Welcome to the "Original" Dynasty Rankings Fantasy Football Blog

This blog was born out of a Dynasty Rankings thread originally begun in October, 2006 at the Footballguys.com message boards. The rankings in that thread and the ensuing wall-to-wall discussion of player values and dynasty league strategy took on a life of its own at over 275 pages and 700,000 page views. The result is what you see in the sidebar under "Updated Positional Rankings": a comprehensive ranking of dynasty league fantasy football players by position on a tiered, weighted scale. In the tradition of the original footballguys.com Dynasty Rankings thread, intelligent debate is welcome and encouraged.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Quote of the Day | October 5, 2008: Too Often These Feelings of Loyalty Are Dismissed

Michael MacCambridge's 2004 America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation:


One of the central illusions of sport is that a group of athletes wearing a certain uniform can represent an entire city. And one of the wonders of sport is that the repeated exercise of that illusion, through many years and many athletes, can serve to make it a reality.

The Oakland Raiders were a privately held business, but like virtually all professional sports franchises that had remained solvent long enough to become successful, they occupied a unique position in their community. The Raiders had become part of the city's identity, and succeeded in part because of that connection. The people of Oakland and other East Bay communities -- who had supported the franchise, financed a new stadium in the '60s, and through more than a decade of sellouts helped make the Silver-and-Black one of the most recognizable franchises in the sport -- could plausibly be said to possess a stake in the team that went beyond a narrow consideration of legal ownership. Too often these feelings of loyalty are dismissed, but they were at the very heart of the appeal of spectator sports in the late twentieth century.

While this would be true about any city that supported a franchise for more than two decades, it was particularly true of long-mocked cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, and Oakland. At some level, the football team became identified with and evoked a truth about the larger city. "You'd go anywhere in the world and you say, 'I'm from Oakland,' " recalled the actor Tom Hanks. "And people would say, 'Is that where the Oakland Raiders play?' And it'd be 'Yes, that's right, where the Oakland Raiders play.' "


Tags: Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

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