Last Updated on July 21, 2026 10:35 am by Jon Mosales | Published: July 21, 2026

Fantasy Football is one of the few areas of life where we voluntarily surround ourselves with people we might not like, hang out with or ever want to converse with at any point in our normal day-to-day lives.  You can’t choose who you work with and you can’t choose your family, but you absolutely can choose who you play a game with that often-time dominates your life and controls your mood from August to January.  Yet, how many people have a fantasy league where they are friends with everyone? is that even possible and if it was, is that even as fun as squaring off against your mortal enemy that you may have only met face-to-face once in passing.  One thing is for sure, fantasy sports does not bring out the best in everyone, if anyone.  It’s a cruel sport that leaves over 90% of the league unhappy each season and creates emotional scar tissue that never really heals.  Yet, hope springs eternal and it only takes one magical run where all the stars align for it to feel not only worth it, but as if your team was manifest destiny itself and that you may be the single greatest fantasy GM that ever lived.  Fantasy football and hubris go hand in hand, which is kind of like bragging about being great at winning the lottery, but luck is in the eye of the beholder and fantasy winners are never lucky, it’s only the losers who are cursed with a never-ending streak of bad luck.  A great fantasy league is ripe with a cast of characters, but only a truly degenerate league can bring out the worst in everyone.  One that grinds us down to our core self and reveals the haunting insecurities that we otherwise keep locked and buried away.  As someone who historically takes fantasy way too seriously, I feel I can confidently riff about the darker side of fantasy, a world devoid of Jedis and ripe with Sith Lords.

These are the seven fantasy GMs you meet in Hell:

•  1. Bearer of Bad News – This GM might be my least favorite.  They are the bearer of bad news, the fantasy angel of death and the one who never lets an opportunity to dampen someone’s day go by.   Anytime you get a message from this GM, you assume the worst.  They are the first to “inform” you that your starting QB – Lamar Jackson is out for weeks or that your RB1 – Saquon Barkley has concussion-like symptoms in the first quarter.  The only thing worse than getting a raven from this GM is getting a trade proposal as they try and pick the bones of your freshly injured squad.  This GM is a vulture that always foreshadows fantasy death and they think they are doing you a favor when they offer you a top-40 WR and a top-50RB for your just-injured top-5 WR.  “At least they are playing” is the echo cry of this GM as they are in a constant state of refreshing Twitter to find more bad news to pounce on.  This GM is the nightmare of fantasy and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn they have voodoo dolls of your best players filled needles and burn marks.  As terrible as this GM is, there is nothing sweeter than flipping the script and having the entire league message them when injury luck finally befalls their squad.

2. Kissed by the Gods – There is the constant battle in life whether it’s better to be lucky or good, but in fantasy the answer is clear.  You can be the most skillful GM in the world,  the one who navigates the draft like a seasoned pro and who artfully plucks future starters off the wire, but without luck on your side, it’s all for naught.  We all know it when we see it and there’s even empirical data to back it up.  The GM who is kissed by the gods is always in the bottom three in points scored against and is seemingly always skating downhill.  Anytime you look at their matchup late on Sunday, their opponent has less than a 100 points and the huge MNF game where they are going against an elite stack suddenly becomes engulfed in a monsoon.   Injuries are a problem that other teams deal with and a stud who is “questionable to play” on Sunday is just a euphemism for potential career-day pending.  The fantasy gods are petty and unforgiving, but fortunately they don’t always play favorites.  Nobody likes the GM who blames luck for every loss, but the only one worse is the one who ignores perpetually living at the end of a rainbow.  Eventually everyone gets to bask in the sun, with the wind at their backs and fate on the horizon.  It might not happen often, but a true great fantasy GM makes his own luck, whatever that means.

3. The Finger on the Button –  This is truly my least favorite GM.  The fantasy season can be treacherous enough trying to survive the war of attrition on your own team, let alone worrying about the self-sabotaging nature of some half-cocked GM who just wants to feel something this season.  Some GMs should never have the nuclear codes because they have no problem blowing up the league when their season goes awry.  They will be 2-7 and nearly mathematically eliminated from the playoffs and decide to trade the two best players on their team who are on a bye week just to have a 0.01% chance of making the playoffs.  There might not be honor amongst thieves, but there should be some dignity amongst the defeated.  There is a difference between throwing in the towel and drenching the towel in gasoline and burning down the neighborhood, but this pyro-GM doesn’t see the distinction.  There is nothing greater than a late-season rally and often-times, it’s the team that is peaking late that everyone fears, but sometimes it just isn’t meant to be.  There is nothing wrong with going all-in, but this isn’t poker and saying all you need is a chip and chair isn’t accurate because not all chips are the same.  Handing the first-place team Ja’Marr Chase and James Cook for DK Metcalf and Kenneth Walker just because they are playing this week while the other two are on a bye undermines not just the integrity of the league, but the competitive balance for everyone else still invested.  This is why Commissioners lock teams when they are eliminated from the playoffs, but we also need safeguards to protect GMs from themselves.  Of course if you are the GM on the receiving end of a lopsided trade, it’s just good business.

