How My Dogs Learned To Win By Losing

  • Last Updated on December 22, 2025 2:16 pm by Jon Mosales | Published: December 22, 2025

     

    The best part about watching football is its reliability, that no matter what else is going on in my world, at 1pm EST I can sit down and forget/ignore everything else.  As someone who tends to err on the side of chaos, the routine of the NFL has been a blessing as I age.  As I continue to accrue life’s wisdom, the daily grip fantasy football has over me has gradually subsided, but on Sundays I am often at its mercy.   I tell you this because my dogs happiness has become intertwined with my fantasy successes and more often failures.  To that end, they have learned just how much they have at stake with that early slate of games is to an enjoyable Sunday.

    To quickly set the stage, I like to get everything out of the way before the 1pm games start.  Ideally, I have woken up early, let the dogs out, scanned the internet for anything noteworthy, completed a pre-check of my lineups, hosted a podcast, wrote some blurbs and gone for a bike ride.  These are my non-negotiables.   So, in a perfect world, the only thing I have left to do that doesn’t involve fantasy football is walk my dogs at some point during the day.  While I may have become a creature of routine, they are now slaves to it.  They have discovered that Sunday is special and the length of their walk is directly tied to how my fantasy teams are performing that week.

    When I say dogs, I don’t mean two.  I now have four, small furry companions that consume most of my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  There is Molly, who is more of a cat than a dog.  She doesn’t play fetch and I’m afraid the game ain’t in her no more, if it ever was.  Next is Princess Leia, who reminds me of Ray Lewis insomuch if you get between her and a football that squeaks, you better be willing to die for that toy.  Then there is Loki, who is my actual dog, not inherited and she is obsessed with all sports.  As long as there is a ball, she’s game.   Monkey in the middle is her preferred sporting activity, but her quirk is she has to win at all costs.  She’s never met a neutral zone she won’t infract and much like the Chiefs, she always makes sure the ref (aka me) is on her side in order to get a proper head start.  Last, but not least is the pricey free agent acquisition Mini, who is still a puppy and her arrival completely rearranged the natural order of things.  Mini is your classic diva WR who can run go-routes for days but still plays for the love of the game.  They are rarely ever all aligned or present in the same room, but if someone drops the W word without spelling it out in code, the beacons of Gondor get lit and it becomes a frenzy.

    To bring this full circle. When the early slate is going well, it imbues a sense of confidence in you that your fantasy team is one of destiny and the games are now merely a formality.  We all know this not to be true, but hubris is an intoxicating drug.  In the words of Logan Roy “If we’re good, we’re good.”   The peak walk time is right after the early slate is done, as it allows me to decompress before jumping into the afternoon games.  It’s gotten to the point that when Chris Hansen says “Welcome to the witching hour”, Mini starts to bark and anticipation starts to build.

    This is the part where I’m kind of the ass hole.  The better my teams are doing, the more I want to consume and sadly the shorter the walk ends up being, but what they have learned is that the inverse is also true.  So, when Nico Collins is streaking unabated down the sideline and I’m fist pumping while calculating fantasy points in my head, the dogs shrink into their pillows and my jubilee falls on deaf ears.  But when Ken Walker is losing TDs to Zach Charbonnett , the Bills aren’t handing the ball to James Cook and somehow I’m playing against a perpetually wide open Puka Nacua, you haven’t seen four happier, drooling mutts in your entire life.  In some sort of Pavlovian Frankenstein, my dogs learned to feed off the vibes and unfortunately, they’ve discovered that when my teams are losing, my desire to touch grass, bask in the sun and ignore the NFL goes up exponentially.   It only seems natural that a healthy dose of reality is the best cure for a disappointing world of fantasy, but for my dogs, I swear they cling to those 1pm results as if it were a matter of life or death.

