The Penalty

Fantasy Football. It's an odd thing isn't it, how wide an obsession it's become over the past twenty five years. Every fall millions of people pour their time and mental energy into this hobby, worry over line ups and waivers and ADP. All of that effort and it still all comes down to chance. Will these football players, these athletic demigods who have absolutely no knowledge of your existence, happen to perform well enough to beat another random set of their contemporaries on any given week? It all comes down to chance and yet every year millions engage with it anyways. Anything to add a little excitement to their lives, anything to add some spice to a game they'll be watching anyways. To be fair to those millions, the stakes of fantasy football usually aren't that high. The buy-ins are affordable, for a given context, and the penalties for losing are usually some minor embarrassment or inconvenience. I like to think that if those hordes of fantasy football devotees were playing with real stakes they'd exercise more caution, or not participate at all. Certainly if I had known the stakes of my encounter with fantasy football I would probably have made different choices. It all comes down to chance after all, and on one particular Sunday in early January, that chance sent my life in a completely different direction.

It was the championship week of that fantasy football season, and our commissioner, Brian, had invited the other eleven members of the league over to his house to watch the final game. I was new to the league that year, having been invited by my former college roommate, Jeremy. The rest of the league were friends and relatives of his, or at least that was what I had gathered. The one hundred dollar buy in was steep for someone freshly graduated like I was, but Jeremy persuaded me. "It'll be worth it." He'd assured me over text. I was still skeptical, but eventually I agreed. I had just moved from a small college town into a much bigger city, and like a lot of twenty somethings I had been finding it difficult to get my bearings and even more difficult to build a friend group. I'd figured at the time that at the very least I would get a new group of guys to hang with. Still, a hundred bucks was a hundred bucks, and so I was determined to make the most of it. I put the effort in: listening to podcasts on my morning commute, scouring forums, I probably spent more time in the week before the draft examining player rankings than I did the spreadsheets I was paid to analyze.

I had arrived at our draft, held in a private room of a sports bar, nervous but feeling prepared. Looking back at it now, there were things that should have been red flags or at least yellow flags that I either ignored or missed entirely. There was a vibe, an energy in the room, emanating from a lot of the other managers in the league. It was in the way they would look at me, eyeing me up and down with a slight smirk on their faces. At the time I assumed it was just a bunch of experienced players categorizing me as an easy mark, fresh meat they could prey upon in the weeks ahead. That was a case of me being wrong, but also more right than I could have known. Brian at least seemed nice enough, a man ten years my senior with a well groomed head of brown hair, an easy affable smile, and a firm handshake, all of which fit the vague muttering of 'sales' that I had gotten when I'd asked Jeremy what line of work Brian was in to be able to afford to rent out this room.

Other than those pointed looks, the vibe at the draft had been lively and light hearted. The drinks and appetizers were flowing freely, and while I had arrived determined not to drink before the draft was complete, a piece of advice that I had read in several different places, so many of the other guys good naturedly but insistently plied me with free shots and beers that by the time the first pick rolled around I had picked up a decent buzz. I'll try to put the blame for me missing the next red flag on my alcohol clouded brain, but in truth it's never been in my nature to be confrontational. Still when my first pick, number six over all, was up and the app we were using suffered a strange malfunction that caused it to auto draft a third rate quarterback who had just injured his elbow instead of the stud running back I had been about to select, I should have made a bigger fuss. I did try, I'll give myself that credit, I protested to Jeremy and the three guys closest to us, and Brian came over to me shortly after.

"Ah shit, Chris, I'm sorry about that. This is a new app we're using this year, and I guess there are still some bugs to work out. I'd say that I could work some commissioner magic and force the guy you wanted onto your roster, but I think Kyle over there just picked him up." He nodded his head to the other side of the room, where a skinny, weaselly looking dude with dirty blonde hair was sitting. Kyle gave me a small wave, a smug grin on his face. "I'll tell you what though," Brian continued, "I'll bump up your free agent budget by twenty dollars. The waiver wire is where leagues are really won anyways, right?" That small concession and a warm smile were enough to mollify me, and the draft had continued without incident.

