Why does anyone play fantasy football? This is not a trick question, although it's also not particularly difficult to answer. Perhaps they do it for money, or they enjoy football, or they want a shared activity to help stay in touch with friends or family. Whatever the reason, the fun is in picking your guys and managing your little team and hoping you win more often than you lose. Some people have a healthier relationship to this endeavor than others. Still, if none of it appeals to you, then you can always not do it.
Then there's this guy:
That's Nic Carter, who boasted this week that he didn't spend any actual time on fantasy football because he has an AI agent run his team for him. That sure sounds like the kind of thing someone would say if they were a huge loser, but let's keep an open mind and first learn more about this strategy. Carter is a venture capitalist who focuses on finance and blockchains, and hopes to create alternative currency. That's strike one. His use of "sportsball" is strike two. (For Nic: These are references to baseball.) Anyway, the entrepreneur who has posted 79,000 tweets has no time to set his lineup, since it's such a daunting "social obligation." Doing it this way leaves him more time to ponder ways to streamline the death penalty and kill people more efficiently.
Also, Carter's personal website comes with a disclaimer: "If you have navigated to my personal website because you are mad about something I said online, and you’re looking to mine biographical details so you can Own me, you have already lost. I mean leaving aside how pathetic that is in the first place, you’re not going to find any useful ammo on here." Call off the search, everyone. We're finished.
But what exactly does Carter mean when he says AI runs his fantasy team? According to him, it does "literally everything": drafting players, adding and dropping free agents, and deciding who to start or sit each week. Anyone familiar with fantasy football knows that there is already an entire industry built around helping you do all of this, with recommendations written by real people, sometimes even presented in convenient rankings; presumably "AI" would be regurgitating some form of that advice back to Carter. Oh, AI drafted your fantasy football team? Wow, that's next-level. I'm sure this cutting-edge technology didn't just make its choices off whatever stat projections were already baked into the fantasy app. This lug is using autodraft with extra steps and more fresh water. I guess we needed that data center so you didn't have to check Kyren Williams's ADP.
Seemingly every day some self-proclaimed genius declares they have found a way to save time by letting AI address a task which doesn't take that long to do, and actually requires a personal touch—for example, buying your partner flowers, or reading a storybook to your child. These people eagerly reveal how lazy, callous, and unimaginative they are, and how their inability to think for themselves has detrimental effects on those around them. Using a machine for these kinds of social interactions is the sign of a decayed mind.
But I want to get back to the football of it all. Without breaking Defector company policy and discussing my own fantasy football team, I am familiar enough with this NFL season to know that Carter's starting lineup might have played great in Week 4, but a bunch of those players were pretty bad before then. Drake Maye was horrid for the first three weeks of this season; Tetairoa McMillan had some pedestrian games before his career-high performance this past Sunday night; Malik Nabers had a slow start before lighting up the Arizona Cardinals' secondary. I had a pretty solid hunch that this AI-made team could not be atop its league standings. After all, Carter only flaunted this lineup when most of it scored well. Surely, if his team were truly good, he would not have needed to wait until Week 4 to brag about it.
To get to the bottom of this, I emailed Carter, asking for his team's record, but he has yet to respond. Then I went a little deeper into the Twitter discussion and saw that Carter had mentioned beating someone with the handle "@crypto_bobby," who had tweeted a screenshot of their matchup:
So this weird, off-putting man's AI-managed fantasy team is now 1-3. I'd call that a loser.
