Chicago accountant is world's top-ranked fantasy football player - Chicago Tribune

Chicago accountant is world's top-ranked fantasy football player - Chicago Tribune

Pretty interesting. Somewhat a puff piece but a few pieces of decent advice in there.



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Chicago accountant is world's top-ranked fantasy football player
John Rozek recently was named the king of fantasy football by the World Championship of Fantasy Sports
September 05, 2010|By Chris McNamara, Special to the Tribune
The best football player in the world is a soft-spoken, 37-year-old accountant from the Gold Coast.

The best fantasy football player, that is.

Based on his overall performance in the last eight years, John Rozek recently was named the king of fantasy football by the World Championship of Fantasy Sports, the big dog in big-money, faux-football leagues. The WCOFS boasts it will award more than $2 million in prize money this year.



But the weird thing about Rozek is his normalcy. You might picture the world's savviest fantasy football manager to be an obsessive savant poring over every magazine and Web site, watching every NFL game on a network of televisions in his basement, with stat sheets and rosters and divorce papers littering the floor.

The truth is the world's best (for the time being, at least) is quite casual in his approach to each season. Rozek says he reads a football magazine or two in the months leading up to the drafts, and he watches "SportsCenter" throughout the year. But that's about it.

"I think my football background helps me understand coach-speak," explained the former defensive back at Carthage College, meaning he can read between the lines to glean NFL coaches' plans for their players. That combination of knowledge — football and numbers — is a valuable skill set in fantasy football.

"He's a thinker. He understands how to analyze something, how to put pieces together," said Dustin Ashby, commissioner of football leagues with the WCOFS, which on Saturday will honor Rozek amid his peers at a high-stakes draft in Las Vegas.

Ashby said rankings in his organization are based points scored in each game, wins each week, playoff success and championships in the various leagues it hosts. A player's history with the WCOFS determines his ranking, adjusted with what Ashby called a "complex algorithm" to accommodate for length of play.

People may have made more money than Rozek playing fantasy football with the WCOFS in recent years, but nobody has put up better overall numbers, particularly last season, when his teams earned him the title of top banana.

"John has consistently qualified for championship brackets year to year," Ashby said. "That's a hard thing to do."

On a recent Saturday night when he was simultaneously drafting for two leagues online, Rozek was relaxed in his condo overlooking Oak Street Beach. The native of Fond du Lac, Wis., wore flip-flops and cargo shorts, sipped a beer from a Packers pint glass, disinterestedly watched the Bears' exhibition against the Cardinals and played with his dogs.

"You have to take advantage of people not making the best picks," he explained while jumping between Web pages on his laptop. "And you can't fall in love with players."

During the season, with his rosters in place, Rozek — who doesn't even subscribe to the NFL Network — simply watches the games on Sunday like millions of other fantasy players around the nation.



"You do have to stay on top of your team," he stressed. "You can't take a fishing weekend up north where you won't have Internet access and you can't make changes to your team."

Rozek has been honing his fantasy skills for 20 years, starting in high school when he and classmates had to tabulate points with pens and notebooks. This year he'll compete in 14 leagues, from high-stakes national contests with entry fees of $1,800 to casual ones with his buddies who try to pick his brain when assembling their rosters. (His co-workers, he said, have banned him from the office fantasy league.)

"It's weird," Rozek replied with a laugh when asked what it feels like to be considered the king of fantasy football. "It's an honor. I'll definitely have a target on my back this year."

Being a target is worth it. Last season, Rozek says he earned $25,000 for sitting around in shorts and flip-flops, sipping beer out of a Packers pint glass and pretending to be an NFL general manager. Talk about a fantasy.