Fantasy football mid-season re-draft

Gunnational Fantasy Football League team in Palo Alto, Calif., in its 32nd season, founded in 1979, at its mid-season re-draft, Wednesday, November 9, 2011.

“Gunnnational” comes from Gunn, Henry Gunn High of Palo Alto, where four of the current 10-team owners were freshman together in 1979 when the league was launched. Sports Illustrated had an item about a team comprised of Oakland Raider beat writers callng itself “Gnational Football” connoting something small like a gnat.

Team owners munched brownies and chips drank Brother Thelonious beer, and due to the preponderance of pushy Wesleyan football former players, listened on Youtube to fellow alumni Dar Williams and Das Racist — resisting the urge to send a lackey out for Taco Bell or Pizza Hut.

From the SI Vault, 1978, Marvin Webster of the Knicks on cover:

GOOD GNUS

“If you can remember where the Kansas City Chiefs originated, or San Diego‘s Chargers, or recall the AFL New York original nickname—or Oakland‘s—then you will survive in the G.F.L.” So says, in slightly confusing prose, the weekly Gnus of the Gnational Football League, which arrives in a plain brown envelope with a Santa Rosa, Calif.postmark.

The eight northern California teams of the GFL—Tiburon Hot Tubs, Walnut Creek Weasels, San Mateo Critical Rays,Humboldt Crabs, etc.—held a draft of NFL players during the summer to establish 15-man rosters, and each week during the season the club “owner” sends his starting lineup—one quarterback, two running backs, two receivers and a kicker—to the commissioner, Mike Carey, a former University of San Francisco sports information director who lives in Sebastopol. The winners of the weekly GFL “games” are determined by the scoring of each team’s six starters in NFL play that week.

According to Commissioner Carey, a typical GFL game was the season opener between the Big Plum Buckeyes (now the Big Plum Pits) and the Sonoma Geysers (now the Sebastopol Escargot). The Geysers appeared to be on their way to a narrow victory over the Buckeyes thanks to Dan Pastorini‘s two touchdown passes against Atlantaand Chuck Muncie‘s two touchdowns against Minnesota, even though Rafael Septien had missed two field goals inDallas‘ 38-0 win over the Colts. But, when one of Pastorini’s touchdown passes was belatedly ruled a lateral, instead of the Geysers winning 41-38, the Buckeyes came out on top 38-35.

Within minutes of the decision, Rank Link, a disciple of Woody Hayes and general manager of the Geysers, kicked in the mailbox of his opposite number on the Buckeyes, thereby forcing the commissioner’s office to take a stand against the “criminal element” surfacing in the GFL.

Trades are frequent in the league and they are reported weekly in the gnusletter. For instance, last week: “When the Escargot had lost Bob Griese, Doug Williams and Pastorini to injuries, it sent Chuck Foreman to the Walnut Creek Weasels for Dan Fouts, whereupon Foreman rewarded his new team with a Monday night touchdown against the Chicago Bears that helped the Weasels nip the Critical Rays, 15-9.”

It could develop into the gnational pastime.

(I read the above article and re-wrote it in a letter to Brian Evans and together we founded a similar GFL, and at our 25th high school reunion I was invited back into the league that Evans had kept going thru college and the ensuing years)