It’s Fantasy Football…Lighten Up!

There's no denying the gigantic popularity of fantasy sports leagues. The king of all fantasy leagues is football. Thousands and thousands of fans get to play GM, draft players, and put their football knowledge to the test all in the hopes of winning their respective league championships. Sometimes winning comes with a big cash prize, sometimes it's bragging rights. Some participants simply take part for the fun of it.

For others...it's deathly serious.

Detroit.cbslocal.com has a story about fantasy football fans who've taken things way too far.

Ever get death threats over a bad day at the office? Thanks to Twitter, it happens to NFL players on a regular basis.

But it’s not just their play on the field that makes fans fly over the edge — overwhelmingly, the nastiest comments come from how that play affects fans’ fantasy football leagues.

Some tweets go beyond wishing harm on players to actually threatening violence.

Let's take a look at a tweet directed at the Detroit Lions' QB Matthew Stafford and WR Calvin Johnson. An irate fan tells the two players: "I lost my fantasy playoff game by 4 damn points. That's four bullets for each of you b******."

That's fairly tame when you compare it to a tweet received by the New York Giants' Brandon Jacobs.

Back in October, New York Giants running back Brandon Jacobs received several menacing messages on Twitter, and the content concerned him enough to contact NFL security.

Jacobs exposed the fan for terrible remarks that included, “ON LIFE BRANDON IF YOU DON’T RUSH FOR 50 YARDS AND TWO TOUCHDOWNS TONIGHT ITS OVER FOR YOU AND YO FAMILY N—–.”

That tweet was followed by one that said, “FULFILL MY ORDERS STATED IN THE PREVIOUS TWEET OR THATS YO LIFE BRUH AND IM NOT PLAYING.”

The "fan" who sent that was subsequently called out by Jacobs. The fan tried the old chestnut "I was just joking!" Brandon Jacobs, however, wasn't about to accept that.

“When you say stuff like that and think it’s a joke, it’s a problem,” Jacobs said to the New York Daily News. “It’s a good thing he was where he was at that time.”

So, are players rattled by fan interactions like that? Not really. At least according to Reggie Bush.

“Well, they wouldn’t say it in person, that’s the thing,” Lions running back Reggie Bush said. “It’s easy to talk trash behind a computer, so that’s what it comes down to.”

Nate Burleson agrees:

“Most of those people that throw stuff out there like that are cowards in so many ways because they’re using a screen as a buffer between them and the real world,” Burleson said, “so it doesn’t bother me too much. They want to be able to brag to their friends and tell people that they got a rise out of an athlete and see us step outside our element and kind of I guess water down our own brand, our own names, but I just block it. If you say something too vulgar, I’m going to hit the block button, and that’s the end of that.”

More on the give-and-take between fantasy football GMs and NFL players can be found here, including some reasons why you might not want to bring up the topic of fantasy football with real NFL players.