4. The Reverse Jinxer – There is nothing worse than a GM who refuses to accept reality, especially when it favors him. They could be up 50 points going into MNF and their opponent only has a kicker and a defense and goes, “Oh man, it’s a toss-up right now.”  This GM will never say anything good about his team or bad about yours.  They are superstitious bordering on paranoid and if you try and raise thier hand and claim them victorious before all the dust has settled, they might cut off their own arm first.  If they have Lamar Jackson going against the Raiders, “It’s going to be a big a Derrick Henry game”, if you’ve got Drake London going into SEA, it’s “What’s the single-game record for receiving yards in a game?”  This GM ignores probabilities, fades himself as a favorite and will never admit his matchup is going great until long after the games are over in fear of a stat correction.  Your text history is littered with him telling you “you’re a lock” and “I have no business winning this week.  This perpetual underdog is the hero of his own underdog story.  This GM is insufferable and actually just a fantasy cockroach.

5. The Revisionist Historian – History is written by the victors, but in fantasy, it’s apparently a fluid tale that can shift to fit whichever narrative works best.  This GM rarely makes the playoffs and often comes in last place, but god help us when they finally have a good draft.  All of a sudden, they are pondering being a consultant for the Bills or playing in a super-high stakes league next season.  This GM has irrational confidence and is undeterred by their previous failures.  There is no point in even opening their trade offers.  They will propose his Ja’Marr Chase for your Khalil Shakir and then cancel when Shakir has a good first-half.  This GM is impossible to make trades with because the value of their players are sky-high if they recently played well and if they didn’t, they just uses their entire career as a selling point.  Your Joe Burrow could have been over 300 passing yards five games in a row, but if he went for 200 last game, he’s in a slump.  There is no reasoning with a GM who has replaced rational thought with chaos and nonsense.  The only silver lining is when the hubris catches up to this GM and his empire crumbles in the first round of the playoffs.  You never want to celebrate your friends failures, but fantasy has diplomatic immunity towards civility and it’s completely acceptable to kick this GM when they are down 100 points by the end of the 1pm games.

6. The Terminator – In this era of AI, how do you beat a GM who never sleeps.  They make pickups at 3:01 AM, have the entire internet at their disposal and seem to always be a step ahead.  They claim not even to care about fantasy anymore, but yet they lead the league in moves and major news never happens without them making a move minutes, sometimes seconds later. This GM always has some weird APP that no one has ever heard of, some reverse-engineered algo that re-calculates potential points in a more accurate fashion and seem to always roster the backup RB when the stud RB goes down.  Fortune favors the prepared, but this is getting out of hand.  It’s hard enough to beat a league full of humans, how do you beat a GM who takes the human component out of the equation.  They don’t show up the draft and then brag about auto-picks, use generative AI to analyze trade favorability and use real-time syncing to suggest pick ups based on positional scarcity and team needs.  What happened to just drafting based on vibes and stacks?

7. The Worm – This GM is genuinely the worst and takes the plot of Rounders to a fault.  They can’t pass up an up edge whether that means trying to cheat, collude or just rub it in.  They will message you at 1:01 PM after lineups lock if a player in your starting lineup was ruled out late and you aren’t even playing him this week.  You find out he’s been messaging the last place team with terrible trade offers just to keep them “incentivized” or to “switch up the mojo” on their own squad.  They are “actually” doing the GM a favor, sure pal.  This GM can never be commissioner because they will switch up the settings hours before the draft and claim “they told everyone” or just assumed people would check.  This GM will veto any trade because they’re not involved and will tell you that you lost every trade regardless of what actually happened.  They are the scourge of fantasy, a gut-maggot without guts and someone who will self-sabotage the league if a vote doesn’t go their way or someone else tries to pull something shady.

Okay, here’s the rub.  I am all of these fantasy GMs.  All is fair in love, war and fantasy and sometimes you have swim in the mud in order to later soar with the angels.  I play dirty, fast and loose with the rules and will happily play the role of villain in any league I am in.  The only thing worse than waking up with 250 messages in your group chat about some shady trade, pickup or other nonsense after Week 1 is having zero messages.  If a league has no engagement from the people in it, does it even exist?  The one thing I have learned in all my years playing fantasy is there is no fantasy karma.  Luck comes for the just and unjust alike, so why not go down swinging.  Pretend every play is life or death, live in a world or perpetual hyperbole, throw out a bunch of mediocre trade offers an outlier weekend and always raise the hand of your opponent before the dust has settled.

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Jon Mosales

I have been crazy about fantasy sports even before I knew what it was.  Some people use stats as a tool and some use the eye test.  I like to believe I have the perfect blend of both and that extra special spider sense that separates me from the herd.  I have been nominated for one FSWA Football Article of the Year award and am just getting started.  My only fear is that I will become too good at fantasy football and have to retire early like Michael Jordan. You won’t see me leave my house without at least one of my (four) dogs and if you are lucky enough, you will catch me cruising top-down with all four in tow.

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