In MLB clubhouses, September hype is building … for fantasy football
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Tim Kurkjian, ESPN Senior Writer
The energy in the clubhouses for Friday night’s game between the Tampa Bay Rays and Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards was unmistakable.
It was the same intensity that existed in every baseball clubhouse in the major leagues that day — at Fenway, Wrigley, Dodger Stadium. Yes, it’s September, it’s the stretch run, with great pennant races, but this excitement was different because Thursday night, the NFL season opened with the Kansas City Chiefs‘ 27-20 win over the Baltimore Ravens. That means fantasy football is back.
“Guys came in the clubhouse today and they were already running their mouths about last night … and there was only one game — one game,” Orioles catcher James McCann said. “After the first weekend of fantasy, every baseball clubhouse will be bedlam.”
“Monday will be unreal,” said Orioles pitcher Zach Eflin. “Unreal.”
Rays infielder Taylor Walls, who Eflin, a former teammate, lovingly calls “a lunatic” about fantasy football, says it is “an event. I love it because it allows me to — sorry for my language — to talk s—, which I love to do. It allows you to look at a teammate and say, ‘How can you be such an idiot?’ Motor [Rays hitting coach Chad Mottola] had three playmakers from the Ravens on his team last night, and we were all over him today, like, ‘How could you play a running back, wide receiver and a tight end on the same team?’ But fantasy football is all about camaraderie, it’s about bringing a spark to the end of the season. It’s an escape. It’s about staying in the loop with guys even after the season ends.”
This goes on in most clubhouses around the major leagues. The Arizona Diamondbacks determined the order of their fantasy draft by placing each team’s fantasy league name on 12 different baseballs: Whichever manager Torey Lovullo hit the farthest in batting practice got the No. 1 pick, second farthest got No. 2, etc. The Oakland A’s put baseballs with team names on the top of the Coliseum, and players from each fantasy team threw the balls from the roof to targets on the field — closest to the target got the No. 1 pick. The Boston Red Sox hit golf balls off the top of the Green Monster: closest to the pin picked first.
“We just picked out of the hat,” Walls said. “And it was still so much fun.”
Every major league team holds its fantasy league draft as a group, which they note is great for team building approaching a stretch run.
“Ours was so good,” Eflin said. “Pizza, beer and lots of trash talk. Lots of ‘What a reach!'”
The Rays held their 12-team draft when they were in Los Angeles at the end of August.
“It was very relaxed; I spent most of the time looking quietly at my phone,” Rays outfielder Josh Lowe said. “Then there was Motor. He had his pen and paper out, he had his spreadsheets laid out on all the tables as he prepared to take players who were five or six years past their prime.”
“We had 20 guys at ours, it was so good for team chemistry,” Orioles pitcher Danny Coulombe said. “We had guys trying to talk trades as soon as the draft finished. I looked at a few of them and said, ‘I guess you’re not happy with who you drafted, I’m happy with mine.'”
Rays pitcher Ryan Pepiot, during his rookie season with the Dodgers last year, didn’t have a fantasy team but still played a role on draft day.
“I didn’t participate, but they had me read the first-round picks, but they said I took too long, so they replaced me,” he said. “They had me start the proceedings by singing the national anthem. I can’t sing at all. It was more like I just spoke the national anthem. But I participated this year. My teammate is one of our clubhouse guys. I gave him the reins. He was up at 11 o’clock in the East on his computer while we were out West. He put in more effort than me.”
No one puts in more effort than Walls, say his teammates.
“He is a lunatic in a good way; he carries around a fantasy football notebook with him, and I’m sure he has a big white board at his house to track transactions,” said Rays second baseman Brandon Lowe. “He’s really good at his because he really does his homework.”
“That’s not true!” Walls said, laughing. “Guys came to the draft with notebooks and IPads. I winged it!”
Walls was Josh Lowe’s fantasy teammate last year, but each forgot to make a key transaction late during the playoffs, and they lost in the semifinals. So they went out on their own this year. Lowe got the No. 1 pick this year; Walls had it but traded down to No. 3.
“I had inside information on what he was going to do,” Walls said, smiling. “I fleeced him a little bit.”
Lowe said: “When we were general manager and assistant general manager last year, we fleeced a lot of guys. There were times that I had to talk him off the ledge from making another trade. Finally, I told him, ‘Dude, just let the players play.'”
This year, the Orioles also paired up players, instead of each player having his own team.
