I was watching ESPN today, and there was a gentleman who was promoting a new kind of insurance. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard that he was selling fantasy football insurance. Yes, you heard me, he was selling insurance for your fantasy football team! Now, I believe that people do invest a lot of money into your fantasy football team, but do you really need to take out insurance?
I say that if you are putting so much money into your team that you would want to take out an insurance policy on your team that you are really investing too much into your team. There is nothing wrong with putting a few dollars into your team, but according to the insurance agent at fantasyfootballinsurance.com, there has been strong demand. He claimed that there were thousands of people who were signing up.
Here is how the whole thing works: You can select three options for your insurance, and the players have to miss a total of games for them to be insurable. They also have to be among the top 50 point earners on average for them to be eligible. Basically if a player misses the majority of the season, or if two players miss a certain amount of games then you are eligible to recoup the losses that you suffer as a result.
Say that Tom Brady was on your team last year. He gets injured, and if you were in a league where you literally pay for players, you would have been out some money. It was estimated that 150 million dollars were lost simply because Tom Brady was injured for the season. However, if you have insurance for your fantasy team you have the money back, and if you never drafted Brady in the first place.
It isn’t that expensive either, and you only have to pay 10 percent of the amount that you put into the league. Say you put 100 dollars into your league, the premium that you would play for your team is 10 dollars. To be honest it isn’t that bad of an investment if you are going to be investing a few dollar bills on your league. However, it is a testament to the popularity of the game to see an insurance service offered.
So, is fantasy football insurance going too far? On the surface I would say yes. However, after thinking about how many people play fantasy football, and how much money is put into the game, why not try to protect your investment. I guess it is a good thing I don’t draft a quarterback in the first round anyway.