Perhaps you are the kind of person who finds it hard to get excited for a lot of NFL football games. Perhaps you only like to watch the marquee games, for example, when the Dallas Cowboys, owned and coached by Jerry Jones, visit the Green Bay Packers, owned and coached by Satan.

Perhaps to you all of those boring games (also known as Bears’ games) are worth watching only if it means not having to sit through reruns of “Beverly Hills, 90210” because a roommate of yours (we will call this roommate “Curt Duncan”) insists upon watching one or the other.

That used to be me, until I joined a fantasy football league.

Fantasy football is a game in which you pay money to select a “fantasy” team of NFL players, and then have a chance to win money based on their individual performance. It sounds like a fancy way of betting, but it isn’t at all like betting in the sense that so far I am doing well in the league. If this were gambling, that wouldn’t be the case. I cite as an example the time I took a friend of mine (we can call him “Drew Harris”) to his first casino when he turned 21. It was there I taught him the 3 basic rules of roulette, which are: 1) Sit down at a roulette table. 2) Set $20 somewhere on the table. 3) Get up from the table wondering if there are free drink specials at the bar.

Now, if you know anything about either A) football fans or B) guys in general, you should already know a lot of men spend their Saturday and Sunday afternoons peacefully planted on the couch guzzling nacho cheese and munching on pork rinds. Throw fantasy football into the equation, however, and those same docile men turn into a pack of wild yetis, frantically scanning the networks looking for highlight films of the day, screaming about who caught what touchdown pass for teams nobody would otherwise care about and throwing nacho cheese at the TV rather than eating it.

Fantasy football requires you to have an encyclopedia-like knowledge of football statistics, and you gather that after hours of heated football watching every Sunday. Unfortunately, I have found some side effects. I have a theory that says when you start filling your head with football statistics, the rest of your brain turns into a useless festering goo, like what you find inside of a pumpkin.

Other fantasy football leaguers can probably attest to this. In fact, it is possible John Madden could be one of the greatest minds of our time, except he has been around football so long that anytime he opens his mouth to say something intelligible, he ends up blurting something about the Dallas Cowboy offensive line’s butt sweat.

For me, it hits closer to home. A typical conversation between my roommates on a Sunday afternoon usually sounds something like:

JASON: “Curt, how did Adrian Murrell do last week?”

CURT: “He rushed 17 times for 165 yards and two touchdowns and caught six passes for another 33 yards.”

JASON: “Curt, how are you doing in your trans-log class?”

CURT: “WOW. Look at that butt sweat.”

Someday my theory will be tested when newspapers and campaigning senators will start asking questions like, “Why aren’t our kids learning anything in college?” and, “Why are our nation’s greatest minds filled with that goo that you find inside of a pumpkin?” At that time, I’ll want to stand up and say “Because all we ever do in college is watch football.”

But I won’t, because I’ll be filling my mouth with nacho cheese.

Aaron Senneff is a senior in computer engineering from Bettendorf.