“I am the owner of the team this year because the last few years haven’t gone very well,” Eflin said, smiling. “I’m with Mitch [Plassmeyer, a pitching instructor] and [pitching coach Drew French]. They make all the player decisions. We have a club president and general manager. I am now just a special assistant.”
According to Coulombe, teammate and fellow reliever Craig Kimbrel has more of a hands-off approach to fantasy.
“Craig said he doesn’t know the players, he’ll just be a silent partner who offers moral support,” Coulombe said. “I asked [Orioles general manager] Mike Elias if he wanted to be our GM, and he said he had a real major league team to run.”
McCann is teammates with outfielder Austin Slater.
“With the Mets, Mark Canha and I won our fantasy league,” McCann said. “But last year didn’t go well. I drafted the All-Injured Team.”
Among the top names of fantasy teams among the Rays and Orioles this year:
“We wanted to play off the [clear] mask that I wear when I catch,” McCann said. “So we’re The Masked Bandits. But if we lose for a couple of weeks, I’m sure we will change.”
“We are The Ef Shack,” Eflin said. “I don’t know what that means.”
“I am ‘The Real Slim Shady’ because I have Joe Burrow, and he has gray hair,” Walls said.
“I am JLowe,” Lowe said. “If I start to lose, I’m sure I will change it.”
“Our team is Love Thy Nabers because we drafted [Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers],” Pepiot said.
Each MLB team has a commissioner; the Rays’ is pitcher Kevin Kelly.
“[Teammate] Pete Fairbanks gave me the job last year because I was a rookie, he just gave me some pens and paper and asked me to go around the room and see who wants to play,” Kelly said, smiling. “I don’t do much. I just collect the money. Technically, all transactions have to go through me. I don’t have a team in the league. That would be a conflict of interest. That’s another reason they made me commissioner.”
The Orioles’ commissioner is Ryan Klimek, a statistical analyst.
“His team won last year,” Coulombe said, adding with a laugh: “We’re not happy that he is still the commissioner.”
And though a lot of players monitor fantasy football very closely — “a lot of the guys come to me during a game and say, ‘Go check the score, go check the score,'” said Pepiot of days when he’s not playing — the fantasy football craze is all for fun.
“We play 162 games in 180-some days, sometimes you have to get outside of the game and enjoy something else,” Lowe said.
“It really brings the clubhouse together,” McCann said. “We are heading toward playoff time, we need to take our minds off the things that are really important. I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes, you have to make it about something different. It’s like binge watching a new show, sometimes you have to just open a new head space. That’s what it does.”
Though the Rays have money at stake — between $200 and $1,000 — Walls said, “It’s not about the money, it’s about the competition, it’s about bragging rights.”
The competition in baseball clubhouses just got more intense. Football is here.
“I had dinner with my mom the other night and I told her right now is the best time of year,” McCann said. “It’s September baseball. The playoffs are ahead. And football has started.”
Between Archie, Peyton, Eli, and now, Arch, the Mannings have been a part of America’s football consciousness for nearly 60 years. Only one of the family’s college football rivalries, however, has included a spelling test, years of shade, and has spanned generations.
Within that lore, holding a spot that goes beyond merely an opponent, are the Florida Gators. First as haters-in-chief, then as part of the redemptive end to the family’s first college football run, Florida was there.
While Archie Manning never played Florida in three seasons with the Ole Miss Rebels from 1968-70, the Mannings are 2-3 as starters against the Gators. On Saturday, Texas Longhorns QB Arch Manning, with a lot of family history behind him, takes his turn in The Swamp (3:30 ET, ESPN).
It will be the next entry in what was once a salty family vs. school rivalry that featured an all-time hater.
A brief history lesson
The current Cheez-It Citrus Bowl was previously the Capital One Bowl and, before that, just the Florida Citrus Bowl. While the Orlando-based game annually hosted top-10 teams and was where the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets beat the Nebraska Cornhuskers to earn a share of the 1990 national title, it is a tier under the major bowl games. Secondly, this Manning-Florida rivalry began in the era before the BCS, let alone the College Football Playoff and the nascent days of conference championship games. So, one loss could doom a season, or at the least, keep a team from a conference title and a major bowl.
Arch Manning might already know this, but it’s important to the lore of this rivalry and will make sense later.
The visor’s world
Peyton Manning’s recruitment was a big deal. His father’s legacy in the SEC combined with Peyton’s ability made his college decision one of the biggest recruiting decisions ever in the sport. By the time Peyton landed with the Tennessee Volunteers in 1994, Steve Spurrier was going into his fifth season at his alma mater.
