Rich Hofmann: Our fantasy connection

YOU WOULD NOT consider watching an NFL game without the accompaniment of your cell phone. Neither would you even think about watching an entire game from beginning to end - unless it is the Eagles' game, or on Sunday and Monday and Thursday night, when you have no choice.

Your channel is the Red Zone. Your faithful guide is Scott Hanson. He provides you with the ammunition you need to disparage either your friends or yourself, depending upon the quality of your lineup that week (and, perhaps, the depth of your hangover). To be in a room together in front of a game is not to experience a cacophony of second-guessing the play calls, but bragging and bitching about your lineup instead.

You are about scoring plays, not final scores. You perversely root for your quarterback's team to fall behind so he will be forced to throw a little more. The Eagles are your favorite team (because that is blood), but your next favorite team is "Bowles and Foles in 2013," or whatever you call yourself. So Sunday is not just about football, but about you. And multitasking.

You know who you are. Now Rebecca Kissane wants to know you, too.

Kissane is an associate professor in the department of anthropology and sociology at Lafayette College. She also describes herself as someone who watches Philadelphia sports teams "religiously." Until now, her research mostly has been on topics related to poverty in America. But she has just launched a project to study fantasy sports - why you play, how it affects you as a fan and a friend, and how fixated you are on winning.

CLICK HERE to get to the survey.

Kissane is hoping it will provide a window into the fantasy soul.

In a email interview, she called the study "a departure for me, one that primarily emerged because of my own interest in sports and my observation that many of my friends and family members were playing fantasy sports.

"As a sociologist, I became interested in why this might be the case, how playing might affect 'fandom,' how playing may influence our social networks, and to what degree fantasy sports may reflect and/or reinforce social inequities."

A confession: I've never been a fantasy football guy. Mostly, it's because I was an Eagles beat reporter when the whole thing began to blow up more than 25 years ago. It was a time before cell phones and the Internet and official NFL injury reports. Any time spent researching something in the office after, say, Wednesday led to an endless stream of phone calls from people I didn't know asking if, say, Mike Quick was going to play on Sunday or if his knee was still bothering him. These people were beyond annoying. It was hard to shake that bias.

But the industry is gigantic now, as we all know. Kissane says research indicates as many as 34 million people in the United States participate in fantasy sports and spend $800 million on fantasy sports media prospects. We can only guess at how much money is being wagered.

Everybody knows how fundamentally it has altered the game-day experience for people watching on television. But Kissane is looking deeper than that. The survey has just begun, so the results are only preliminary.

"The demographics of those who have responded to the survey so far tend to mirror what fantasy sports trade associations report - that players are overwhelming male, middle- to upper-class, and white," she said. "I'm hoping the interviews and survey data might help shed some light on why this is the case."

Anti-intellectual/skeptical journalist alert: What's the point? What is there to study? My experience is that most of the people who play fantasy sports are men, and most of them use it as a way to keep in contact with their friends. What else do we need to know?

"Well, first, I'm interested in whether that indeed is the case [and certainly, I see it as a viable possibility]," Kissane said. "If indeed you are right and staying connected to friends is a main motivating factor for playing, this may be important for a few reasons. For one, there's lots of evidence that men's social networks are more limited than women's - if fantasy sports create a way for men independently to maintain ties with others, particularly as they age, then this might actually confer physical and mental health benefits."

More than that, though, she seems interested in this: Fantasy sports might defy the notion that Internet and television lead to isolation and disconnect among Americans.

"If fantasy sports - a 'hobby' largely dependent on computers and the Internet - are connecting people, I think that's interesting and warrants further investigation about what kinds of connections are being fostered," she said.

Besides, Kissane said, she just finds the topic interesting. She would, though. She says she plays in three leagues herself.