For years, friends and family members bugged me to join their Fantasy Football leagues.

For those not familiar with how Fantasy Football works, teams selected by Jerry Jones wannabes win or lose based on how many points certain players on offense or an entire defensive unit compile during the course of a National Football League game.

I always politely declined to participate, giving what I thought were legitimate reasons.

First, I’m competitive. That means in order to win, I would feel compelled to add a player or players I don’t particularly like to my team in order to have the best chance to win.

The thought of “drafting” Jimmy Joe Smacktalker, who played at the University of Alabama and now suits up for the Philadelphia Eagles, just to win a fake football game was more than this Tennessee Vols/Dallas Cowboys fan could fathom.

Also, this is a busy time of the year for a sportswriter, so the opportunities to actually sit and watch football games I’m not covering for my newspaper are rare.

I don’t want to spend that time being upset that a quarterback I didn’t really want to put on my fake team — but did anyway because I thought he could get me valuable points — decides to play Santa Claus in September and delivers interceptions to all of the players on the opposing team.

Last year, I finally gave in and joined a Fantasy Football league my son and some of his friends put together because they needed one more team to make a legitimate league.

It took me one week to regret the decision.

So-called draft experts rated my draft a D, but the defensive unit I picked (the Dallas Cowboys) scored a crazy number of points, and I actually defeated my son’s team in the opening week of the season.

He had an A-plus draft according to the experts, by the way.

I was hooked, but my joy eventually turned to shame. The competitive side in me took over, and I began taking the fake games way too seriously.

I benched players I’ve always rooted for if I thought I could get two more points from someone else. I made trades for guys like Jimmy Joe Smacktalker, knowing my dad — a lifelong Vols/Cowboys fan — would have disowned me if he was still alive.

I even began wishing various ailments on receivers who dropped passes, quarterbacks who tossed interceptions, running backs who fumbled and defensive players who went more than one game without an interception or a sack.

No broken bones, torn ligaments or concussions, but if a player developed a bad case of nose hemorrhoids or swamp foot after I had a losing week, I shed no tears for them.

I knew I had finally hit rock bottom when I used insider information gathered thanks to my job as sports editor at the Longview News-Journal to gain an edge during a key week late in the season.

To teach me a lesson, Jimmy Joe Smacktalker played Oprah football that week (You get an interception. You get an interception. Everyone gets an interception), and my best defensive player — Joe Bob Slobberknocker — evidently became a devout follower of a cult where the act of tackling is forbidden.

I managed to finish in the middle of the pack in the league standings despite several suspect moves by the team’s general manager (me), and I have to admit it was fun watching my son work his rosters throughout the season and eventually finish as the runner-up.

I’m not sure if Kyle will ask me to participate in the league again this year, but if he does, I probably will.

Who knows. Maybe Jimmy Joe Smacktalker has recovered from that bad case of nose hemorrhoids and will lead me to the Super Bowl.