Technobabble

Fantasy Football

Posted by on Aug 18, 2006 | 9 Comments

Fantasy football is big business. A report issued by Challenger, Gray & Christmas this week boldly states that “the time lost at work could cost employers as much as $1.1 billion per week.” With as many as a purported 36.8 million folks indulging, it’s no wonder that ESPN, CBS, FOX, and AOL all have their own fantasy football franchises. But forget the big players and numbers, the most intriguing thing about Challenger’s fantasy football report is its conclusion.

“Employers should avoid squashing employees’ brief participation in fantasy football during work hours. The potential damage to morale and loyalty resulting from a fantasy football ban could be far worse than the loss of productivity caused by 10 minutes of online team management,” said Challenger, Gray & Christmas CEO, John A. Challenger.

“Companies that not only allow workers to indulge in fantasy football but actually encourage it by organizing a company league are likely to see significant benefits.”

There’s some interesting extrapolation in the report, as it strives to tie together information on fantasy football from a range of sources. But I’m not sure if I can argue with the conclusion. Take away football and what do you have?

An unhappy workforce and decreased performance.

I wonder what the man would have to say about the little guy (name withheld) that used to come around with the little slips of paper printed with the college and pro games each week. I don’t think I spent ten minutes a week (or more than five bucks) on those slips back in the day, but man, I could never pick ‘em to save my life.

Related: Performance Management Software

  • Laura

    Why do guys think that girls cannot be apart of Fantasy Football?

  • http://twitter.com/mitch_bartlett Mitch Bartlett

    Boxee is a great device to aggregate many sources of content, US and elsewhere.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001770065819 Joseph Palmer

    I ditched cable tv long ago and have been happier ever since. Netflix does wonders as well as youtube and a lot of other sources.

  • Anonymous

    Amazon has fantastic customer service!

  • http://twitter.com/webbnf Neil Webb

    My frustration in rural Michigan is that Charter is our only internet provider. I called them to cancel everything but the internet, the rep said “well it will be more expensive to have just internet, so we will give you (slow speed) but throw in the TV content.” It was an interesting conversation… they do not want people to ditch TV so they are throwing it in free while people need internet.

  • Roger Market

    My wild guess would go either way. I’d say iTunes because it seems to work better; I’d say Amazon because you have all that credit to spend. You didn’t leave enough clues to make the answer clear. ;-)

    But yeah, all those are great. If I didn’t have roommates who wanted cable/satellite, I wouldn’t have any of it. I’d use Netflix and iTunes. And stuff.

  • http://twitter.com/Mistwaver Steven Mosley, Jr.

    For a while I didn’t have cable television. Now that I have it again, it makes me realize I really didn’t miss it that much. The only things I typically watch on TV is sports (racing, football, wrestling, etc.), which a lot of people just setup streams for on sites like ustream and justin.tv.

  • Jack Durst

    What about YouTube… Who cares about mainstream TV, all the really good stuff is there.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/David-DeWitt/627236289 David DeWitt

    I love cable tv and my dvr.