The last red flag that confronted me at the draft was actually one that I had noticed at the time, it was just explained away. In all the chatter, and trash talking, there was constant mention of 'The Penalty'. "Oh watch out, Bill definitely aint trying to pay The Penalty this year." one guy might say, or "Just you wait until you're paying The Penalty". I had come across this in my research, a lot of leagues had punishments for getting last place, which encouraged each member to keep actively competing even when eliminated from championship contention. But the vagueness, it was always just 'The Penalty', and the seriousness with which everyone spoke about it struck me as odd. I had asked Jeremy about it at one point and been told that the penalty was a secret. "We don't tell newbies what The Penalty is. It builds suspense and all that." He'd said it with a conspiratorial wink. I hadn't been thrilled with that at the time, but looking around the room, alcohol fueled trash talk and blasting dad rock filled the air, the group seemed like a bunch of normal ass dudes. Most of them wouldn't have been at all out of place at the accounting firm I worked at. I figured at the time that The Penalty, ominous buildup aside, couldn't be all that bad. I had no fucking idea.

After the draft of course came the season, and once the games were underway...well things did not go well for yours truly. My top running back went down with a torn ligament in his leg three weeks into the season. My top receiver was seen getting into shouting matches with his quarterback, my third tier quarterback with the bum shoulder, by week four. I tried to play the best possible match ups on defense and guessed wrong six times in a row. My kicker(s) got me negative points more often than they got me ten points the first eight weeks of the season. None of that is the sign of some deep dark conspiracy. None of that is even unusual for fantasy football, it all does come down to chance after all. There were other things that, if one were to look back on them with a cynical mind, might start to suggest a pattern, a hint of a design. It was always little things. When the bidding system for free agents ate my bid after week one, swallowing the budget I'd allocated but not awarding me the player, I'd accepted Brian's repeated and effusive apologies. In week five I managed to eke out a win against the number two ranked player in the league by just a fraction of a point, .3 to be exact. It was my sole win in the first two months of that season and I'd been ecstatic. That high lasted all of eight hours, until a 'point adjustment' the next morning wiped my victory away. Brian was sympathetic, but firm. The correction came from the app, he explained to me patiently, and there was nothing he could reasonably do to correct it. I complained to Jeremy about it too, and he had half heartedly tried to commiserate with me, relating that a similar adjustment had cost him a game the previous season. I didn't ask him if the win it had cost him was his only win out of eight, I didn't need to.

Every loss I suffered was underscored by a very weird little routine of this new league of mine, a routine that you're going to hear about and think 'man that Chris sure is a dumbass for not suspecting something was up'. Well I did think something was up, I thought that my new league mates were all just degenerates with an odd sense of humor. Because, you see, every single time I lost, the rest of the league would flood the group chat with explicit pornographic pictures and gifs, all of a certain type: Dozens upon dozens of images of trans women, crossdressers, sissies, femboys, all of them getting fucked. The first time it happened I thought the chat had gotten hacked somehow, and I had frantically reached out to Brian. Even over text I had been able to discern his eminent amusement. "Oh that, that's just a dumb thing we do here. Sort of a ribbing for the bottom of the league. Don't let it get to you, it's totally nothing personal." I mostly believed him but only mostly, because as the weeks wore on and the losses started to mount, the messages that accompanied the slew of pornography started to get more directly aimed at me.

"New guy gonna look like.." a caption to a picture of a skinny little femboy being violated by a big black cock might read, or "Looking forward to the end of the season, fresh meat?" might accompany a picture of an eager sissy sitting in the middle of a sea of lusty men. These comments should have made me even more suspicious, as should have the fact that they were never directed at anybody other than me, but I honestly thought it was just a very out there form of ribbing that was directed solely at me because I had occupied last place in the league every single week that year.

Despite Brian's words of warning, I did let the routine get to me, just not in the way I think he probably meant. All those pictures and gifs and sometimes even short video clips, they were...well they were fucking hot. I had never delved into that type of porn but after weeks of being bombarded by images of hypnotically sexy and hyper feminized ladies, they started to creep their way into my fantasies. I found myself on a certain level looking forward to each loss and the material that would come with it. Another oddity though was that while a lot of the images that flooded my phone were from easily identifiable public sources, there was also several girls who I could never find anywhere on the internet.

