Mr. Baum’s Fantastic Fantasy League 

There are a multitude of fantasy football leagues in the Gilman community. Many students have personal leagues amongst friends, team leagues within their respective athletic group, or even the occasional advisory league, all possessing unique rules and traditions. However, all of these fantasy football leagues pale in comparison to Mr. Matt Baum’s ’93 thirty-year-old fantasy football league, founded by his classmate of 1993, which he joined in 1995 and still participates in today.  

The league primarily consists of Mr. Baum’s close friends from Gilman and the cofounders’ friends at Middlebury College. In an interview with Mr. Baum, he explained that he joined the league because he “was a huge sports fan” and “managing your own sports team sounded like a fun thing to do” despite fantasy football being in its infancy. For 30 years, the league has consisted of twelve members with a fifty-dollar buy-in each year and no punishment for last place. Interestingly, the total pot is split at the end of the year between first, second, and third place, along with the winner of the losers’ bracket, known to them as “the toilet bowl.”

Mr. Baum fondly recalls that for the first few years, they all got together on an “audio call, with the commissioner using a big whiteboard to draft everyone.” Back in the 90s, with no modern internet, let alone fantasy football websites or apps, the only way to research who to draft for your fantasy team was to physically “buy NFL preview magazines,” which “printed the depth charts of [all] the teams.” Then everyone on the call would tell the commissioner who they were picking throughout their snake draft, and he would record down each team’s roster. 

Once the season started, Mr. Baum stated, “You’d go buy the USA Today, which is a newspaper that printed every box score of all the games, and then each opponent would tally his team’s points and his opponent’s total points. Mr. Baum explained how the scoring system has not changed much since he started, but “it was a lot of math” back then. Every Tuesday, “the loser would call the winner to confirm the scores… and then they would call the commissioner to tell him the score. Every two to three weeks, the commissioner would send out a letter with the standings that would end up in your physical mailbox,” Mr. Baum added. Finally, at the end of each year,  six teams would make the playoffs, with two people receiving a bye, and the other six heading to compete in the toilet bowl. 

Mr. Baum’s league continued like this until, around the early 2000s, they moved to an online fantasy league. No more written letters, buying NFL preview magazines, or manually tallying up one’s team score from the USA Today; it had all become digitized and streamlined. When asked what version of fantasy football he preferred, Mr. Baum nostalgically reflected,  “What we do now is so much easier, [but] I sort of prefer the old way. You had to do your own research, and it was more work, but it felt more rewarding when a pick turned out.” Mr. Baum finished, “You also got to know the league better, for you had to do the research yourself.” 

Throughout the years, Mr. Baum has stayed in touch with many members of his fantasy football league—especially the ones from Gilman: once a Hound, always a Hound. His fantasy league serves as a testament to the lifelong bonds and friendships we make here at Gilman, and one has to wonder if any Gilman alum or current student will ever be a part of a longer-lasting fantasy football league than Mr. Baum.