It looks like for the first time in quite a while (maybe since 2001?), I won’t be playing fantasy football this year. The main reason is just that I’m finding better, or at least more important, uses for my time these days. A secondary reason is that I just haven’t kept up with the comings and goings this past off-season (L.T. is still a Charger, right?), and between work, planning a trip to England, and preparing an application for an online master’s program, I really just don’t feel the motivation to do catch-up research at this point, with the season only a couple weeks away.

I’ve done fairly well in fantasy football in the past. I usually put together high-scoring teams, and I’ve won a couple league championships, including my initial exposure to fantasy football in a cut-throat league where people paid $60 to play and would push your mother in front of a moving vehicle if she stood in their way of picking up somebody’s third-string tailback who might sniff the field that week because the starter is listed as questionable. I do enjoy tweaking my lineups and scouring the waiver wires for hidden gems, but to do that well requires way more time for research than I’m willing to dedicate to it these days. I’m not the type to start a team and then do a half-assed job managing it, and the thought of digging through mountains of stats to decide which team’s backup tight end is a better waiver-wire pickup just makes me cringe right now.

Finding time to do research wasn’t a problem when I worked in a newspaper’s sports department, since I was blitzed with more NFL minutiae than I cared to read every day. Since leaving newspapers, however, my interest in sports has plummeted. I’ve found that I’ve watched a lot more of — and find much more enjoyment in — the sports I really care about (basically UNC basketball), and much, much less of everything else, and I can’t say I’m sorry about that. I haven’t watched a baseball game in years. NASCAR? Yeah right! The NBA? What’s that? Even the NFL, which was probably my second favorite sports-viewing option before, only managed to pull me to the TV for short stretches of a couple games last year. Even college basketball, which flows in my blood given my UNC alum status, has struggled for my attention. Outside of UNC games, I’ve watched maybe a handful of contests the last couple years. I turned on the national championship game this past April just in time to see Butler’s last shot barely miss, and immediately turned it off again.

So I’ll be taking a break from fantasy football this year. I’m sure I’ll miss it at some point, just not as much as I would have before, and I definitely won’t miss having to get up early on Sundays to check the injury report.