If you’ve ever lost sleep over a late-game fumble or spent your Tuesday morning scouring the waiver wire for a backup tight end, you have a 1960s hotel room in New York City to thank—or blame. Most people think fantasy football is some product of the internet age, a digital brainchild of ESPN or Yahoo. It's not.
Who started fantasy football is a question that leads back to a man named Wilfred "Bill" Winkenbach. He wasn't a tech mogul. He was a partner in the Oakland Raiders.
Back in 1962, the Raiders were struggling. Winkenbach was traveling with the team’s public relations director, Bill Tunnell, and a reporter for the Oakland Tribune named Scotty Stirling. They were stuck in a Manhattan hotel during a cross-country road trip, likely bored and looking for a way to stay invested in a game that, at the time, didn't have the 24-hour media coverage we're used to today. Winkenbach had already experimented with fantasy-style games for golf and baseball, but football was the white whale. That night, over drinks and probably a lot of scribbled-on napkins, the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League was born.
We call it GOPPPL for short. It sounds ridiculous, but that acronym is the foundation of a multi-billion dollar industry.
The Original Rules Were Brutal
Winkenbach wasn't messing around. He wanted a game that rewarded actual knowledge of the sport, not just luck. When they sat down to draft the first GOPPPL roster in 1963, the rules were way more restrictive than your current PPR league.
The draft took place at Winkenbach’s house in Oakland. There were only eight owners. These weren't just random fans; they were guys connected to the Raiders or the local media. To be an owner, you had to have some tie to professional football.
The scoring was primitive. You got points for touchdowns. You got points for field goals. If your kicker sent one through the uprights from long distance, you got a bonus. But yardage? Nobody cared about yardage yet. The idea of getting a point for every ten yards rushed would have seemed like madness to Stirling and Winkenbach. They wanted the big plays.
Interestingly, the first-ever pick in fantasy football history wasn't a quarterback. It was George Blanda. Blanda was a kicker and a quarterback, which made him the ultimate "cheat code" before that term even existed. If you had Blanda, you were double-dipping on points every single Sunday.
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How the Game Escaped Oakland
For years, fantasy football was a cult secret. It stayed within that small circle of Oakland insiders. It was a "gentleman’s game," played with pens, paper, and physical copies of the Monday morning newspaper to tally scores. There was no live scoring. You had to wait for the Tuesday edition of the paper to be sure who actually won the week because stat corrections were handled by guys looking at grainy film or official league box scores.
The "patient zero" for the spread of the game was a bar called the King’s X in Oakland.
One of the original GOPPPL members, Andy Mousalimas, owned the place. He started the first public fantasy football league at the King’s X in the late 60s. Suddenly, it wasn't just team executives playing; it was the guys at the bar. They’d show up with their notebooks, arguing over whether a fullback deserved more credit for a goal-line plunge.
Mousalimas is really the unsung hero here. While Winkenbach invented the mechanics, Mousalimas invented the culture. He realized that the trash-talking and the community were what made the game addictive. He eventually opened the league up to different "divisions," and by the 70s, word started to leak out to other cities.
The Technological Leap That Changed Everything
If it hadn't been for the 1980s and the rise of the personal computer, fantasy football might have stayed a regional hobby.
In 1985, a guy named Grandin Conover started the first national fantasy football contest. But the real shift happened when the internet became accessible. Before the web, if you wanted to run a league, you had to be a "Commissioner" in the literal sense. You were a data entry clerk. You spent your Sunday nights and Monday mornings doing math.
When CBS Sports launched the first online fantasy football platform in 1997, the barrier to entry collapsed. You didn't need to know how to calculate a weighted scoring system. You just needed a mouse.
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- 1962: GOPPPL is conceived in a NYC hotel.
- 1963: The first draft happens in Oakland.
- 1969: Andy Mousalimas brings the game to the public at the King's X.
- 1980: Bob Funk starts the first national service (Fantasy Sports, Inc.).
- 1997: CBS takes the game online, and the explosion begins.
Why Winkenbach’s Vision Still Holds Up
Honestly, it's kind of amazing that the core loop hasn't changed. You draft, you set a lineup, you agonize. Winkenbach understood something fundamental about sports fans: we all think we can do a better job than the GM.
We love the "what if" scenarios. Fantasy football turned the passive act of watching a game into an active, competitive experience. It changed the way the NFL operates, too. Think about it. RedZone wouldn't exist without Bill Winkenbach. The league's obsession with individual player stats and the massive increase in viewership for "meaningless" late-season games between bad teams? That's all fantasy.
There is a bit of a misconception that fantasy football was a "nerd" thing that eventually became cool. It was actually the opposite. It was a "pro" thing—started by team owners and beat writers—that eventually became a "fan" thing.
The Evolution of the "Expert"
Today, we have "fantasy analysts" like Matthew Berry or Mike Wright who make a living doing what Scotty Stirling did for fun in 1962. The industry has become so specialized that we now have high-stakes leagues where people play for millions of dollars.
But if you go back to those original GOPPPL meetings, it was much more personal. They had a "Developmental Squad" which was essentially the first taxi squad or bench. They had trades. They had holdouts. They even had "fines" for owners who didn't show up to meetings or messed up their rosters. It was a simulation of the professional life they were already living.
What Most People Get Wrong
The biggest myth is that some college kids in the 80s came up with this. While "Rotisserie" baseball (the father of fantasy baseball) was started by Dan Okrent and his friends at a restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise in 1980, football beat them to the punch by nearly two decades.
Football was actually the pioneer. It just took longer to go mainstream because the stats were harder to track than baseball box scores. Baseball has a rhythm that fits perfectly into a spreadsheet. Football is chaotic. It took a certain type of madness to try to quantify it on paper in 1963.
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Actionable Steps for the Modern Player
If you want to honor the legacy of who started fantasy football, you have to treat the game with the same analytical rigor Winkenbach did. Here is how you can actually improve your game based on the evolution of the sport:
Focus on "Opportunity Share" over raw stats.
Winkenbach and Stirling were looking for guys who were on the field. Today, we call this "Snap Count" or "Target Share." A player might have a great game because of a fluke 70-yard touchdown, but the "prognosticator" looks for the guy who got 15 carries and 5 targets. That’s the sustainable path to winning.
Diversify your league types.
The original GOPPPL was unique. If you're bored with standard leagues, try a "Devy" league (where you draft college players) or a "Dynasty" league. It brings back that feeling of being a real team owner that the Oakland founders craved.
Keep a "Paper Trail."
One of the best things about the original leagues was the history. Start a league constitution. Write down the history of your winners and losers. The longevity of the GOPPPL—which, believe it or not, continued for decades—was built on the community and the shared history of the owners.
Understand the "George Blanda" factor.
Always look for players with dual eligibility or unique roles. In modern terms, this means mobile quarterbacks or "wide-back" receivers like Deebo Samuel. These players break the traditional scoring models just like Blanda did in '63.
The game has changed from hotel napkins to mobile apps, but the goal remains the same: prove you know more than your friends. Winkenbach would be proud of the chaos he started.
Refine your strategy: To truly master your draft, your next move should be investigating "Value Based Drafting" (VBD) metrics. This is the mathematical evolution of Winkenbach's original scoring system, helping you compare the value of a top-tier running back against a high-scoring quarterback across different positions. It’s the closest way to mimic the "prognosticator" mindset of the 1960s founders.