RANKED: The 10 Best (AKA Worst) Fantasy Football Punishments For Finishing Last Place In Your League

As somebody who's covered sports for a long time, and should know the ins and outs and intricacies of football well enough to be a stud at fantasy, I must confess I'm pretty bad at fantasy football. Every year I usually just join a random no-money league full of strangers. My competitors are probably in like five different leagues. I tend to start out badly, then when several of my rivals give up because they're doing better in other leagues, I make a charge in the second half of the season, backdoor my way into the playoffs, and let the chips fall where they may. I rarely finish outside the top four. This way, I can say that I'm good at fantasy football based on my results, but I put in a fraction of the effort other people do. It's pretty awesome. Only this year I'm in a legit league, and as is customary, I'm off to my typical 0-2 start. It's more out of solidarity with the Cincinnati Bengals than anything else. Or at least that's what I tell myself. Gosh OK. I just thought I'd give some background and setup to say: I might be finishing last in fantasy football this season for the first time ever. No last-place punishment has been decided upon, and frankly it's poor form to make a retroactive call on that if it's not specified at the outset! Especially if I finish last! Alrighty then. So I scoured some Reddit threads (here and here primarily) to see what all the roto sickos are doing out there to punish fantasy league cellar dwellers. No way to verify if they're all real, but we're talking theoretically here. I've taken my 10 favorites, aka worst punishments, and ranked them in descending order, with "best" meaning "most cruel and unusual." Hope you enjoy.

10. Blowup Doll Date

This is very, very embarrassing but among the worst punishments I found, it's the one I'd be most willing to do. Think about it. You only have to do it once. Most people could probably guess it's punishment for a fantasy league or some such thing. The only hassle is finding a place that'll accommodate you. It might've been far more difficult years ago. Now I think you just go your nearest downtown area with many restaurants in close proximity, and try your luck until somebody lets you in. Hustling around to multiple spots would be the only potential downside to this. I could handle the humiliation. If Ryan Gosling can make a long-term relationship work with his beloved Bianca in Lars and the Real Girl, I'm confident I could woo my blowup doll for a night before a bunch of strangers. I'd go in full character as Lars. Make a whole thing out of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNcs9DrKYRU

9. Busk For Money

The first post I read in this vein mandated that the loser dress as a mime and perform on the street until they made $100. One of the replies was for someone to play an instrument at the nearest sporting event until they made $50. That mime thing sounds awful and possibly impossible. The loser should have some say in what they do on the street to make money. Therefore, I like the idea of any kind of street performance until the loser makes, say, $35. If you can't mime and you try to mime, you're never gonna make enough money. If you can't play an instrument and you try to play an instrument, you're never gonna make enough money. We needed some sort of compromise here. I'm fairly confident I could sing and guitar my way to the milestone in an honest day's work, hence why this isn't too far down the list for me. The potential hang-ups would be the fact that I'm a pale Irish dude and would need to keep applying sunscreen if it were sunny. Then, what if it's a rainy day? Can I rain check, or do I have to busk and ruin my instrument while I get poured on? What I like most about this concept is there are infinite variations and twists you can add to it to make it more or less severe. If you didn't have any musical or performing talent at all, what would you do? Sounds like a fun topic for readers to sound off in the comments about. Shout out to the busking gawd, Glen Hansard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEwlsF2CiqA

8. Beer Mile

When something has its own Wikipedia page and you've never heard of it, you might be getting a little old. That's how I felt when it came to reading about this. The basic format from what Google tells me is you run a full mile at a track (four laps at 400m a pop), and you have to drink four full beers during the course of your jaunt. I recently had to do a sort of early-morning beer drinking situation mashed up with playing golf, which led me to play the worst golf of my life. Kind of depressing since it came a mere few weeks after my first hole-in-one and a round of 80. At least the beer mile sounds like less drawn-out suffering than that. If I'm gonna projectile vomit some of that booze out, at least it'll only happen once or twice and the worst of it will be over within the hour, right? I've clearly never done this and am not gonna make plans to. Unless, you know, it's a last-place fantasy football league penalty. Some elite athletes have taken the beer mile challenge personally. A dude managed a mile at around four minutes and 30 seconds despite the rapid alcohol consumption. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XtmwP6Dj5E

7. NFL Combine Workout

I could get confessional and a little TMI here, but long story short, I've been on something of a weight loss quest for the past seven months or so. Around the Super Bowl I was up over 200 pounds for the first time. Never thought I'd get that high. A slow, steady approach has led me to drop about 15 pounds, but I'm still not where I want to be. They call the NFL Combine the "Underwear Olympics" because world-class athletes really do dress up in underwear to make them as dynamic as fast as possible during career-altering drills. Going through the Combine gauntlet — 40-yard dash, bench pressing 225 pounds for reps, 20-yard shuttle, 60-yard shuttle, 3-cone drill, vertical leap, broad jump — in a public park would be plenty to get me red in the face. Criticizing athletes sure feels silly when I ponder the prospect of putting up anything remotely respectable in any of those drills. So there's that. Then, if I weren't happy with how I looked, and had to wear those infamous Spandex uniforms, it'd be even worse. This is an underrated punishment in my opinion. Maybe make the loser post their times and full results to social media to rub some salt in the wound. I also wouldn't hate for the loser to follow in Rich Eisen's footsteps and donate to charity. Eisen runs the 40-yard dash every year to benefit St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and makes all of us average Joes and Janes laugh in the process. https://twitter.com/The33rdTeamFB/status/1762240240109171180

