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When Real Tragedy Meets Football Fantasy - Let's Be Honest About Our Priorities

Consider this situation: You had a tough start/sit call, say Rashad Jennings vs. Arizona or Andre Ellington at the Giants. Initially you have Jennings in, but at the last second you switch to Ellington. On the first play, Ellington aggravates his foot injury, while Jennings rushes for 140 yards and three TDs. It costs you the win against your biggest rival, your team is now 0-2, and your season is already starting to slip away. You go to bed frustrated that night.

The next morning you see news that 15 people died in a car bombing in Iraq. Horrible. Then you remember your fantasy team lost, and it would have won had you not made that last minute switch from Jennings to Ellington. Which situation is going to have more of an effect on your day, the car bombing that killed 15 or the bad lineup decision? Let's be honest with ourselves - it's going to be your team. If it were otherwise, why do you spend five, 10, 20 or more hours a week on fantasy sports and so little volunteering, donating and doing what you can to help, if not abroad, then in your home city where tragic things are occurring daily? I'm not judging anyone, I spend more time on fantasy sports than you do because (1) It's my job, and (2) I enjoy it. But it's pretty clear where my priorities are.

So if I'm focusing my energy on my team's fantasy loss over a car bombing that killed 15 people (yes, people in that part of the world are just as real as Ray Rice's wife and Adrian Peterson's kid), then I'm kidding myself if I pretend the human tragedy is the most important thing to me if we - quite reasonably - base importance on the space it occupies in my thoughts and actions.  And this is the case even though I know the tragedy is objectively more important by many orders of magnitude.

If the Rice or Peterson news breaks, what do we do then? Allow a suitable pause out of respect for the grave nature of the crime and its victims before offering advice on how to capitalize on it? Many leagues are first-come-first-served waivers. "Let someone else reap the benefits then," you tell yourself, "I'm not going to profit off tragedy." But this is not in keeping with the entire reality of your life!

So why are you even contemplating a pause before tweeting that you should pick up Justin Forsett? I think it's because by doing so you're showing your cards. You're announcing to the world what your priorities are, and they're not the priorities you and everyone else know to be correct. You *should* care more about domestic violence than fantasy football, and theoretically you do. But in your everyday actions you simply do not. By revealing this, you're opening yourself up to the judgment of others who also know what you should care about and can now see that you don't. If domestic abuse and its victims really were more important to you than fantasy football, you might volunteer at a battered women's shelter. In that case, you wouldn't be tempted to tweet about Forsett because it probably wouldn't occur to you.

I'm not advocating we all quit spending time on hobbies that bring us enjoyment and force our priorities to align only with the moral aspects of life - the long term consequences of that would probably be disastrous . But I do think we should be honest with ourselves as to what our priorities actually are. At the very least it'll eliminate some of the false piety and hypocritical judgment. And where there's less pressure to pretend to prioritize something, maybe there's more chance we'll one day do so in earnest.