Interview: Matthew Berry Discusses the NFL's Off-Field Issues, Turning Anything Into Fantasy, and Working on Soaps

Fantasy sports weren't the only issues he dealt with this season.

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ESPN fantasy sports analyst Matthew Berry just wants to have fun. That's the entire reason he got into fantasy  games in the first place. His work in Hollywood when he was younger was fine, but he wanted to do something that made him happy every single day. Now he writes about rookie wide receivers having breakout years, old quarterbacks making comeback campaigns, and waiver wire pickups that will help keep you from having to tattoo a mermaid on your forehead. He's even written a book about it called The Fantasy Life. The Talented Mr. Roto, as he's also known, took some time to speak with us about the unfortunately serious NFL issues this season, the weirdest fantasy games he's played, and what it was like to work on a soap opera. 

What’s your mood going into the final weeks of the season? 

It’s been a great season. It’s obviously been one that’s very up and down. I’m looking forward to the next few weeks here, but I’m also looking forward to getting some time off. It’s been a crazy season. I feel like you say that every year. But between some of the off-the-field stuff with Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice, which has been a negative, to the emerging stars, who have been positives, this year has been phenomenal, especially for fantasy.

Guys like Odell Beckham and Jordan Matthews, Kelvin Benjamin make this rookie wide receiver class in fantasy stronger than it’s ever been. Add that to the crazy years guys like Jordy Nelson, Demaryius Thomas, and Antonio Brown are having, it’s been great. And I’m excited about it. I managed to survive, and I hope everybody reading this did as well. There have been some guys people were counting on who didn’t show up, so it’s definitely a roller coaster. 

Yeah, I lost one of my championship games by four points. 

That’s the worst. I’d always rather get blown out than lose by like two or three points. Then it’s just one play. 

What was it like for you as a fantasy writer having to tackle some of these bigger issues this season with Rice and Peterson? 

Understand that it’s a very serious issue, I think that’s what I wrote about. It was really my struggle. I had to deal with those issues from a fantasy football angle. My job is to interpret news of the NFL and how it affects fantasy teams. But when you’re dealing with domestic abuse, when you’re dealing with child abuse, those are such horrific and horrible issues to have to talk about, to have to see, you feel so bad for the victims in that case. For every case like this that gets blown up because somebody well-known is involved, there are millions of other cases like that that go unreported. So it was a real struggle for me to figure out this thing that is just horrible and tragic for the people involved in the specific stories and also just because it’s an epidemic. There’s way too much of it in America.



I dropped Peterson from my team immediately and didn’t care if he came back. He’s not a guy I wanted to win with.


Having to reconcile those thoughts and what it means for fantasy football really rubs me the wrong way. It’s just one of those things where it’s like, “I don’t want to do this.” It shouldn’t matter what the fantasy football implications are, because there are so many more serious issues at hand here. It was definitely tough, and I wrote about my struggles with having to deal with those issues in my own little world, because my world is not built for stuff like that. My world of fantasy football is fun. We’re fun, we’re an escape. We’re not an area that deals with really terrible issues like that. 

I had Peterson on a few of my teams, and I decided I wouldn't start him at all, but I'd keep him on my bench so nobody else could use him if he were going to play again. 

It’s one of those personal decisions, and I wrote about the struggles that people had and about whether you can still win at fantasy with a moral conscience. I think it’s just a decision everyone has to make. I dropped Peterson from my team immediately and didn’t care if he came back. He’s not a guy I wanted to win with, so that was one of the things I wrote about. 

Going back to the fun part of fantasy, what is this Terminix league you’re involved with and how did you get to working with them? 

It sounds like you’ve read me, so anybody who has read me and read my book knows that I love fantasy, period. Obviously fantasy football is my focus, but I’ve written extensively about different kinds of fantasy leagues: fantasy sumo wrestling, fantasy weather, fantasy Tour, and phantasy spelled “ph.” It’s basically a game of Phish fans, and they try to predict the set list for a Phish concert every week. There’s fantasy Supreme Court. So, there are all different types of fantasy, and I love it all. I think it’s great.

I’ve often said, if you can figure out a way to keep score at it, there’s a way to play a fantasy version of it. I enjoy different types of fantasy, so when Terminix called, and they had this idea to do a fantasy exterminator league, I thought it was hilarious. When they pitched the premise to me, it sounded great. I was like, lemme get this straight: You can play fantasy and win prizes? That’s a pretty good deal. So I have a team entered in there, it was easy to do, it’s fun. For me, I’m always excited any time there is a different kind of fantasy. Especially at the end of the season, when a lot of people’s fantasy seasons are over, and you get to play this and win prizes, it was a no-brainer for me. 

