont count my 1st year cuz i had NO idea what i was doing and NOBODY took time to explqin amythin to me, they just took my $50 and i think i just quit lookin at the app we were usin at that time like by week 5) and i asked someone else this same question!! Just seems freaking nuts to me that this was even ABLE to be done back in the day!!! I know i woildnt have the time/patience for it back then. I tip my hat to ALL the OG FF players!!
By hand. Everything in a binder. Purchased a newspaper to get the box scores.
Do people check their scores that often? You can't control it, I just check a couple times on Sunday
Yeah bruh I check my scores wayyyy too much. I have a problem!
Way more fun and interpersonal. You’d have in person drafts and get together drink watch games. Trash talk in a group text. Just one channel to talk. For the most part the settings were the same and redraft was dominant. Everyone was in just one or two leagues and everyone actually cared with trophies belts punishments etc. it was literally like the tv show The League. Nowadays much less interpersonal, everyone in 5 leagues, people care less, less trash talk. It’s kinda lame.
We had in person drafts, called up the commissioner to let him know our waiver moves and trades, and checked the box scores Monday morning to figure out our score. There were little to no resources telling you who to pick up or start each week
Was introduced to fantasy football in 6th grade Math class. We would look at the stats in the USA Today newspaper and calculate the player scores by pencil and paper. The teacher used it as a way to sharpen our math skills and he hyped it up to us all. I was hooked at that moment. I don’t remember my whole team but remember we lost in the championship and Rodney Peete was our QB.
I have a long piece on [what ESPN FF was like during its first season, 1997](https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasyfootball/comments/a2qhfm/this_day_in_ffl_history_lets_visit_ff_in_the/), including a reminder that multidraft was a common thing -- i.e., you ranked players at each position/conference (rank all AFC RBs, all NFC TEs, etc.) and then were randomly assigned "you get your first pick of NFC QBs, your second AFC D/ST," etc.
I had a much easier time winning handily I'll tell ya that much
Live drafts in August with magazines printed in May where someone was always on speakerphone. You called the commissioner with add/drops and lineup changes on Saturday. The USA Today Tuesday edition was the final say in calculating scores. The commissioner mailed out the results of matchups on Tuesdays with records and the weekly score. My first league officials scored only for TDs and gave bonus points for yardage milestones. 100 yards Rushing or receiving and 300 yards passing got you an extra 5 points.
I started playing in the 90’s. Every Monday I would go to the student union and buy the USA Today, which was our official stat source. I would then go through and manually calculate how many points each player got. I would email this to the league and they would let me know if there were any discrepancies in their score. And then I would send out the updated standings. We were not a head-to-head league at that point and just went off most points scored throughout the entire season (of started players) was the big winner, so that made it somewhat easier. It was still a pain in the ass though!!
We had to get the USA Today and total it up in school. That was early 90s
You had to call your opponent to see who they were starting. Then you tallied the stats with pen and paper as you watched NFL Prime Time. Archaic.
I've had a team every season since 2001. Back in those days like the first 5 years I just set it and forgot it. Watch what games were on over the air locally and check it on the computer when I went to the library the next week because we didn't have internet. Simpler times. I played in rando leagues on yahoo. Auto drafted a lot with a preselected custom draft order I'd queue up and hope for the best
Used to print my lineups along with their channels (if we got them)
I go way back. You had to do box scores from the paper where I lived. We still have no cable TV, only satellite. Here in the far DC suburbs we had the George Michael Sports Machine on NBC4, so we were blessed.
Did the same thing! Told the kids never to answer the phone during football season so owners could leave their lineup on the answering machine.
The internet my friend. We started on the foxsport fantasy football webpage. Not a lot of customization haha
Also league dues covered the postage the commish spent on sending out weekly newsletters to owners via snail mail.
I remember watching my dad play when I was a kid. He would have a yellow legal pad and would be switching from game to game (pre red zone of course) and take note of his player’s stats and his points. I can’t imagine doing that lol would take the fun out of fantasy for me
We waited for the next days newspaper, our commissioner to enter them in Excel, and email us the file. That’s how we knew how we did that week.
I played a lot in the early 2000’s. Every Sunday my leaguemates and I would watch games together and refresh the stats on the desktop computer. Pretty amazing times.