The Gators would win five of the first six SEC championships. That’s what Peyton Manning was stepping into. The Tennessee-Florida rivalry would become the SEC’s biggest game for much of the 1990s. Between 1990 and 2000, eight of the 11 meetings would be top-10 matchups.
Manning wasn’t a part of the Vols’ 31-0 loss to No. 1 Florida in 1994. In the 1995 game, Manning and the Vols bolted out to a 30-21 halftime lead only to see Florida outscore Tennessee 41-7 in the second half and lose 62-37.
“It’s a 60-minute game. They don’t stop the game after 30 minutes,” Florida tackle Mo Collins said after the game.
The refrain would be played more than “Rocky Top.”
Manning was solid in the game, going 23-of-36 for 326 yards and two scores. The problem: Florida’s Danny Wuerffel was better. He threw for 381 yards and six touchdowns.
It would be the only game Tennessee would lose that season, but it would keep the Volunteers out of the SEC title game and relegate them to the Citrus Bowl. An amazing Manning performance in an excruciating loss to Florida and a less-than-satisfying bowl trip.
Before the 1996 game, the trash talk went wild.
Florida defensive lineman Tim Beauchamp all but guaranteed victory.
“They look vulnerable, very vulnerable,” Beauchamp said before the game. “… It should get pretty ugly.”
Beauchamp also took a shot at Manning. “He gets rattled,” Beauchamp said.
Archie Manning offered advice to his son ahead of the game, saying “spend the week with a smirk on your face, have some fun,” Sports Illustrated reported at the time.
When the game between the No. 4 Gators and No. 2 Volunteers began, that smirk might have turned into a grimace. Florida went for it on fourth down on its first series and scored on a 35-yard touchdown pass. Manning was intercepted on Tennessee’s first series. He was intercepted once more in the half and the Gators built a 35-6 lead at the break.
Manning, who attempted 65 passes in the game, would lead a second-half rally. He threw for a school-record 492 yards and four touchdowns but also had two more interceptions, which came at the goal line when Tennessee was threatening to score.
“We would’ve liked to have been accused of running up the score, but it didn’t work out that way,” Spurrier said after UF held on for a 35-29 win.
The Gators would go on to win the SEC, go to the Sugar Bowl and win their first national title. Tennessee was off to the Citrus Bowl. Wuerffel, the first of many QB foils for Manning, threw for just 155 yards in the game against Tennessee, but had four touchdowns and, crucially, no interceptions. He would go on to win the Heisman Trophy that season as well.
How do you spell Citrus?
Just a reminder — the “Head Ball Coach” loved hating on his team’s rivals. Spurrier surely meant what he said about running up the score on Tennessee in 1996. In 1994, he called Florida State “Free Shoes U” for allegedly failing to monitor agent activity. He called Ray Goff, who coached the Georgia Bulldogs from 1989-1995 and never beat Spurrier, “Ray Goof.”
In 2015, after a fire at Auburn’s library destroyed 20 books, Spurrier said “the real tragedy is that 15 hadn’t been colored yet.”
“He’s the needler champion of the world,” former FSU coach Bobby Bowden told Mark Schlabach in 2014.
Give him a national title (that came in a rout of rival FSU) and a summer booster tour and he could be in his hating bag like he was when he uttered his most famous barb.
“You can’t spell citrus without U-T.”
The brevity. The sass. The deeper, historic context. It was Spurrier’s masterpiece of hating on Tennessee.
He also had something for Manning, who had announced he was returning for his senior season, as well.
“I know why Peyton came back for his senior year,” Spurrier said. “He wanted to be a three-time star of the Citrus Bowl.”
Despite being a No. 3 vs. No. 4 matchup, it wasn’t the wild shootout the previous two games had been. Manning was 29-of-51 for 353 yards and three touchdowns, but he also threw two picks. The Gators again shredded the Vols’ defense. Fred Taylor ran for 134 yards and Florida QB Doug Johnson threw three touchdowns in the Gators’ 33-20 win.
That was it. Manning would never beat Florida. He lost five games as a college starter. Three came to the Gators. Tennessee would go on to win the SEC in 1997 only to be crushed in the Orange Bowl by the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Ironically, due to losses to Georgia and LSU, Florida would land in the Citrus Bowl.
“It bothers me that we never did beat Florida, but hey, I can’t control the way other people view Tennessee or view my career,” Manning said after the game. “I’m sure Coach Spurrier will go make a few more jokes. That’s fine. He’s got a good ballclub.”