Anyway the season dragged on, and so did our fantasy league. I continued to accumulate losses at an alarming pace, and by Thanksgiving it was very clear that I was going to finish dead last in the standings. I tried to get more clarification at that point from Brian and Jeremy about what the mysterious Penalty entailed, but they both remained cagey. "Don't worry about it." Jeremy told me, "There's still a losers bracket in the playoffs, all you have to do is win once and you can avoid The Penalty altogether."

Brian, who I had found growing more curt and impatient with me as the season wore on, was more blunt. "You don't need to know about the fucking Penalty." he wrote me after yet another loss, "You just need to have your ass at my house for the Championship game."

And have my ass at his house for the Championship game I did. By that point the playoffs were in their third week, as was the losers bracket where, surprising no one, I had failed to win even a single game and stood one afternoon slate of games from being the absolute bottom of the league. Brian's house, a McMansion monstrosity out in the suburbs, was humming that day as the twelve of us gathered. Eleven of us were in high spirits, chattering and trash talking and ready for a day of NFL action. I on the other hand was knotted up with nerves, the capital P in the Penalty looming ever larger in my mind.

I thought at the time perhaps my nervousness was blatant, because no sooner had we all settled down into Brian's cavernous TV room than Brian's girlfriend, a petite young blonde who had been introduced to me as Allie, attached herself to me. I was taken aback, because although we had never met, something about her was incredibly familiar to me. I almost said something, but then my social anxiety overruled that impulse and settled for a polite handshake instead. She slid into place on the spacious couch right next to me and started chatting me up, asking about my life, my job, how I knew the rest of the league, how my season had gone. When I confessed, quietly, to her that I was almost certainly going to come in dead last she pursed her lips and looked away for a second, but as her head moved I thought I saw a look of deep pity set in on her face. By the time she turned back to me however, she was wearing a mask of emotional indifference. "You never know," She said softly, leaning in so close to me that her lips practically touched my ear, "Maybe the penalty isn't all that bad?"

The games started, and one by one, as they reliably had each and every game that season, all my top players proceeded to underperform. My QB threw three interceptions by halftime in the early window, my RB1 left the game with turf toe, my WR1 hurt his ankle on the first play of his game and spent the remaining 55 minutes limping ineffectually up and down the field. As each new devastating setback reigned down on me, the rest of the league grew more boisterous in their cheering and jeering. Worse than the outright insults about my manhood and football acumen though, were the comments and significant looks I could feel bubbling under the surface. As my inevitable loss approached a deep set tension was taking hold and I was at the focus of it. Another little peculiarity reared its head in those final hours of the season: everytime my opponent put up a touchdown, the rest of the group would go out of their way to get me drunk. "A shot for the condemned" One guy said as he thrust a drink into my hand. "Chumps gotta chug", Another said with a hearty chortle ten minutes later while foisting a foam capped solo cup onto me. Even Jeremy got in the action.

"Trust me bro, the alcohol will only help." He told me solemnly, though with a glint of anticipation in his eyes. With all the drinks being pressed on me, I had a decent buzz going by the second half of the early window, and by the second half of the late window I was pretty well sloshed.

As the tension mounted, and the alcohol worked its effect on me, another development played out. I didn't, and through the beer flavored fog couldn't, tell whether she was just picking up on the tension in the room or if drunk and miserable accountants were an aphrodisiac, or if it was just my raw animal magnetism, but as the afternoon wore on Allie became more and more flirtatious. It started subtly enough: a soft hand pressed against my shoulder as she laughed too hard at one of my jokes, and maybe that hand lingered a beat too long. Then she was leaning into me, her small bust pressing into my arm. And then her hand was resting, just casually resting, on my thigh as she was seeming absorbed in Raiders/Broncos. During this whole ramp up my own pulse was picking up speed at a rapid pace, both out of excitement at her touch and sheer terror that Brian would notice what she was up to. But Brian, when he happened to glance back at us at all, and those were mostly to demand that Allie go and fetch more snacks or drinks, just flashed me a knowing smile.