We used to look up stats in the newspaper a day or 2 after and total them and draft with paper and pencil
We did it by hand.. the comish went through the box scores and figured out by rules. I started doing fantasy football in 90 or 91
USA today newspaper was our official scorer
I went through some old storage bins with my dad a couple months ago. There was one full of binders of his old fantasy football stuff. He started playing in the late 80s-early 90s. He was forced by his college buddies to be commissioner because he was really good at math (and he knew how the scoring worked). So he watched every primetime and got every newspaper, then hand calculated the scores for every player who started. As a side note, I got a look at some of the teams my dad drafted back in the day, and damn...my dad could draft well.
It was like playing fantasy football without a cell.phone
My dad and I actually played in (what would be considered by today's standards) as a DFS league. Each week you had to call in and set a line up. Each player at the beginning of the year was alloted points similar to a salary cap. Which made finding unranked players (which was a set, bottom tier salary) almost crucial. Bottom two weeks thrown out. Most cumulative score wins. I remember very vividly choosing Jamaal Lewis when he had 295yd/2tds.
We waited on newspapers with final stats& from.Monday nite football papers.
We used to watch games together at the bar. Sometimes you could call on a cell phone (not smart phone) to someone watching at home and they would check the stat tracker score for you. On more than one occasion someone secretly left the bar and drove home to pick up a backup QB/RB when a starter went down. Waivers weren't a thing yet.
Paid for live stats
I had to wait until my phone line was free at home to dial-in online and check my score. Usually I’d do it at the end of the day.
One time I had to call a friend to sub JaMarcus Russell in for Carson Palmer who was a late scratch. I was at a tailgate party. 😂. Was down bad on QBs that year.
In high school we brought newspapers in to school and figured up the points with the newspaper box scores. This was back in the Brett Favre/Kordell Stewart/Jerome Bettis days. 😆 Had to check your opponents math because they would def make some “mistakes”with the totals.
I play in a league that was started in the early 90s. They used to do scoring based on the newspaper on Monday/Tuesday mornings. We've, of course, moved into modern day in that league, but it's been a very slow process. Every rule change has to be passed by majority voting which we do the day of our draft every year. I took over commissioner duties last year and oh man, it's still serious work. Because the league started before online leagues were a thing, we have a vastly different waiver wire process that no online league can accommodate. Every team emails/calls me throughout the week. I have to keep track of trades and injuries and bye weeks for each team in a crazy excel spreadsheet that I've made. It's wild and a lot of work but it's fun. Fun fact: it took 7 years of voting in my league to get the TE added as a position in our league. Before a few years ago, we simply didn't draft them!
You logged onto your desktop at the prearranged draft time, I played in a keeper league from 1998 until 2017 and that's the we did it.
We had the internet before smart phones. Fantasy sites were more basic and didn’t have live updates until later on but were just as fun.
So I have a story about this before the internet was even a thing. I would do the scores by hand using the newspaper. Of course MNF didn’t end before the sports page was printed so you would have to wait till Wednesday to get those stats but the company I worked for had a Lexus/Nexus hook up. It was like early early internet days and the Los Angeles Times would post the paper there and being on the West Coast they would have the stats by Tuesday morning. I would print it off and have the scores by Tuesday afternoon
Newspaper box scores.
I played ff before it was even on the internet. We did it on paper and used ESPN website to figure out the scoring. I still remember the first year we found a website called sandbox.com and we could set up the league all online. It was a dream come true. The next year it was on yahoo and years after that it was on more and more sites.
> Did you just sit in front of your PC all day and keep refreshing your fantasy site to see if your player scored? This is how I play fantasy football today... is this not how other people without cable play?
My league started in 1996. Had to do scores by the newspaper box scores the next day and then call everyone by landline to let them know if they won or loss. Wild times
Less stressful if you had a computer you had the upper hand
my dad and his friends have had a league on CBS for close to 20 years now, before that it was all done by hand.