    Before you accuse me of being a selfish dog dad, walk a mile in my shoes.  Walking four dogs at once is more art than science and just getting out the door can be its own battle royal.  Nobody wants to walk straight and the more I yell “Don’t cross the streams”, the more I become the living embodiment of an AT-AT on Hoth about to go down for the count.  Each dog has their own style and it reminds of the different types of fantasy GMs.  Leia only cares about the walk back.  She’s all destination and no journey.  She’s the GM who drafts injured players at “value” and brags about how many expected fantasy points they are going to score in Week 15.  She doesn’t realize she has to get there first and drafting injured players looks great until your healthy players also get hurt and you’re just getting creamed each week.  Molly is the opposite, she’s all business and never breaks stride, stops to sniff or even pee.  She’s the GM you have to worry about.  She doesn’t reach for players and happily will take all the older RBs who fall to her in mid-to-late rounds.  Her team might not look imposing after the draft, but then you play her in Week 9, she’s got a deep bench and everyone is scoring at least 15 fantasy points.  Mini has new fantasy GM syndrome and everything that just happened is bound to happen again.  When Derrick Henry struggles one week, she claims he’s washed and tries to trade him for whichever rookie WR just had a mini-breakout.  Mini can’t contemplate a world 15 minutes from now and as a fantasy GM, it’s always smarter to think long term than to overreact to the moment.  Loki is curious bordering on paranoid.  She has to sniff every pee and then leave her own mark.  It can be exhausting, but knowledge is power.  She is the GM who lives the game.  She knows who she is playing three weeks from now, what their wavier priority is and that she should trade Rico Dowdle while he’s out and before Chuba Hubard comes back.  She doesn’t get too excited because she has seen it all before and knows that if she tries to sprint the marathon, she’s going to have to take an Uber home.

    There is nothing more infuriating than watching the percentage of victory slowly slip through your fingers as all your players are done and your lead shrinks by one first down after another.  The thing we often forget is that fantasy football is about the journey, not the destination and it’s about basking in that magic moment when the universe aligns and start TDs are flooding in.  It’s at that point it becomes clear that I am going to be glued to the couch and the dogs are going to get a brisk lap around the neighborhood and maybe some backyard fetch at halftime.  That euphoria rarely lasts and it’s usually it’s around the precise moment my teams are flying too close to that sun when the music stops and brick-by-brick my empire began to crumble.  I swear one time when the announcers ruled Nico Collins out with a hamstring injury, I saw Loki do a paw pump.  Then Joe Flacco turned into Joe Montana and the hits kept coming.  That week, we were out the door before the clock struck four and I had enough treats and poo bags to last a lifetime.  That was the longest walk of our season and I swear we passed the same bank so many times, the tellers thought we were casing the place.  By the end of it, I was carrying Molly, while Mini channeled her inner-Bane and wondered what would break first, my spirit or my body.  The crazy part was I ended up winning the week and my melt down became just another shared experience between me and my dogs.

    I’m not sure I want to live in a world where my dogs and I are divided on such an important issue.  I’m not willing to compromise on either my happiness or the dogs and it doesn’t seem right that in order for them to win, I must lose.  I spent days thinking how to reverse engineer their response stimuli and even thought about faking my emotions next season, but they would see right through that charade.  I explored the radical concept of acting like a normal person who doesn’t have tempter tantrums when his fake teams fail to live up to his unrealistic expectations.  How could I be outmaneuvered by a bunch animals who lick their own butts?  It wasn’t until I was watching Max Crosby with his three dogs, that I had my eureka moment.   I don’t need some sort of behavioral rehabilitation when I can simply buy their love.  Whenever anyone on my team scores, my dogs score, but in this case TDs are a euphemism for treats.  You get a treat.  No, you get a treat, everyone gets treats.  I’m confident by Week 2, everyone will be bought in and when black Sunday hits and there aren’t any TDs in the early slate, we can all commiserate together on the kind of epic walk where you get lost and found at the same time.

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    December 22, 2025, 1:56 pm