It was never particularly unusual for Joe Banner’s two pre-teen sons to talk football with him in the early 2000s. After all, Banner was the Eagles’ team president at the time, and Philadelphia was a permanent Super Bowl contender. At one point, however, Banner noticed the conversations change.
They were no longer asking innocent questions about Donovan McNabb or next week’s game against the Cowboys. The questions were becoming more specific and were more about the whole league than the Eagles.
Who are the best rookies this season?
Which teams have the best attack?
“For some reason they were focusing on things like running backs and wide receivers,” Banner recalled. “I realized they weren’t just having a conversation. They were actually brainwashing me.
Why this sudden need for information?
Fantasy football.
“In a relatively short time, I realized they weren’t unique,” Banner says of his sons. “They were actually just the tip of the iceberg. The thing was catching on fire.
Fantasy football had been around for over a decade since Banner’s sons started playing, but it didn’t take off until the internet made it so much easier to play. The Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association estimates that around two million people played fantasy football in the early 1990s. In 2003, that number jumped to 11.8 million.
The most recent estimate from the FSGA, in 2017, was over 46 million.
“It’s amazing how popular it is,” said Mike Tannenbaum, who led football operations for the Jets (2006-12) and Dolphins (2015-18).
Tannenbaum and Banner had a front row seat to the rise of fantasy football, but it never affected their day-to-day work. Of course, they heard fans calling out certain players during the pregame, saying they needed them today. Banner says he’s heard players in the locker room complaining (or bragging) about where they get caught up in fantasy drafts. You know the saying, You don’t believe the players who say they don’t read their press clippings? Same goes for when they tell you they don’t know where they rank in fantasy.
“There’s a pretty high level of awareness,” Banner says.
Tannenbaum and Banner have moved from NFL offices to the media world, recently launching a site called The33rdTeam.com. Much of the content on this site features deep dives into topics like salary cap analysis, scouting, and management — but these old-school league executives knew they had to hit the fantasy.
“Fantasy football has become so mainstream over the years,” says Tannenbaum. “For us to become a holistic football website, we felt it was necessary to have fantastic quality content.”
Tannenbaum and Banner are not alone. Mike Lombardi, a front-office manager with four different teams during his 22 years in the NFL, has been actively involved in the media world. Lombardi offers personalized fantasy advice through Cameo.
The 33rd team launched a weekly radio show on SiriusXM’s fantasy sports channel. Banner – although he never play fantasy football – was the show’s co-host.
While he had a “macro view” of fantasy, Banner says co-hosting the show took his appreciation of fantasy to another level.
“I think that just added to what I realized was a passion, but I still underestimated how intense that passion was,” said Banner, 1995 Eagles president. to 2012, then CEO of the Browns from 2012 to 2013. It’s not so much about winning and losing, he notes, as evaluating talent and giving fans a taste of his former work.
“I think a lot of fans imagine themselves as general managers of their teams,” Banner says. “Some of them are smart enough to see it from a league perspective, and (with fantasy) they have a real chance of doing it. Testing their own skills and competing turned out to be something very interesting. and enjoyable for them. And frankly, no threat to the game or the lore of the game.”
There was a time when NFL executives feared that fantasy football would threaten their sport. The league is all-in on fantasy these days, but it took a bit of persuading. Team owners worried that the fantasy would dilute their fan base. God forbid a Broncos fan got a Raiders quarterback for his fantasy team.
They support Rich Gannon – even in his two games against us?
(Well, they still want the Broncos to win, as long as it’s a high-scoring game.)
When Chris Russo joined the NFL in 1999 as the league’s senior vice president of new media, he set out to learn as much as he could about the emerging fantasy industry. What Russo learned convinced him the NFL should embrace the fantasy. And – surprise – it wasn’t about the money.
“I did research that showed pretty definitively that fantasy players watched more NFL games on TV, more NFL hours than non-fantasy players,” says Russo, who worked at the NFL for seven years and is currently CEO of Fifth Generation Sports, a sports consulting firm. “And the longer you played fantasy, the more you watched. I think it was something like 2.3 more hours or something.
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That was enough to convince the NFL’s top brass, including then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue, to push forward with the fantasy as a vehicle for development and fan engagement.
“It wasn’t really about money or profit. There was no cash element,” Russo explains. “And then what happened over the next three or four years was really an expansion in the visibility of fantasy, which I think was a big part of its adoption in the industry.”
Suddenly, fantasy football was being discussed and promoted everywhere, including broadcasts of NFL games – which had been banned under previous broadcast deals. The NFL Players Association has also partnered with fantasy, allowing players to help the league promote its product (then-Patriots kicker Adam Vinatieri drafted a fantasy team of “just kickers” in an advertisement for NFL.com).
“It was a really big step to integrate it from a communications perspective,” Russo says.
Tannenbaum witnessed the growth of fantasy football during his years with the Jets, but it wasn’t until he was in Miami that he saw the light. The NFL launched its RedZone channel in 2009, and by the time Tannenbaum arrived in Miami in 2015, the league was requiring teams to show RedZone highlights in stadiums during breaks. “That’s when I realized how important it was,” he says. NFL RedZone was designed for fantasy managers, showing every touchdown in every game on any given Sunday. The league knew that even diehards attending games in person were also playing fantasy.
Remembering that experience with RedZone in the stadium, Tannenbaum knew fantastic cover needed to be built into the 33rd team.
Some outlets have employed ex-players to cover fantasy, but the idea of former NFL general managers and team presidents talking about fantasy hasn’t been all that common. Banner, despite still having no plans to join a league this season, has gotten into the game.
Jade McCarthy, who co-hosted the 33rd Team fantasy radio show, felt that Banner’s competitive nature as an NFL team executive clearly applied to fantasy. “Like when he helped build teams in the league, Joe wanted to win,” McCarthy says. “It was all in good spirits, but competition is competition, right? I saw Joe’s interest in fantasy grow because that competitive nature came through.
McCarthy says she found it fascinating to listen to Banner explain how he expected certain players to be used — speaking like an NFL general manager but applying his observations to fantasy. “It gave a different twist to the fantasy,” she says.
For his part, Banner was surprised to learn that he wasn’t the only “fantasy expert” who knew what he was talking about.
“My biggest lesson was credibility,” Banner says. “There are absolutely top people who could work as evaluators on an NFL team and contribute to it.
“I would have thought that was a ridiculous statement probably five years ago.”
If Banner had any preconceptions that fantasy analysts fit the stereotype of bloggers working in their parents’ basement, that ship has sailed. He found many in the space to be extremely knowledgeable about football.
“Those I interacted with were really, really hard workers,” Banner says. “It was pretty amazing to me how many hours they spent consuming content, forming their own opinions, or reading data. He kind of jumped up and punched me in the face. It was even bigger than I thought, that the passion for it and people working as experts actually probably deserve more respect and credibility than they were getting.
Banner’s experience sums up the growth of fantasy football as a cottage industry: It started with college kids asking their dads for advice, and now the experts giving advice are smart enough to work for NFL teams. And some of them already have.
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