SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
In a memorable “Saturday Night Live” football sketch from 2016, Vanessa Bayer toils in the kitchen preparing Totino’s Pizza Rolls while her six “hungry guys” lounge in the living room watching “the big game.” It’s hilarious — but no longer remotely accurate in portraying the audience for NFL games and, specifically, fantasy football.
Nearly 14 million women now play fantasy football, representing roughly 25 percent of the nation’s 55 million total participants, according to research compiled for my new book, “Inside Fantasy Football: America’s Favorite Non-Contact Sport.”
NBC’s Matthew Berry, one of fantasy football’s top analysts, says the games used to operate in “a fairly insular world.” He recalls fantasy conferences not long ago where, “You’d go there and there were three women and two people of color. It was a lot of white men between 30 and 50.”
Now, Berry told me, he sees a lot more women getting involved. “I get recognized these days by more women. I was at an event a couple of weeks ago where a woman came up to me and said she was a big fan. She let me know she’s in four leagues, and she’s the commissioner of two of them.”
Connecting with other women who share an interest in fantasy football motivated Rachel Woodford, a Vikings fan in Rochester, Minnesota, to create “Unwind,” a female social media group. “We get on a Zoom call and we discuss fantasy football,” she told me. “We discuss life, and it’s just a hangout session. There’s a good number of us women in the community. I think connection is really important, especially when we’re a minority in a male-dominated sports industry.”
When Woodford reached out via social media for interested participants, she was surprised to find that several veteran commentators wished to join in, among them, Stephania Bell, an ESPN analyst since 2008. “When I arrived at ESPN, it was the rare fantasy league that included female participants,” notes Bell. “The unspoken expectation was that they would be unskilled and therefore easier to defeat. However, many of these same women, aware of how they were perceived, made it their mission to learn and study as much as they could about the game which then translated to success. It also resulted in enjoyment of the game, which in turn led to continuing to play in subsequent years.”
This summer Bell became the first woman to receive the Matthew Berry “Game Changer” award. Concurrently, the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association inducted the first woman, Stacie Stern, into its Hall of Fame, where she joined 25 men. She is a senior vice president at Underdog Fantasy, where she is one of the leading voices lobbying in state capitals for fantasy sports.
“I know this seems insane,” says Matthew Berry, “but I wonder if there’s going to be an uptick in female fans because of the Taylor Swift effect. Taylor has a massive female audience. There are certainly a lot more women interested in the NFL and aware of the NFL because of Taylor Swift’s interests.”
Female fans make use of numerous social media platforms, among them Women of Fantasy Football, whose YouTube channel and @WomenOf_ FF postings on X, alerts female players to year-round drafts and high stakes contests. One of the founders, Faith Enes, explains, “Originally we had wanted to gather some women content creators but we recently decided that’s not what our role is. That’s not who we are. There are plenty of women content creators who are already creating for multiple sites. There doesn’t need to be just one specific place where women gather. It’s more important that women are in those places where it’s mostly men, and we just promote the crap out of that.”
The group’s motto: “Women of Fantasy Football exists to promote, support, and nurture women in sports so they know they can achieve what they dream. We believe that it’s what’s between your ears — not your legs — that matters most.”
