The draft was set to begin last week when Jeff Killian reminded the members of his fantasy football league that he could fax them a rule book if they needed a copy. A hand went up.
“Umm,” Jack DeStefano, 32, said. “I don’t have a fax machine.”
Of course. Killian, 63, meant he would email the seven-page document. That’s what happens when you’re the commissioner of a fantasy league that started in 1986.
The league began after someone went to California on business and returned to the AT&T office near the King of Prussia Mall with a stack of papers detailing something called “Fantasy Football.”
They found eight guys, rented a room at a hall in Chester County, and launched the Vince Lombardi Memorial Football League. The league members faxed their lineups on Friday night to the commissioner and then waited until Tuesday to see how their team performed.
It seems harder every year to find someone who doesn’t play fantasy football as it is estimated that 40 million people will play this season. But it’s hard to find a fantasy league that’s been around as long as the VLMFL where players once scoured newspaper box scores to tabulate their stats long before smartphones relay that information in real time.
The game was a mystery then — “People said ‘Fantasy what?’,” original leaguemate Ken Leidheiser, 69, said — but the VLMFL figured it out. They created their own rules and have stayed true to them for 40 seasons.
Two original members are still in the league while the majority of the players have been involved since the late 1980s or early 1990s. They drafted Bo Jackson, Dan Marino, and Randall Cunningham and won championships with the Bears defense.
“I can still remember watching a game years ago on Monday Night Football where Jerry Rice caught a touchdown so I could beat my big rival,” said 77-year-old Lee Bye, who retired from the VLMFL after 30 seasons and seven championships for the Bye Boys. “That still sticks with me after all these years. Here it is after midnight and I’m jumping around in my basement.”
Some teams are now managed by second-generation fantasy footballers as the 60-something OGs have infused the league with their number-crunching sons.
And everyone is within six degrees of AT&T, where inaugural champ Paul DeStefano, 68, still works.
“I’m not in it for the money,” said DeStefano, who manages the five-time champion Fabulous Thunderbirds with his son Matt and once staged a parade down his street after winning it all. “It’s the camaraderie. It’s sitting up at night for Sunday Night Football and my wife says, ‘Why are you still up?’ I go, ‘Because I need 5 more yards from my running back and I have to watch the game until the end.’ You think you can control it. The next morning, I’ll be exhausted at work going, ‘Why the hell did I stay up for the game?’”
The old days
It’s easy now to stay informed as there are websites, podcasts, TV shows, and social media accounts dedicated to fantasy football. The game is impossible to ignore. But in the early days, information was the great separator between the VLMFL’s Have and Have Nots.
They read NFL previews in Sports Illustrated, studied newspaper articles, and looked anywhere for information that is now seemingly everywhere. Fantasy magazines, which started printing in the late 1980s, were gold. It was survival.
One leaguemate once used his first-round pick on Bills running back Robb Riddick, only to be told that he suffered a serious knee injury days earlier. Better luck next year.
“We were scrambling,” DeStefano said. “We were literally going through pages trying to figure out who’s a guy we need. Some guys were football savvy and some guys wanted to be in because they wanted to be a part of what we were doing. Fourth-round came, they didn’t know anybody and they’d be asking us for a running back. Of course, we didn’t help.”
To add a player during the season, a leaguemate had to call Greg Swerdlow’s apartment in Bedminster, N.J., where the commissioner changed the greeting of his answering machine to say it was the “VLMFL Transaction Hotline.” They left their waiver claims after the beep as the moves had to be recorded by Friday at 5 p.m.
The commissioner listened to his voicemails, wrote down everyone’s adds, and then determined who had priority if two teams left messages claiming the same guy. They rang Swerdlow’s apartment a second time as he changed his voicemail greeting to a list of transactions while his roommate’s yellow lab barked in the background.
“So the tradition was you would get your transactions through a dog barking,” said Swerdlow, 61.
The opposing players faxed their starters to Swerdlow by 8 p.m. on Friday and then sent them to their opponent as if they were baseball managers exchanging lineup cards. They spent Sunday looking for glimpses of their players long before Sunday Ticket and RedZone allowed them to see it all. They’d see a highlight on the 6 p.m. news or a touchdown catch on a postgame show.
But there was no way to know for sure if you won until you opened the newspaper on Monday morning. They agreed that USA Today would be their paper of record as it used the Elias Sports Bureau for statistics while The Inquirer — which many had delivered to their home — did not.
So they counted their own scores and then waited for Swerdlow, who created a computer program to input scores, to fax over the official tallies.
“You had to be careful at the office not to leave stuff on the fax machine in case your boss saw it,” Leidheiser said.
Their own rules
Killian, the current commissioner, joined the league in 1989 after hearing about it at DeStefano’s Christmas party. Killian played fantasy baseball and already spent his Sundays watching football. He was in.
And then he watched as the first eight selections in the VLMFL draft were quarterbacks. Killian panicked.