And so it was that as the fourth quarter of my final player's final game wrapped up I was both drunk and horny. I was in such an altered state that the dread I'd felt at the Penalty had receded to the back of my mind. My loss was inevitable, I was down by 20 points, with my only player remaining, having only fifteen minutes with which to work. I had checked out of even watching the game, content to lie back on the couch and savor the attention of the beautiful young blonde at my side. Therefore it barely registered when the rest of the room suddenly exploded in shock, and it took me several more moments to realize what had happened. My player, a second rate receiver playing on a third rate team with a fourth rate quarterback, had just scored an eighty yard touchdown. With shaky hands I fished my phone out of my pocket and thumbed into our fantasy app. That one play had just netted me 13 points, more than half of what I needed. Suddenly the atmosphere of the gathering, which had seconds ago been raucous, was wrapped in stunned silence. That didn't change as we watched the opposing team go three and out on the following drive. They were going to punt the ball away. They were going to punt the ball away to my wide receiver, who, while he didn't have much going for him on his career resume, was widely acknowledged to be one of the most dangerous return men in the league.

The punt was up, spiraling its way end over end forty yards down the field. It landed squarely in the hands of my receiver, and he was off like a rocket. He ran fifteen yards before he even encountered an opposing player, and then he made a juke to the left that hurt my ankles just to watch. He was off again, sprinting down the field and weaving his way between the opposing coverage team. The final man, the punter himself, took an angle as he intersected my receiver and tried to push him out of bounds. The punter received a vicious stiff arm for his trouble and then there was nothing but a clear green expanse as my receiver galloped into the endzone for a touchdown.

My heart started to race even faster as elation bubbled up inside me. I had done it. Well he had done it, but...I clicked back into the app to see what his titanic athletic feat had gained for me. It took me a moment of staring dumbfounded at the screen before my stomach plummeted. His score hadn't changed. At all. I looked up at Brian. "Hey man, I think the app is busted again. My points aren't showing up." Scenarios began racing through my mind. What had happened? I knew that in most leagues punt and kick return touchdowns went to the Defense and Special Teams, rather than the individual player who scored them, but I also knew with a certainty that that wasn't the case in our league. I knew it because I had actually lost a game earlier in the season on the back of a last second punt return. I looked back at Brian, who finished tapping something out on his own phone before he responded to me.

"Yeah no, sorry about that dude. It's my fuck up honestly. A couple of weeks ago I was trying to tweak a minor setting in the app and accidentally reset all the scoring rules to standard. I thought I had gotten everything set back up the way they were, but I guess I missed that one." His tone was apologetic, but it didn't reach his eyes, which were fixed on me with a cold, speculative air, like a scientist waiting to see how the animal he was experimenting on would react.

The way I reacted was to finally, after way too many of these instances over the past 16 weeks, snap. "What the fuck?" My voice was thick and heated. "You just reset all the fucking rules, and now I just lost? Fuck that. I won!"

Brian was not at all impressed. He set his phone down and rose from the recliner he had been lounging on and took a few steps to position himself in front of me, still sitting on the couch. "First of all, watch your fucking tone with me while you're in my house." All traces of that apologetic tone were gone from his voice, which was now so cold that it sent a slight chill running down my body. I felt a touch on my shoulder and looked over to see Allie had reached out a reassuring hand. "Second of all," Brian continued, "You didn't fucking win. What the app says, goes, that's how we do things. Third of all, I think you're going to actually like paying The Penalty, so calm your bitch ass down and listen to what it's all about." I was still steamed up, but Brian's presence just feet in front of me was so commanding that I slunk back into the couch without even realizing what I was doing. "Good boy." I couldn't miss the sheer derision in his voice and it shook me. Where the fuck had this come from? Where was the smooth talker I had been dealing with all season? "Allie, why don't you stand up and tell your little friend here about the Penalty, and what's about to happen?"