What’s the weirdest fantasy game you’ve played? 

This one is certainly up there. It’s certainly different. Other than the exterminator league, I’ve played a lot of ‘em. In terms of sports, I’ve tried them all. I’ve done fantasy NASCAR, I’ve done fantasy wrestling, I’ve done fantasy golf. I do a fantasy movie league with my buddies every summer for the summer movies, where you pick how well they do at the box office. So, I’ve done all sorts of things. Internally here at ESPN, a bunch of us on staff do fantasy spelling bee every year. We always pick kids. 

I’ve tried a ton of different sports ones, as well, most recently hockey, which I’m massively struggling with. 

In my fantasy hockey league, we counted penalty minutes, so I just had a bunch of goons on my team. I just ended up loading up on goons. It was fun, I led the league in penalty minutes. 

When you are researching throughout the week, for football specifically, what is your approach or process? 

For each individual player, it’s a week-long process and a season-long process. Obviously, you’re watching game tape and film, you’re studying the stats and the trends, not just from the games, but of the entire offense and how that offense does against the defense they’re facing. Is the defense banged up, in terms of injuries on either side of the ball? It’s not just about whether the player you’re talking about is healthy, it’s about the offensive line being healthy, is his quarterback healthy, is he facing an elite cornerback or is he facing a guy who was just on practice squad last week? It’s all those things. How does this defense particularly attack that offense and so on and so forth? What do you expect the game flow to be? You try to project out all those things, and how each one plays. And frankly, you add all that into it contacts.

Sometimes it’s personal contacts that I have with beat reporters, the team, the players themselves, or agents, and then sometimes I’ll tap into the network of some of the people here at ESPN, guys like Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen who are so plugged in. Sometimes, they’re very kind and gracious with me, and sometimes, I’ll ask them, “hey, can you ask your contact so and so?" They’re obviously reporting news and I’m interested in fantasy, so sometimes they’ll hear something that isn’t right for what they do, but they know it will have an impact in fantasy, so they’ll pass along a nugget or two to me.

1.

Did you ever try out for football or play football back in the day? 

I certainly didn’t play football. I was a Jewish kid growing up in Texas. Football was not for us. I played tennis as a kid growing up. I was always a big sports fan, and I played basketball and tennis in junior high. I was a pretty serious tennis player and was ranked in the state of Texas as a junior. I went to the state finals in high school, that whole thing, so tennis took up the majority of my time as a kid. I didn’t really play other sports, just focused on tennis. 

How did living in Texas help develop your love for football? 

As they joke, there are only two seasons in Texas: football season and spring football season. I’ve always been a huge, huge football fan my entire life, so growing up in Texas solidified that and strengthened it. 

I know you have five kids. Have you or will you let them play football? I know some athletes have come out and said they wouldn’t let their kids play. 

I understand it, and it’s a concern. I have five children, three of them are boys. The two younger ones are girls. We’re not going to let the girls play football. All three boys do actually play football. My oldest, who is 16, now plays lacrosse, but he played football as a kid and he was on the high school freshman football team. He just started focusing on lacrosse. My 14-year-old was on the freshman football team this year at his high school, and I think he’s going to continue with it. And my 10-year-old plays peewee football. I would be lying to you if I said I weren’t a little bit nervous, but all three boys love it. And it’s something we discuss, and they try to play smart, and it’s something we look at year to year. But the kids enjoy it so much, and in my particular case, it’s one of those things where I’m not the only decision maker. Obviously, they have a mother, and I’m in a mixed family, a blended family, so I’m not the biological father of my boys. So their biological father obviously has a say in it as well, so the three of us and his long-time girlfriend have a conversation. 



I have confidence that the [safety] issue will be resolved and that the game will continue to evolve.


What do you think of the theory that football is headed for its own demise with the concerns about safety? 

I don’t claim to be an expert in concussions or in safety for the football players. That’s why we have people like Stephania Bell here at ESPN who knows specifically about injuries and concussions, and there are people who are studying this who are much smarter than I and at a much higher pay grade than I am. My belief is that that is not the case.

I think safety is a priority and should be a priority for football at all levels, not just the NFL. But I think that football at all levels has said that. The NFL has said, “we know we need to make this game safer.” The NCAA and all the way down has said, “we need to make the game safer.” And I think there are a lot of studies going on and there is a lot of talk about this, which is a good thing, and the more people talk about it, the more change can happen for good.

