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We all have one in our fantasy football league. The guy who pesters you for lopsided trades, then sends you the offer, then texts you to make sure you saw the offer, then calls you in bewilderment to see why you rejected the offer — now there's a name for it, it's called being a fantasy football Karen, and unfortunately there is no known cure at present.
The laws of probability dictate that one out of every 10 members in a ten-team fantasy football league is a Karen, therefore chances are that some of you reading this right now may fit this categorization — but since the first stage of the recognition process is denial, allow me to give you a few other examples.
Do you alone inexplicably have issues with the waiver wire and feel the need to group text your entire fantasy league at odd hours of the night to inform them that something is heinously wrong up in the proverbial cloud and your commissioner needs to contact tech support immediately to solve this colossal crisis so you can pick up Romeo Doubs before the Thursday night game?
Do you love to rehash recent history and elaborate in great detail to anyone who will listen about the series of unfortunate events that led to your close loss of the previous week? Do you then imagine and expand upon a detailed revisionist bevy of occurrences that would have resulted in your winning your week if only fortune was in your favor?
Do you manually calculate your point total every week, cross checking the sum with the official stat line, and if there are any discrepancies — even fractions of a point — cry foul to your commissioner as if you just uncovered the next subprime mortgage crisis?
At your live draft, did you on more than one occasion ask if a player was still available who had been picked more than two rounds earlier, then react stunned to the news that he had?
Do you change your fantasy team name weekly, perennially striving for that perfect mix of topicality and wordplay that still eludes you, and making it annoyingly difficult for your opponent to know which of his friends he's up against?
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Are you still sending Taylor Swift–Travis Kelce memes concerning her appearance at last Sunday's Chiefs-Bears game?
If you answered yes to any of the above, you are most definitely the fantasy football Karen of your league.
I tell you this not to make you feel bad, or guilty, or ashamed — I mean, sure those would be nice secondary effects of this intervention — but really to inform you that you're not alone. Fantasy football Karens are all around us, in every league across this vast universe.
So power through the denial and anger phases, and no need for the bargaining phase since you already do that multiple times a week with your incessant trade requests. Ditto for the depression stage you consistently go through after every one of your team's losses. And let's move right on to acceptance of being a fantasy football Karen, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, you think twice this Sunday before blowing up the group chat with injury updates from the England game at the crack of dawn.
NOTE: Josh Silverstein, better known as the Kosher Pickleballer in his fantasy league, is a fantasy football player and may occasionally even be guilty of being a fantasy football Karen himself.
