Presumably, it’s to make sure the guy they’re drafting is still alive. And, to avoid the situation where, one year in a fantasy football league I was in, someone drafted Christian Okoye two years after he retired.
oo that’d be an interesting fantasy team. You have to draft retired players and specify what year they’re playing for you. Once you draft a player nobody else can draft him. and then each week you use the stats from their week the year you drafted. holy crap would that make for some interesting scores.
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Barry, 1997. Picking a running back was pretty easy.
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There were definitely some fantasy draft mixups when the Bears had a RB named Adrian Peterson and the Giants had a WR named Steve Smith. The Giants Steve Smith turned in one big season for anybody that got stuck with him instead of the Panthers Steve Smith. He actually had a better year than “the real” Steve Smith.
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Well Okoye was pretty awesome. 
The most shocking thing to me is that you were playing fantasy football in the early 90’s! I didn’t even know fantasy football was a thing until the internet era.
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It was all done by hand on paper. Obviously the internet made it much more accessible.
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I think it was the Patriots who drafted a recently deceased player in the later rounds back in the 90s.
Shit, that must have taken forever. Especially if leagues were still doing defensive scoring and decimal point scoring.
And waiver claims, good lord.
it was nuts. I ran two leagues and basically had to get like a usatoday or something. but the leagues I ran were basic scoring leagues, no yardage I didn’t want that friggin nightmare. I mean I could sit and put in scores while watching the lions games and watching score alerts, etc.
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Back then, it was publications like the Sporting News and Pro Football Weekly which were two of the main sources of fantasy draft info.
We did fantasy baseball in the '80s but nothing like today
You drafted a team, then no transactions. Roto style, not H2H. End of the year your best 9 fielding players and best 8 pitchers made your final team.
One year I did stats for the league. Would send out monthly updates. Took me about a weekend with a Sporting News (or The National) each time.
Its funny how much people complain (including myself) how much they have to do these days. But in reality life is SO much more convenient than it was years ago. I think about how getting a paycheck used to be a time commitment. Right now my money just magically shows up every Friday morning. If I want to go on a long weekend but need money from my check, its right there with the swipe of a debit card whether I am in town Friday or not.
Then I look back on some trips my family took when I was younger. My dad got paid on Friday’s. He had to go into work and “grab his check.” Then he had to get to the bank and cash the check. So when we took road trips he either had to already have the money we needed for the trip, or we had to wait around until paychecks were issued and the banks were open so he could cash his check and we could hit the road.