There are so many good people invested in the sport and there are so many people invested in making sure our young people can play the game and can play the game safely. I have confidence that the issue will be resolved and that the game will continue to evolve into something that’s safer to play and something for fans to enjoy and watch. 

… You saw the story about the school that started practicing without helmets to teach people to be safer. There is a lot of discussion going around about this issue, which I think is great, and I think it needs to happen. It will continue to evolve. This is not my area of expertise. I certainly wouldn’t feel confident speaking out about it. My job is to evaluate how players will do in terms of fantasy football once they’re on the field. So whatever game they put out there, that’s the game I’ll evaluate. But as a fan, as a human being, as a step father to three boys who play football, certainly you want the game to be safe. You never want anybody to get hurt. 

2.

Jumping to before you were involved in the fantasy sports career, you were and still are involved in Hollywood production. What are you most proud of from your work with that scene? 

There are a couple of things that didn’t really see the light of day. My co-writer and I were hired by the Jim Henson company, Lisa Henson, and Team Todd, which is a movie production company that made the Austin Powers Movies and a bunch of things, to recreate  and reimagine the Muppet Show. I’m a Muppet freak, and I’m really proud of the script that we turned in. I think we really did the job that we were supposed to. We put the script up online. We wrote it for Fox, and I was really proud of how that script came out. People loved it, and corporate politics is what kept it off the air at Fox, but we really loved it. That was something that was really important to me because I love the Muppets. Lisa Henson telling me how much her dad would have loved that script, that was something that was really a proud moment for me. 

Also, working on Married With Children. I loved that show, it was really fun. I co-wrote the 250th episode of the show, which was a cool milestone. I’m proud of that. One of my favorite scripts that I wrote was a movie script that didn’t get made and didn’t even sell, but a lot of people loved it called “Undercover Elvis.” That means nothing to anyone, but that’s what I’m most proud of. I’m proud of the work, and, ultimately, sometimes it sees the light of day and sometimes it doesn’t. You just have to trust the work. 

Anywhere to find that one? 

No, unless you know an assistant or producer in Hollywood. We haven’t put that one up for some reason. We probably should. A number of people told me they kept that script when it came out. 

Let’s get it up! 

I get so busy with my real job, but yeah. 

What was it like to work on a soap opera? 

It was fun, it was a blast [laughs]. Listen, I can’t act, but I enjoy doing things that are sort of goofy and out of my nature. I do fantasy football, right, which is fun. It’s fun! I think I look for things that are fun. I don't take myself too seriously. The world that I live in is not a particularly serious world. Whether it’s something goofy like this Terminix league, which is fun, or when they called and asked me to do this soap opera, I'm like, "you bet! That's hilarious!"

We had done a fantasy baseball campaign called "Endless Drama," which was a parody of soap operas. And we shot it on the One Life To Live Set with the One Life To Live crew, and myself, some real baseball players, along with some people like Buster Olney, and some actual soap actors. I was hamming it up on set like I normally do and the executive producer was like, "you're actually really funny, we could use you on the soap, would you ever want to do it?" I'm like, "are you kidding me? That sounds like a blast." He's like, "cool, we'll write you in." And I'm thinking, "yeah, yeah, that's never going to happen." Six months later, I get a call, "we got a part for you, it's a two-episode arc, you're playing a jewelry appraiser." I'm like, "I'm in!"

It was fun, it was a real blast. I wrote about the experience, but it was just a nice thing for me because so much of the television I do is hurry up. It's all live television, it's 45 seconds here, it's a minute here. Other than the Sunday morning show, Fantasy Football Now, I'm doing a minute-and-a-half on Sportscenter, I'm doing a minute-and-a-half on NFL Live, I'm doing these little quick hits, and it's live television. You're churning out so much, because it's ESPN, and every 24 hours it's turned over. It's a very intense, fast pace, because news changes very quickly in the world of sports, and you're constantly moving.

So it was really nice to be on a set, and they're like, "ah, let's take that again, let's try it this way." It's all very relaxed and slow. "Let's do it here, let's try it this way, let's break for lunch, we'll get it after lunch." So that was a lot of fun too, just hanging out on set for two days and being with them. All the actors and actresses on One Life To Live, especially the ones I did the scenes with, could not have been more gracious or patient or tolerant of me and my lack of acting ability.

Interview by Tony Markovich (@T_Marko)

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