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What: Fantasy Football

We know that maybe millions are involved, but the opinion here is that fantasy football is dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. We love football, particularly NFL football. We subscribe to DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket package that gives us every game, and we watch as many games as possible. It’s great.

But we like rooting for real teams, not contrived teams and individual players. We also don’t bet against a line. We root for one team to beat another, and we don’t care if it’s by one point or 41 points.

But we got involved in an ESPN fantasy league a few years ago, a media league. We found it was more trouble than it was worth.

But we also realize we may be in a minority. We know fantasy football is a growing craze, particularly on the Internet.

The old-fashioned way of starting a fantasy league is to get a bunch of friends together, draft your teams, make trades during the season and see who comes out ahead in the end. Now, there are also Internet fantasy leagues.

ESPN’s Fantasy Football has been around a few years, and may be the biggest and best known. This year, it even has a sponsor. Really. It’s now called ESPN Fantasy Football ‘99, presented by Sprint.

Teams sell for $29.95. A second team costs $17.95, but what is being pushed as the best buy is a three-pack--three teams for $49.95.

If we thought managing one team was a bother, we can only imagine that three teams would be three times as bad.

You can sign up through www.espn.go.com. Click on Fantasy, which will take you to the Fantasy Games page, and from there you can find Fantasy Football.

Fantasy Football accessories include customized injury reports, lists of free agents, and analysis. There is also the NFL Fantasy guru, called the Gamer, a.k.a. Brandon Funston.

Another feature is a Chalktalk mailbag, and there is a top-10 feature that makes players who submit their stories eligible for the owner of the week honor.

Gee, all this sounds kind of like fun after all. Maybe we’ll give fantasy football one more try, even if we do prefer real football.