Eli’s coming
In the moments after Peyton Manning’s last game against Florida, Archie Manning was feeling the weight of watching his son’s very public athletic struggles.
”Everybody talks about how great and wonderful it is to be at all the games and see your son playing. But I’ll tell you something: It ain’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Archie Manning told The New York Times afterward.
”Sometimes I wish someone would just knock me out and tell me what happened when it was over. This wasn’t fun.”
Five years later, in 2002, Peyton Manning was going into his fifth season with the Indianapolis Colts, and Spurrier was about to start his ill-fated tenure as an NFL head coach. After being turned down by then-Denver Broncos coach Mike Shanahan and then-Oklahoma Sooners coach Bob Stoops, Florida hired Ron Zook, a longtime assistant in college and the NFL, to replace Spurrier.
After choosing the Ole Miss Rebels, his father’s school, and becoming the starter as a sophomore in 2001, this is what Eli Manning was stepping into for his first crack at the Gators in 2002.
While the game featured two eventual Heisman Trophy finalists and Super Bowl QBs in Manning and Florida’s Rex Grossman, it was not an aerial bonanza like those in which Peyton played.
Manning was 18-of-33 for 154 yards and no touchdowns, and Grossman was 19-of-44 with two touchdowns and four interceptions. One of those picks was returned for the winning touchdown.
The 2003 game allowed Manning to exact a bit of vengeance on his family’s nemesis. It would also mean a return to The Swamp for the Mannings. Following Peyton’s last game there, Archie Manning claimed he’d never go back. But he was there nonetheless.
“[Archie] had one last trip and he got to end it on a good one,” Eli Manning said after the game.
In the 20-17 Ole Miss win, Manning threw for 262 yards and led a 50-yard scoring drive to win the game. The lore of the family history and status of the Gators was, perhaps, not lost on Eli Manning who got a shot on Florida afterward.
“That team is beatable,” he said after the game. “They’re really not the team they were a couple of years ago when they had [Danny] Wuerffel and all of those other guys.”
That Manning ended 2-0 against Florida.
Next Manning up
Prior to the 2025 season, when Arch Manning was the preseason favorite for the Heisman, Spurrier found a little more hating in his heart.
“They’ve got Arch Manning already winning the Heisman,” Spurrier said on the “Another Dooley Noted” podcast. “My question is, if he was this good, how come they let Quinn Ewers play all the time last year? And [Ewers] was a seventh-round pick.”
Spurrier might have been right. Prior to putting up huge numbers against Sam Houston State, Manning was 124th out of 136 QBs with a 55.3% completion rate and struggled in his only other road start at Ohio State. On the other side, Florida is 1-3 after starting the season ranked No. 15 in the AP, and head coach Billy Napier is on the hot seat.
Saturday will mark 22 years to the day since a Manning played the Gators. While Arch Manning has not yet met the preseason hype, he will have his chance to continue the family winning streak and another rancorous chapter to the rivalry.
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Mark Schlabach
OXFORD, Miss. — Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said “dynasties are over” in the SEC after the league added Oklahoma and Texas and recently announced it will play a ninth conference game starting in 2026.
Kiffin, whose Rebels (5-0) are ranked No. 4 in The Associated Press Top 25 poll after last week’s 24-19 victory against LSU, said name, image and likeness rules and the transfer portal have also leveled the playing field in the 16-team SEC, making it harder for programs to stay on top.
He said SEC programs will no longer be able to stockpile talent as former Alabama coach Nick Saban did while winning six national championships from 2007 to 2023 and Georgia coach Kirby Smart did when capturing back-to-back CFP national titles at his alma mater in 2021 and 2022.
“In my opinion, the dynasties are over,” Kiffin told ESPN on Wednesday. “Alabama with Coach Saban and then Kirby at Georgia, where they had those rosters year in, year out and there would be a bunch of wins by 30 points in the conference, those days are done.”
Kiffin was Alabama’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach from 2014 to 2016, helping the Crimson Tide finish 14-1 and beat Clemson 45-40 in the CFP National Championship after the 2015 season.
“When I was at Alabama, they’d be like, ‘Go watch the outside linebackers,’ and there’s six of them over there that are first-round picks,” Kiffin said. “That’s not going to happen anymore because if they don’t play, then they’re going to leave. They can’t keep them all anymore.”
