Hi, I'm Tyler, and I'm a fantasy football addict.

Like millions of other Americans, I take part in a fantasy football league every season. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that it consumes more of my time than it probably should.

Fantasy sports are huge these days. In addition to football, pretty much every other sport has fantasy leagues: baseball, hockey, cricket, golf and even NASCAR. Heck, there's even a Fantasy Congress league, where apparently your "team" consists of U.S. House and Senate members, who can earn you points for things such as voting attendance, speeches and partisanship. This baffles me and makes me laugh a bit, but props to the political nuts for taking fantasy sports to the next level.

The fact that fantasy sports are so popular means there's obviously something appealing about them. I'm not the type that buys fantasy guidebooks before drafts or studies thousands of statistics, but I know plenty of people who do. Once the season starts, though, I become just as attached as anyone else.

I was never the fastest or strongest kid growing up, meaning my chances of playing professional football (or any professional sport for that matter) were slim to none. I did, however, play one year of football back in eighth grade, which I like to refer to as my "glory days."

Fantasy sports serves as an outlet through which I can vicariously live my childhood dream of being a pro athlete, even though that dream was crushed many years ago. Now thanks to fantasy sports, I have a team I can refer to as "my team." Granted, I'm not the one getting lit up by Ray Lewis after going across the middle or making leaping catches in the back of the end zone, but that's where the emphasis on the "fantasy" in fantasy football comes into play. As weird as it may sound, it's almost as if I'm scoring all these points on my own.

For those of you who are in a fantasy league, I'm sure many of you compulsively check stats on Sundays. I'm just as guilty as the next person. Far too often, there are times when I should be doing my homework but instead find myself checking the scores of games to see how my team is doing. I tell myself I'll just check this one game, but I always get caught up in the fantasy world. It makes me wonder how fantasy football might decrease productivity in offices, or if my GPA has suffered because of it. I'd like to think it hasn't.

I also become emotionally invested in games I would otherwise never care to watch. Take last weekend's offensive shootout between the Browns and Bengals, for example. Before the days of fantasy football, the only fans who would bother watching this game would be Ohioans. But things have changed. I actually cared more about that game than perhaps any other last weekend (beside the Vikings and Chargers games. And yes, I'm a fan of both teams; it's complicated).

You see, I have Carson Palmer as my fantasy quarterback, and last Sunday, for him, was perhaps one of the most impressive fantasy games any player has put together. I couldn't help but cheer for him and the Bengals (who cheers for the Bengals?) as he threw touchdown after touchdown. He ended up with six scores to go along with 400 yards — simply ridiculous numbers.

The only problem I had with the game was that my opponent in the league had two Browns players. So again, I became involved in the game, hoping that Braylon Edwards and Kellen Winslow would go unnoticed on offense.

Palmer's offensive explosion was enough to lead my team to victory, although it was a narrow win. After the Monday Night game, I was unsure whether I could pull it off. So I decided to calculate the stats from that game to see if I beat my opponent, as nerdy as that sounds.

Sure enough, my record improved to 2-0. Yes, it might be sad I cared that much about the result of a game that I had no control over. It's also sad that I am just as excited about my fantasy team being undefeated as I would a real team.

I think I may have a problem, but it could be worse — I could have drafted Hillary Clinton.

Tyler is a junior majoring in journalism. He can be contacted to talk fantasy football at [email protected].