insAIne sports

“Remember when watching sports was exciting?” He eyes her grayless hair. “Maybe you don’t.”

The man in Conference Room B uncrosses his legs and recrosses them in the other direction.

“It felt like anything could happen at any given moment. You’d watch just to find out. Hell, I even remember when there was no instant replay. You’d have to sit glued to the couch. Because if you missed that pick six, you just missed it. You might catch it in the paper the next day.”

Here he spreads his hands in front of his face and mimics a catch. “Big front-pager in the Sports section. Ball just about at his finger tips.”

He chuckles, scratching an invisible spot just behind his ear.

The woman across from him adjusts her glasses. He figures she’s reading something in them even now. Unconsciously, he shakes his head. She clears her throat.

“Right, so anyway, I always tell my kids, it was the highlight of my week. To sit down for a full Sunday of football. My wife, she used to make all kinds of snacks for us. I’m talking nachos, buffalo chicken dip, sometimes. If I wasn’t as good about hitting the gym that week, I’d even settle for veggies and ranch dip.” 

He folds his hands over his stomach. 

“You’d just be sitting there, watching game after game. Maybe your friends would come over, right? So then if someone was talking or whatever — say you had to grab a beer — we could pause the TV. I tell my kids that. I want them to understand what a miracle that seemed to me. You didn’t have to miss a goddamn thing.” 

He leans back, balancing the chair on its hind legs.

“And fantasy football at that time? Pshhhh. Let’s just say, I spent a lot of money on that. Every year, I put aside maybe $2K just for my leagues.”

He notices that the woman raises an eyebrow and quickly adds, “I’d usually break even, don’t worry.” 

Here he leans forward on the table, landing on his elbows. She nods swiftly to keep him going.

“Yeah. So they just don’t get it, do they? I’m not trying to be presumptuous, but I’d bet you don’t really appreciate that either. You all grew up having the control of God. On TVs…smartphones…you name it.”

She folds her hands in her lap, and tilts her head to the right. She tries to make it subtle, but he knows that means she’s silently responding to a message in her glasses. 

“There I was absolutely running my fantasy leagues. Commissioner of a few leagues, even. And every year the analytics would get better and better. Like, at first you could pretend like there was an art to fantasy football. Drafting your team, who to play each week, trades to negotiate. You could be pretty good if you had solid draft positioning, maybe did some research on one of those big time fantasy blogs…talk about a dream job.” 

He looked around the plush office with its pristine views. “At the time anyway.”

“Then, truly what felt like overnight, all of these fantasy sites were adding ‘predictive analytics.’” He actually does the air quotes, she notes. 

“So then it was like, popping up warnings if you had a certain guy queued that he’s, you know, 73% at risk for a knee injury this season. Or it’d say something like, Tyshon Frederickson is still available. He increases your odds at finishing top three by 15%. At a certain point, you didn’t even have to manage your team.

I forget what year, but my buddy literally didn’t open the fucking app.”

He covers his mouth. “Sorry, can I swear?”

“Sure, Mr. Brigs,” she says.

“Ok, so he didn’t open the app. I’m talking, at all. And this motherfucker wins the whole league. Our $500 dollar league!”

He raises his hands, ironically, like a field goal post, she thinks.

“Now, that was a lot of money, but after that, things just got worse. If you don’t have to do anything, then what are you really winning? That’s how I feel.” He points both hands to his chest. 

“Of course, some of my friends would say I’m a fantasy purist.”

“I see,” she nods. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to revisit my earlier question: Can you tell us, specifically, what led you to stop watching sports altogether?”

“Right, right.” He nods emphatically. Then tilts his head side to side, pursing his lips. Whenever her interviewees do this, she always imagines that they’re jostling the answer around until it unscrambles.

“Well, if I’m being honest, the signs were all there pretty early on. 2024? 2025, maybe? It seemed like nothing at the time. AWS started advertising their predictive analytics right in the middle of games. For player health, it said. Or something like that.

So you’d have in the middle of the broadcast, the announcers mentioning AWS as a sponsor, or whatever, and pulling out some stat that supposedly helped you understand the game better. Or like to see whether a player was living up to their potential.

That was cool, I guess. I don’t know, I didn’t think twice about it.” 

He sighs. “But then, you got more and more data thrown at you while watching. They’d have these little bubbles at the bottom of the screen. In bright colors too, so you’d get distracted. And it’d be, say third and ten, and…and…you’d have this little bubble pop up saying something like, 20% chance of pass play. Then, say they make it. Great. Maybe two seconds later, the pop up says, Touchdown chances increased by 50%.

All of the sudden, I’m reading these goddamn alerts instead of enjoying the game. And they got really good too. You might see a 1 in 5 chance of fumble based on Henderson’s average. Sure enough, next play fumble.” 

He slaps the table. “Course, Draft Kings had to get a piece of that action. I’d start getting notifications nonstop. Immediately after one of those AWS odds came on TV, ping!” He taps his finger on the table. “Place your bet for Yes +250.” 

“All of this,” he gestures broadly in a circle, “It started to feel like it wasn’t the odds of. Really, they were predicting games, down to the fucking exact play.

He taps his fingers with each word. She tries to hold back a sigh.  

“Let me ask you, where’s the fun in that, miss?”

“Do you remember a specific moment when you decided to stop watching sports?” She asks one last time. Their in-house chat predicted she’d have to complete 25 interviews to get a comprehensive read on where the league will have to intervene to prevent viewer drop off. But she has eleven more, and so far they’ve all been fairly similar. 

“Let me think.” He looks out the window. The longest pause he’s taken all interview.

“It wasn’t really one moment.” He shrugged. “You see, I had all these notifications set up on my phone because of fantasy. And I kept getting notifications about who was predicted to win. As soon as they started being right more than they were wrong, I just…” He shrugs. “Lost interest.” 

He sighs, and looks at her with his droopy eyes. “I miss when I didn’t know, you know?”

“Will you be watching Super Bowl 68 tonight then?” She asks.

He bursts out laughing, shaking his head. “You must know, working here. The Giants are as sure as champions.”