Under the SEC’s new schedule, teams will play three annual opponents to maintain traditional rivalries, and the remaining six games will rotate among the other 12 league members, so programs will face each other at least once every two seasons. Teams are also required to play at least one quality nonconference game against a school from the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Notre Dame every season.
Kiffin, who is 49-18 in six seasons at Ole Miss, said he didn’t want the SEC to add a ninth conference game, which was done to increase revenue, improve fan experience with an additional game against a quality opponent and get the league in line with the Big Ten’s scheduling model.
“You’re going to have really good teams going 8-4 because we’re going to play nine conference teams, including five on the road,” Kiffin said. “The conference has never been this balanced, and it never used to have Texas and Oklahoma, two top-10 teams and two of the hardest places in the country to play.
“My concern for the programs and for the coaches is that fans aren’t going to be able to get used to the numbers being different, the wins and losses. If you’re a program that’s used to being a nine- or 10-win team and you go 7-5, your fans are going to think the team is terrible and the coach is terrible. But you might have lost four road games at Georgia, Florida, LSU and Alabama.”
Vanderbilt, traditionally the SEC’s worst program, went 7-6 last season and upset No. 1 Alabama 40-35. This year, the Commodores are 5-0 and ranked 16th heading into Saturday’s game at No. 10 Alabama (3:30 p.m. ET, ABC).
Commodores coach Clark Lea has relied heavily on the transfer portal to rebuild his alma mater’s roster, including bringing in star quarterback Diego Pavia and tight end Eli Stowers from New Mexico State in 2024.
Mississippi State went 7-17 in the two seasons after former coach Mike Leach’s death in December 2022, including 2-10 under current coach Jeff Lebby in 2024. The Bulldogs brought in 31 transfers with 168 career starts before this season. They are 4-1 and upset then-No. 12 Arizona State 24-20 on Sept. 6.
“If a team in the bottom half is down for a couple of years, they won’t stay down for long anymore because they can go buy and fix their problems,” Kiffin said. “There are so many kids that want to play and go to the portal. They want to play in the SEC, so they’ll go to what you would maybe call the bottom-tier programs. They’ll fix their problems and won’t stay bad.”
Going forward, Kiffin hopes more weight will be put on schedule strength and other analytics when teams are picked for the College Football Playoff. The CFP announced on Aug. 20 that enhancements were made to the tools it uses to “assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule,” including adding “greater weight to games against strong opponents.”
Kiffin said he would have preferred that SEC teams play an annual game against a Big Ten opponent, rather than another conference game, to produce an additional data point that might have differentiated SEC teams from one another.
“It can’t be these people deciding who gets in the playoff,” Kiffin said. “We’ve got to get back to analytics and computers. Baseball and basketball have the RPI where they take into account margin of victory, who you play, where you play and all of that.”
Last season, Kiffin criticized the CFP selection committee for taking Indiana and SMU over three SEC teams that went 9-3: Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina. The Rebels thumped No. 3 Georgia 28-10 at home but fell to unranked Kentucky 20-17 at home and Florida 24-17 on the road.
“Are you better than the 10-2 Big Ten team or ACC team? Well, you took away 16 nonconference games, so you really don’t know,” Kiffin said. “It’s just like the records in college football are so burned into our heads that 11-1 is so much better than 10-2 and so much better than 9-3, but it’s so different because you’re in these different conferences.”
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Adam Rittenberg
Penn State starting linebacker Tony Rojas will be sidelined long term because of an unspecified injury sustained in practice this week.
Rojas, a junior from Fairfax, Virginia, is tied for the team lead in tackles for loss with 4.5 and ranks second with 25 tackles. He became a starter last season, finishing with 58 tackles, 6 tackles for loss and 3 interceptions, returning one for a touchdown in a College Football Playoff first-round win against SMU.
Penn State did not specify how long Rojas would be out.
Nittany Lions coach James Franklin said Wednesday that senior Dom DeLuca will get increased playing time in Rojas’ absence, and the staff is discussing how to possibly use freshmen Cam Smith and Alex Tatsch.
“What’s helpful is we have these Sunday scrimmages, so we’ve had a chance to evaluate those guys each week,” Franklin said. “Early on, Tatsch was getting a little bit more time with the varsity. We’re giving Cam an opportunity now as well.”
Rojas played much of last season with a left shoulder injury, and underwent surgery following Penn State’s CFP run.
The seventh-ranked Nittany Lions, who lost their first game last week against Oregon, visit winless UCLA on Saturday.
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