Evangeline Bauerle is by all accounts a benevolent ruler. The two-time defending champion of She FF, an all-female fantasy football league, refuses to subject her vanquished foes to demeaning tasks or punishments, like the winners of many fantasy leagues do.
Instead, during a recent chat with league mate Hannah Purnell in a downtown Cincinnati café, Bauerle even let the former champion reconnect with the league trophy — a bedazzled crown adorned with a sparkly football on the front. In keeping with league tradition, Purnell held the crown during her two stints as champion, proudly displaying it on her living room mantle during those years.
To get it back, Purnell will have to usurp Bauerle’s team, the Mystic Farts, who have been a fixture atop the standings during the league’s eight-year run.
“I was also regular-season champion a couple of times,” Bauerle says, recalling seasons when her bid for the title fell short in the playoffs. “But that doesn’t count for anything, except for in my heart and in the screenshots I keep of the trophy case.”
These women are not alone in their pursuit of glory at the expense of their friends. The ongoing popularity of social leagues and the growth of DFS have helped swell the fantasy industry to more than $7 billion annually, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. More than 59 million people played fantasy sports in 2017 — more than double the 27 million who participated in 2009.
The She FF league is much like any other. There’s a Facebook group filled with smack talk, memes and lamentations on the latest player to blow up on someone’s bench. Each season begins with an old-school, in-person draft using color-coded stickers and a manual draft board. League commissioner Susan Fielding hosts a pool party for the draft every year, where the “10th-round plunge” — a group splash after shots of booze — takes place.
“Draft day is better than Christmas,” says Fielding, a 44-year-old wedding photographer who lives in a west side Cincinnati suburb. “That’s the best day of the year for me.”
For all that She FF has brought this group of women, however, the current season almost didn’t happen. Frustrated by the NFL’s leniency with players involved in domestic violence and worn out by the election of an accused serial grouper as president, the ladies of She FF nearly canceled the league this year.
It was exhausting, they say, to continually see the NFL come down easy on players guilty of committing violence against women. During a day and age when the NFL drops full-year bans on players who smoke weed, a team like their hometown Bengals drafted Joe Mixon despite the widely circulated video showing him punching a woman in the face.
“We are a league of women,” says Fielding, a former She FF champ herself. “And I think that was our initial problem: What is the message we’re putting out there as a group of women, even if it’s passively supporting an organization that so clearly disregards our safety as women?”
After considerable debate, the group chose not to abandon what had become a fun and supportive community where longtime friends share in their enjoyment of pro football and friendly competition. Instead, they decided to add a critical new provision to the league rules: No one is allowed to roster any player implicated in domestic violence.
“In times like these you kind of have to put your money where your mouth is, and it’s kind of hard to reconcile your feminist beliefs with an organization that clearly doesn’t value that,” Fielding says.
With all in favor — and an agreement to donate a portion of their league fees to a local nonprofit that helps domestic assault survivors — She FF set about creating a new fantasy league with parameters that allow conscientious women to feel OK about supporting the NFL.
• • •
Various contemptible acts have turned many fans away from the NFL in recent years — feminist and the non-political alike.
Owners’ demands for new taxpayer-funded stadiums and their willingness to de-root franchises in search of higher profits continue to turn off average fans. The heightened awareness of head injuries and tragic effects of a degenerative brain condition called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, have caused otherwise healthy players to retire early. The Trump vs. kneeling players drama is just the cherry on top for the league’s beleaguered PR department.
Still, violence against women is a particularly personal issue for the NFL’s female fans. According to the league, 45 percent of its TV viewers are women. The FSTA estimates that one in three fantasy sports participants are female. At the NFL’s second-annual Women’s Summit during Super Bowl week in February, an NFL marketing vice president said the league is looking for new ways to “bring in teen girl fans.”
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s failure to address issues of violence against women has nearly cost him his job. Goodell admitted missteps in his handling of the Ray Rice case, wherein he suspended the Ravens running back for only two games until after the infamous elevator video surfaced. Just one year later, the Dallas Cowboys signed free agent defensive end Greg Hardy to a contract, even though he had been accused of throwing his ex-girlfriend onto a futon piled with semiautomatic guns and choking and threatening to kill her.
Before his first game as a Cowboy — and after serving only a four-game suspension — Hardy told reporters he hoped to return to the field “guns blazin.” Fox Sports’ Katie Nolan lambasted both Hardy and the league in a video clip that went viral.
“How do you let that comment happen?” Nolan said. “Oh, I’m sorry, not just let it happen — publish it on the league official website endorsing it with your precious shield, which, oh, I noticed has a pink ribbon on it this month because you care about women. That’s cool, thanks.”
For the women of She FF in Cincinnati, it was the drafting of Mixon this past April that seemed like the final straw.
“The Bengals have always been kind of a big group of misfits anyway,” Fielding says, “but that kind of brought it all together.”
To understand where they’re coming from, consider that Adam “Pacman” Jones and numerous other Bengals have worn out the local courthouse in recent years. Jones was just arrested again in January after an altercation with a security guard during which Jones was “disorderly and combative” with police.
Pacman’s latest run-in with the law was nothing compared to the surveillance video that captured the 6-foot-1-inch, 226-pound Mixon during college laying out a woman with a vicious right cross, causing her to fall face-first into a table, breaking her jaw and other bones in her face. Here’s how Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis addressed the situation during a post-draft press conference:
“I don’t know who isn’t disgusted at what they saw,” Lewis said. “But that’s one day in the young man’s life. He’s had to live that since then. He will continue to have to live that. And he gets an opportunity to move forward and write a script from there on.”
The move drew heavy criticism from local media — a news station even called for a boycott of the team. Longtime Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty wrote that seeing Bengals all-time great Anthony Munoz announce the Mixon pick made him feel like crying.
“The Bengals have forfeited any and all rights to the word ‘character’ as a descriptive,” Daugherty wrote. “They have lost all remaining sympathy from anyone who still believed Cincinnati’s miscreants were no different than any other team’s miscreants.”
For She FF, the Mixon situation was just another in a long line of hypocrisies they’d witnessed during their years as football fans. And it made them question whether or not they should bother continuing the league.
Part II of this piece will be published tomorrow, Dec. 24, 2017.
A version of this story first appeared in Cincinnati CityBeat. Danny Cross is the editor of CityBeat and a contributor to Creativesports.com. Read “Cross Reference” in this space every Friday. Illustration by Julie Hill, photos by Hailey Bollinger.
