Fantasy football is a 2 billion dollar industry that has—and continues to—rapidly grow. CHS students and teachers are among over 56.8 million players in the growing cult of fantasy sports.

“I like participating (in fantasy football), because it is something competitive that is fun in the moment but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter, but you get that rivalry between friends, and in my case, some enemies, along with that financial incentive,” junior Ryan Woock said. “It’s something that can apply to a lot of things. You can do it with friends, family, coworkers; Its popularity can be attested to the fact that if you are neutral, it gives you something to get excited about every Sunday.”

Fantasy football offers a wide variety of ways to play—something that Woock takes full advantage of in his league. His league does an offline, or live, draft hosted at a league member’s house. With 12 players, or owners, the entry fee is $30. That is used to pay for the massive amount of wings that are consumed during the five hour event. The rest is divided up between that year’s top teams, with the winner taking home the most cash. The draft itself is an intense battle of football knowledge and wits between the team owners.

“There are those who arrive early and research, and there are those that arrive late with little research and go off the basic ESPN rankings. The first four rounds, everybody is just grilling each other’s picks and it’s very confrontational and explicit, almost like structured chaos. After about round eight or nine, it becomes a free for all where it’s like whatever sticker you can stick on the big board, that’s who you get,” Woock said.

While his league is creative, math teacher Matthew Wernke created a parody of the traditional fantasy football league called Fantasy² Football. He launched it when he realized that he no longer had time to fully participate in the CHS math department’s annual fantasy football league.

“I have a very obsessive, compulsive personality (so) where when I start something, I can’t get it off my mind, so I would sink every moment into fantasy football,” Wernke said.

In Fantasy², instead of drafting NFL players, Wernke and the other league members, drafted the team owners in the math department’s league, were scored based on their owner’s team’s performance.

Although fantasy football is scored off the players’ performance, or even team owner’s performances, it is really about the people in the league. As well as his new Fantasy² league, Wernke’s league has other interesting quirks that make it different.

“We decided it would be fun to see how much work we could get Diamente to do for us. She would always give us the scores and give us markers, rulers, whatever we needed,” Wernke said. “We made it a rule one year that the last person picked had to be Diamente. We even created a rule one year where if you had Diamente on your team, you couldn’t play her because we enjoyed watching her get mad at us because no one thought she was any good.”

Woock’s league contains 12 people, all coming from different places. Some attend CHS, however most attend other schools such as Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School and Park Tudor High School. Perhaps the most unusual though is Doug Talbert, a league member who is currently living in Switzerland. Woock said although he lives halfway around the world, he is still active in the group text message, and he even participated in the league’s live draft via FaceTime, even though it was approximately 3:30 a.m. in Switzerland.

Although there is a financial reward in Woock’s league, there is also a bigger prize at hand: the league trophy. In Wernke’s league, his handmade trophy, is a wooden plaque in the shape of the NFL logo with math symbols instead of the stars and “CHS” instead of “NFL.” Woock’s league’s trophy is a little more symbolic. A Luke Donald, professional golfer, signed golf ball sitting on top of a Lime-A-Rita bottle is given to the winner of his fantasy football league.

“We really like to mess with [league member] Trace Arbuckle a lot, and one of the things he gets really upset about is when we touch his Luke Donald ball, and the Lime-A-Rita represents the poor overall lack of discipline that our members embody,” Woock said.

However, money and trophies aren’t what drives fantasy football participants like Woock and Wernke. It’s something far more valuable: bragging rights.

Woock said, “That feeling of satisfaction you get when you beat someone or when people doubt you and you still win—like when Trace issues power rankings every week and I start in last and now I’m in first—the amount of satisfaction that I get from proving him wrong is unmeasurable.”