(Editor’s Note: Behind the Bleachers is a new weekly column by Sports Editor John Breech. Sometimes the piece will give you an inside look at high school football, other times John will complain about the injustices of life in sports).

According to recent polls by Yahoo! and CBS, people are more concerned with their fantasy football teams then they are with feeding their pets. OK, I made that up, but really, I don’t even know if I’m exaggerating here. The point is this though; everyone loves fantasy football, except for me.

Last year, I did what only about .001 percent of fantasy football owners are able to do; I got the boot from my league. I got kicked out. Disqualified. Banned. Barred. Prohibited. Feel free to use whatever adjective you like best.

Apparently I was such a horrible owner that the commissioner in our league froze my team and asked me not to participate anymore. My first thought, “It’s fantasy football for crying out loud, it’s like watching two blind people play connect four, there is no skill, it’s all luck.”

So here’s what happened. If you follow fantasy football, you know that three of the top five fantasy Quarterbacks last season were Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers, Arizona’s Kurt Warner and New Orleans’ Drew Brees. Well, I’m a sportswriter (even if it is for a local paper) and I get paid real money to pay attention to sports. I spend more hours a week on NFL.com then I do working (Hopefully John Fredericks doesn’t read this). Anyway, all three of the aforementioned guys ended up on my team.  

Midway through the season, my team was struggling. My running back was Larry Johnson of Kansas City and he got suspended for a few games. I heard the suspension was for doing drugs or hitting a woman or spitting on some guy, but who knows, if might have been none of them, it might have been all of them, the point was the NFL made him sit.

With no running back, I knew I was a long shot to win the league. Now everyone paid $20 to buy a team in the league and the league champion was going to get a nice little $200 payout. Since I’m a capitalist first and a sportswriter second, I made someone an offer they couldn’t refuse. The guy in second place really needed a quarterback, so I told him I would ‘give’ him my quarterback for real American money. He pays me 30 bucks, he gets my quarterback. Think about it, I make $10 (remember, I paid $20 to be in the league) and he gets a quarterback that could win him $200.

Somehow our league dictator got wind of the pending trade and all of the sudden my team was frozen, meaning I no longer had access to it. The Commish even sent me an email talking about how trades like mine ‘ruined the fun for everyone and lowered the integrity of the league.’ Yes, a real human being accused me of lowering the integrity of a fantasy football league. Apparently I have less integrity then a bad reality television show.  

After three days of justifying my position about why my trade was legal (My reasons mainly had to do with the fact that I ‘bought’ a team for $20, I was smart enough to draft the three best quarterbacks and I could do with them what I pleased), the Commish finally unlocked my squad.

Two days later I tried to trade Kurt Warner for a case of beer. Apparently that was the last straw. I didn’t even see the ban coming. Commissioner Castro locked my team for good. I was done and I had to forfeit my last game.  I’m only writing about this now because the invitations for this year’s league were sent out this past Friday. I guess Mr. Commish lost my email address because I didn’t get one.  

If there’s anyone out there that needs one more person to fill their league, feel free to email me. Just know that I’m the type of guy that will trade players for money and beer. Oh and I have horrible strategy; I always draft kickers in the third round and I have to have at least three Cincinnati Bengals on my team. This is good for the rest of the league though, because it means I never win.