Fantasy football insurance the first exit on highway to Hell

This has already made the Blogfrica tour, but it requires further examination this morning, before you head to Vegas, Lake Winnipesaukee, Standard Wood-Paneled Rec Room World or wherever you do your Fantasy football draft.

Fantasy football insurance guarantees you a space in Hell.

Risk management for Brett Favre drafters? You might need more than insurance. (AP)

This would normally fall under Comrade Richard's purview, true, but as he is currently in part 3 of Tight End Mania, with an electronic white board that looks like the police flow chart of Avon Barksdale's drug crew in The Wire, we're helping him out here. But to restate:

Fantasy football insurance guarantees you a space in Hell.

And yes, someone really thought of this (unless of course it is an elaborate hoax we couldn't suss out, which is often true with many stupid ideas that have a kernel of plausibility). A couple of brokers at Intermarket Insurance Agency on Long Island have come up with a scheme to offer injury insurance in case your Fantasy player goes down and costs you the pool.

Now we'll repeat our earlier warning about this being a potential piefight even though the Wall Street Journal did the legwork on it, and when it comes to money the Wall Street Journal doesn't typically get scammed. Well, any more than the rest of us, anyway.

Let's say you take Brett Favre (hey, it was the Jager talking, we get it) as your quarterback. He gets hurt, what with being 126 years old and spending his past few offseasons playing Hamlet and all. If you have the coverage, the insurance company pays for your losses, the franchise fee and the pain and suffering from being branded a total and complete weenie by your family and friends.

And being branded a weenie should be the least of your concerns. If you really are trying to cover your costs ahead of time, you don't want to be in a Fantasy league at all. You just want to hang out with actual risk-takers without ever being one, which means you're not just a weenie, but a poser as well.

Not only that, you're pretty much a jerk. When finishing last because your roster was decimated doesn't cause you anguish because you're already indemnified, you are now in the position of rooting for athletes to get hurt, which takes most of the fun out of nearly any sporting endeavor. If you make a series of bad picks and your only way out is to hope for an ACL/MCL/PCL combo plate, you are a toad for wanting that to happen.

Put another way, say you take Todd Heap in the third round and four weeks into the season you're hoping he goes down in one because your team is in last (as it would be if you took Todd Heap in the third round) -- well, you deserve to finish last, and to pay full retail.

This isn't like a fire or a flood or any real disaster. This is you looking for moron insurance, and we don't even blame the two guys for thinking it up -- even though one of them, Henry Olszewski, came up with the idea after getting Brady'd last year, which I guess puts him in jeopardy of eternal damnation even for connecting the dots.

And if you want to take the fun out of bad luck by smugly looking at your pals and going, "No sweat. I'm covered," you deserve an eternity tied to a heated chair and staring into the disturbingly googly eyes of the Progressive Insurance woman. No, not the actress who plays her, a member of the Groundlings comedy troupe named Stephanie Courtney. The actual character.

The point, need we explain this to you, is to spend four months with your friends arguing about your judgments and ruining the competitive aspects of watching actual football by changing the objective to making sure your guys get yards and touchdowns. It's like betting against the line, only more narcissistic. It is to revel in your triumphs and to dance barefoot through their failures.

And vice versa.

If you take that fun out of it by eliminating your risk and the attendant shame, then you're not doing this for the sake of camaraderie, or the lure of alcohol, or even the joy of pretend sport. You're just a weasel, and being a weasel is rarely as rewarding as it seems.

Especially if Hell is what awaits you, and on the off-chance that God pays attention to such transgressions of sport and crypto-sport, you had better have a great story at the ready for whichever astral projection is manning the front desk that day.

I mean, if you really want Brett Favre, take him with pride and confidence. You will be laughed at, sure, but that's supposed to be part of the fun. Rob your friends of that, and well, you deserve Todd Heap in the third round. And for him to be healthy all year long.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.