The Opportunity Cost of Fantasy Football

I have recently been the recipient of verbal office jabs for my choice to abstain from Fantasy Football this year.  My retort?  The opportunity cost of drafting, managing, and discussing Fantasy Football does not warrant participation.  I played last year.  I enjoyed it.  I enjoyed it a little too much, spending Sunday's refreshing my phone at the local B-Dubs, telling my wife I need some obscure receiver to catch at least 4 passes for me to lock in a playoff spot - as if to include her in my predicament.  The end of the season was a welcome relief, maybe as much for me as it was for her.  No matter how many times I have vowed to not let FF take over my life, I still found myself sucked into the office banter throughout the week and a zombie - a shell of my non-football self - on Sundays.  I am STILL being sucked into the office conversations, and I'm not even playing this year!  That's power of Fantasy Football!

What is the tradeoff for that time and stress?  What am I missing out on?  Am I getting more out of participating than I would from some other activity?  What are the opportunity costs?

Utility - In Another Sense

Utility, in an economic sense, is defined in Investopedia as:

"Utility is an abstract concept rather than a concrete, observable quantity. The units to which we assign an "amount" of utility, therefore, are arbitrary, representing a relative value. Total utility is the aggregate sum of satisfaction or benefit that an individual gains from consuming a given amount of goods or services in an economy."

I became familiar with the term "utility" in this regard from Jordan Ellenberg's "How Not To Be Wrong" and it intrigued me.  Business Insider and Smithsonian give nice summaries of its use in the book here and here respectively.  The gist of it is that everything comes with a cost and you need to ask yourself what cost are you willing to pay for a level of comfort.  It is an "inconvenience factor" and Ellenberg measures it in utils.