“So we drafted a good NFL quarterback, not a fantasy QB,” Killian said. “We drafted a great NFL quarterback, but he sucked in fantasy. We drafted Phil Simms. I still own the worst record in the history of the league: 1-15. I didn’t win until Week 10.”
But Killian was undeterred. He dug in and learned the league’s scoring system, which has been fine-tuned over the years but remains true to the original idea: big plays are king. A 60-yard interception return for a TD is worth 26 points. A 50-yard rushing TD is worth 14 while a goal-line plunge is worth just three.
Each team starts a quarterback, two running backs and two receivers along with a defense and kicker. Tight ends count as receivers and there is no “flex” spot.
It’s not a dynasty league and the 12-team draft is not an auction. VLMFL keeps it old school, so much that you wonder if they’ll add fullbacks next year. Kickers and defenses are more valuable in the VLMFL than most other leagues, which is why big-footed Brandon Aubrey of the Cowboys went in the fourth round.
“It’s different from every other league,” Swerdlow said. “People will say, ‘You’ve been in a league since when?’ Then you tell them about the rules. ‘Those rules are crazy.’ Yeah, we didn’t have all of society’s model to build our league off.”
The league season runs the entire NFL regular season with the champion being the first-place team after Week 17. The VLMFL, unlike most leagues, does not do a playoff to crown a champ.
The trophy — a 30-inch wood base topped with a gold football player — arrived in the early 1990s and a new winner is inscribed each year. It had to be repaired twice and there’s still some magic marker marks on the base left years ago by someone’s kid. Like the league, the trophy keeps going.
“I think it was Matt, Paul’s son,” Killian said. “But we’re not sure.”
Draft night
The league that held its first draft 40 years ago at the old Mile Post Inn gathered last Friday at the Chester Valley Golf Club in Malvern. They golfed in the afternoon and then had dinner in a private room before drafting. Each team had their own table with laptops open and papers spread as if they were NFL GMs.
“This is the best day of the year,” said 67-year-old Jeffrey Jaskol, who drafted for his team, The Lost Tribe, with his sons Andrew and Adam.
Leaguemates were heckled for drafting Cowboys and someone cursed when Chargers QB Justin Herbert was snagged. Titans running back Tony Pollard — “I have to go way down on my list,” someone shouted — and Commanders QB Jayden Daniels — “Are you kidding me,” another yelled — were met with jeers.
“We only see each other one night a year. Some of these guys I see once or twice a year,” Leidheiser said. “It’s a once-a-year meeting. I do it just for the competitive fun of it. Plus it’s like a fraternity of guys. We’ve known each other for more than 30 years.”
Lee said he used to worry every year that someone in his family would die and force him to miss draft night. That’s how much he loved the barbs they traded. He kept the yapping going one season when he learned other VLMFLers were attending the same Eagles game. He got in early, tracked down their seats and left them notes reminding them that he was the champ.
“They’d get a hot dog and come back to that,” Lee said. “The camaraderie was the thing that was so much fun. It built more and more every year.”
Fantasy football, which is thought to have been created in 1962 by an Oakland Raiders owner, was still a foreign concept in 1986, but Leidheiser was sold because it reminded him of the rosters he built in beer-league softball in Wayne. He enjoyed playing GM and was soon hooked.
But now he says he sits back at the draft and follows the lead of his son Korey, a 30-year-old who works in data analytics. The results have never been better, the dad said.
“We were in college and we realized most of these guys were doing it by hand and my brother and I could look up stats online,” said Korey, whose brother Kyle is now running his own squad. “It’s all numbers, right? It just depends on what you’re adding up.”
The best part about the league, Jaskol said, was how it evolved over the years to include so many kids of the old-timers. Then his two sons started teasing him for having a fancy for past-their-prime running backs and overdrafting Eagles.
“And I said I loved this,” Jaskol said.
The league donated money one year to a leaguemate whose house burned down and toasted a longtime member after he died in 2019. The league stays connected through an email chain — “Sage Advice,” Killian wrote in a subject line last week — and meets after the season for another night of smack talk. It’s what keeps the league going after 40 seasons.
The VLMFL started before fantasy football became mainstream and the game that everyone now plays once seemed to belong to the guys who traced their league back to an AT&T office.
People got married, had kids, switched jobs, and moved away. So much has changed in their lives since 1986, but the VLMFL feels mostly the same when the guys gather to draft at the end of every summer. That’s what keeps them coming back. The old fantasy league became more than just a league. But you no longer need a fax machine to play.
“It’s really cool how 70% goes back over 30 years. That’s what makes it fun. You’re seeing the same people and you’re telling the same jokes,” Killian said. “I play about 100 rounds of golf a year. But I won’t play on a Sunday again until the Super Bowl is over.
“I don’t care if someone invites me to Merion this fall. I won’t go on a Sunday. My buddies laugh at me all the time and say, ‘I can’t believe you’re going to sit at home and watch football all day and it’s going to be 80 degrees and sunny.’ Have fun.”