6. Take the SAT or ACT Exam

This wins points for innovation. Never would've thought of this, namely because I wouldn't believe it to be possible: Multiple replies confirm that you can, in fact, do this somehow, but one of them said their fantasy loser was rejected by the school board because they were suspected of helping other students cheat on the test. Thus, the loser was prohibited from taking it again. The whole application process for taking the SAT/ACT is the real hook for this punishment to me. Yeah, I guess taking the test in a room full of high schoolers would cause some humiliation, but at that point, I'd be relishing the fact that I got in. Now, the results side of it? That could be ugly and sabotage my self-esteem. Maybe I'd just try to purposely fail. OK. So to guard against that, I'd stipulate that the loser must study beforehand and/or try their best to do well.

5. Open Mic Comedy Club

From a personal standpoint, if I had some time to take comedy classes, I could maybe string together a decent-enough tight five to not be terrible. Maybe the cruel fantasy league managers wouldn't allow such things, or I'd have to do the classes on the low. Whatever the case, this could be the ultimate disaster for any fantasy loser who doesn't love public speaking, being on stage, or isn't what you'd call the life of the party/terribly funny to begin with. Professional comedians bomb all the time. At least you could write your failure off as a daring stunt. Nevertheless, it's rough to crash and burn in front of anyone. I've bombed my fair share of acting auditions. It doesn't feel great! Blowing a stand-up set sounds similarly demoralizing. I'll let you leave this section on a positive note with the best "first stand-up comedy attempt" story ever told. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmbpagijVkk

4.  Calendar Photo Shoot

Twelve months in the year. Most fantasy football leagues are 12 teams. What a creative way to inflict pain on a last-place loser, eh? Scheduling the photo shoot sounds exhausting, never mind picking out the proper outfits, or worse yet, having them chosen for you. What if I had to go on there in a set of bikinis or something? No thank you. The more I think about this one, the more awful it seems.

3. The 24-Hour Challenge

A while back I covered this brave fellow who took on a gauntlet of McDonald's food that had to be consumed within 24 hours. He couldn't leave the restaurant before he was finished. It was painful to watch. https://twitter.com/WhiskeyRiff/status/1802086415058030969 One of the replies caught my eye, though, and has popped up multiple times in various iterations on Reddit: https://twitter.com/Real_Deal_CNeal/status/1802110457831895390 Whether it's an endless, relentless onslaught of Waffle House waffles, or gut bomb fast food that'd be the epitome of the, "My stomach is writing checks that my a** can't cash!" phenomenon, I would stay as far away from this punishment as possible. You do get time knocked off from the 24-hour mark when you finish a waffle. For the McDonald's one, there was a whole value chart that knocked off varying chunks of time based on what you ate. Any sort of one-sitting binge eating is just awful, be it McDonald's, Waffle House or any other chain in that realm. That being said... showing up to a bar at 6am sounds fun... sorta? https://twitter.com/Dalton_Kates/status/1832406197447881027

2. Make "Content Creator Posts" Daily For A Month

Unless you're a legit personal trainer, a professional in the fitness field, or part of your personal brand is to be beautiful and in elite shape — that's quite a wide range of occupations — the motivations behind any given IG fitness account are suspicious to me. The initial write-up for this section got a little dark, so just confining this to myself, nothing sounds worse to me than documenting my personal fitness on social media for anyone to see. Posting on social media in and of itself is an odd thing. Many of us feel required to do so to "stay current" or whatever. I don't know. I'm sure studies will come out decades from now saying how social media turned our brains to complete rot. But anyway, ick. Daily posts about my own fitness. All my fellow fantasy players spreading the word about it. Nightmare fuel! Like, could I just go on a mile run every day and post the screen grab of the route I took, with the time, calories burned, and call it a day? Then maybe I could get by for a month. I've seen other punishments where they have to create a TikTok account and post every day for a month. What they post is up to the rest of the league... brutal. https://twitter.com/LoechnerNFL/status/1745094935257235871

1. Brazilian Wax

My mind races to 40-Year-Old Virgin and Steve Carell's infamous chest-waxing scene that was 100% real. Getting that done below the belt? Ooooooooooof. I have to shout out the Redditor who coined the term, "The Manzilian." Brilliant, mate. Absolutely brilliant. If I had to do this, I'd be manscaping my lower region in advance so that there wouldn't be as much hair to rip free. At least I think that'd be the strategy. Can't imagine that'd make it worse, would it? Going to just live in blissful ignorance about this, praying that the day never comes. The mere possibility of this is reason enough to hammer the waiver wire, consume days' worth of fantasy content each year, and lock the hell in on every draft to not finish last in my fantasy football league. Lest I meet a fate like Steve's... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CTSUjT4Xuk