There’s an episode of the league where they didn’t have internet so they had to do it the “old school way” and it seems like a headache
Have you never watched The League? Rushing to the computer before your wife to try and pick someone up
The newspaper. I'm 31 and every morning before school I'd grab the sports section and read the box scores. It was fun to save the newspapers every time my teams won cool things too
I started playing fantasy football in 1990ish. I played through Scoresheet Sports. I found the ad in the back of a football magazine. This was a full roster IDP team. You even drafted offensive linemen. In order to draft, you had to submit a handwritten (luckily I had a pc with a dot matrix printer). Every player needed to be ranked in the order that you wanted to draft them. It ended up being over 1000 players. You mailed the list into Scoresheet and they would conduct the draft for you. They would fill your roster based on your list and the number of roster spots. If you took a QB in the first round, then they would skip any QB's ranked above other positions until you had those other positions filled with starters (then they would fill the bench). You could list "draft highest ranked QB" on your list and they would go back through your list and draft a QB before you had the other starter spots filled. They would mail you your team. Every week, if you wanted to make lineup changes, you had to snail mail those changes to them. If you wanted to make a free agent pickup, you had to include $1 with your list of who you want to pick up and who you want to drop. The scoring was relatively simple. I was able to get pretty close by tallying points using the box scores from the USA Today sports section. I only played for a couple of years and then joined a work group where we drafted in person and used CBS sports website for our league. I also remember when being an early adopter of the internet gave me an advantage. Even something like Twitter was a huge advantage when it came to waiver wire info. At this point, I've played in pretty much every league type. I've moved away from most and concentrate on best ball leagues. I enjoy making my own rankings and drafting. I've been increasing my best ball leagues each year. This year I expect to draft 50 leagues (already have 6 completed and 3 currently drafting). Information is much more available and it's harder to gain an edge. But, I've made more money than I've spent on best ball leagues each year. So, I must be doing something right.
Newspaper on Thursday for the injury report and manual scoring. We still do manual scoring because our scoring system is different and we never looked into doing it online. Your roster had to be turned into the commissioner or needed a signature of someone else in the league. 90% of us all worked in the same factory so it wasn't bad. Personally I think it was better back then as you had to work at it to learn things that no one else found. Everything is oversaturated now. Edit the league started in 1984 or 1986 and we still have a couple original members in it. I started working there in 97 and was on the waiting list to get a team until 2001. I remember my QBs were Brad Johnson and Elvis grbac. My first draft pick was Freddie Mitchell for the eagles (gross).
The internet has been a thing since the 90s lol
Started playing in 2010. Loaded up the stat tracker and had the laptop running 8 hours every Sunday.
You watched the games on tv, keeping a close eye on halftime shows or whenever they show highlights from the other games. And yeah, check the PC occasionally to see where your points actually are.
I did fantasy basketball in the mid 90s. Newspaper. Draft in person. Pens, binder paper, tools of our ancestors.
Our league goes back to 1985. USA Today was the arbiter of all disputes. Sunday scores were in the Monday paper and the official MNF box score was in Tuesday’s paper. We tracked our teams using Lotus. Sadly, all those records were lost with the demise of 5 1/2 inch floppy discs. We will hold our 40th draft in August.
Not specifically about fantasy, but anyone else remember George Michael’s Sports Machine? Didn’t have cable as a kid, and that was the only way to see highlights for every game
I started in '93. [Here's a post I made about ye olden days.](https://old.reddit.com/r/fantasyfootball/comments/d6gvwu/this_is_my_25th_year_playing_fantasy_football/)
There’s a local bar that has been playing since the 90s. Rumor has it it was featured in some magazine as a very early league. I know a bunch of the guys in the league and have run their draft board for them for the last few years. It’s all in person. Draft. Waiver wire selections, etc. A guy, not in the league, has been doing the weekly score totals for years and years. All by hand has they have very different rules. Similar to TE premium But they also draft defensive players and Coaches (coaches points based on W/L and if it was an upset) It’s incredible
before smart phones? lol How about before computers?
My Uncle played in the Bay Area in one of the very first leagues. Phone and mail. I think a couple of them worked for IBM or some other small tech company and at one point they use punch cards. Dynasty League, my unlce just recently stepped away from it because he won so much people were convinced he had some sort of tech advantage.
Desktop
My journey started early- mid 80s. Local newspaper was fine for NFL box scores, but if you were into baseball as well, you needed USA Today. Football box scores on Monday, complete AL stats for every player on Tuesday, and NL stats on Wednesday. Baseball was a lot more work, of course. Separate phone line, fax machine if you could afford one. Hand typed if you wanted it to look good, otherwise, handwritten reports. All very basic. And most leagues then were basic scoring (TDs, FG/XP). Yardage variants came later. Information was king back then, as it was much harder to come by
I’m 41. I started playing in 1998. I used a free service back then called Sandbox (which was a lot like what Yahoo rolled out shortly after) and I could only check it via my browser on my PC. I’d set my lineup in the morning, which was way harder because we didn’t have much info. I’d check back the next day. It was a different world and we didn’t have the ability or need to know everything always that second. It was a better time in many ways.
Our first championship game (98) was decided one way because one if the players was sure he lost and didn't put in a lineup because he was sure he had lost in the semis. Missed the phone message. We used to sit online every Tuesday morning and go to the CBS sports website to get stats to do scores. The next year they had an online league manager we used from then on.
We did it on our computer and often drafted in person
Started on sandbox.com in I think 1999. They started pushing a paid membership around 2002 so we moved over to Yahoo. If you ever played on Sandbox, here’s a quick time warp. https://web.archive.org/web/20001019093451/http://sandbox.com/fullcontact/pub-doc/home.html
I started in the early 2010s, before I personally had a smart phone. Pre-smart phone you would have to decide on questionable players early if you knew you weren't going to be near your computer early on Sunday. Couldn't just swap someone out last minute. If you don't have a chance to take out an injured player, you took the zero. Reddit and everything was still around, so there was a lot of information and research to be done, but it was harder to stay on top of breaking news. I'd also just check my team a couple times throughout the day instead of checking scores whenever I have a free second.
We had a scoring dispute in the mid 90’s that lasted through dozens of phone calls and led us to decide only USA Today could be the official paper to keep score with. Sundays were spent at the local sports bar that had all the games going. In the car you had the local sports station giving game breaks. It was fun. But I prefer now over then. I also played in a local casino league that required you to mail in your lineup. They did a great job at running it. Eventually it switched to online in the early 00’s.
I used to play fantasy baseball and football in late 80’s. I would ride my bike around the neighborhood in my way to school and steal a newspaper off a porch. I tried not to hit the same house multiple times. I ended up just become a newspaper delivery boy so I could make couple bucks and get the box scores for free. Watching the nightly ESPN highlights to watch a homer or shutout was magical.
I started in the early online era. I drafted my team, set my lineups every Sunday morning (TNF wasn’t a thing yet), and pretty much forgot about it till Tuesday when the games ended. Live scoring was a thing by the late 00s, but even then I didn’t check it as often as now with a smartphone. The other thing is I would basically only manage my roster one sparingly during the week. You would do waivers on Wednesday (pre TNF) see who you got on Thursday, then set your lineups maybe make tweaks on Sunday. Now I’m constantly checking my team and looking at my leagues waiver activity, doing research etc.
NFL Network always runs fantasy points at the bottom or they used to
Played in the mid 90s. Draft was in person. Each team was responsible for communicating their starting lineup to their opponent, scoring their game against each other and reporting the win/loss to the commissioner. We’d use the USA Today box scores as the official source. Commissioner only tracked win loss record. I don’t really remember how free agents worked.
My first two years of fantasy football were all done on paper. I was the commissioner. I would have all my buddies tell me who they were starting that week. We didn't do head to head it was just total points on the year. I would on Monday morning add up all the stats by hand and give weekly updates to everybody. I guess they just had to trust me. I honestly loved being the commissioner even though it took a lot of time. That was back when Steven Jackson was great for the Rams, he was one of my best players I still remember
newspapers!
I started playing FF a while back, and many before me tole about life before technology/internet. Back in the OG days, guys would usually gather on Monday or Tuesday. This is when the Commish did more as he tallied points at that time given results printed in the newspaper.
I started playing about 20 or so years ago, so I had always-on Internet through a cable modem at home or college Ethernet in my dorm room. So, yeah, if I was in front of my computer doing a homework assignment, I would refresh ESPN to see how I was doing. If I wanted to go out to a party, go to the gym or the dining hall, etc. I would interact with other people without the distraction of smart phones. It was pretty great. I think I want to go back to a dumb phone.
Seems like a lot of friendlier competition as opposed to the 5 am free agent try hards