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officials working around the Oakland Raiders, then part of the American Football League, got together in a New York hotel room. After an evening of plan- ning and plotting led by a Raiders part-owner named Bill Winkenbach, they came up with the Greater Oak- land Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPPL). Pigskin is a nickname for a football, while prognosticators is a fancy word for “predic- tors.” After the first draft in 1963, GOPPPL had eight teams. The participants kept the league pretty much to themselves in the early years, but by the 1970s it had expanded, thanks to one of the team owners also owning a bar. After the fantasy baseball craze started, fantasy football became popular, too, even though the guys in Oakland were already veterans. By 1989, more than 1 million people were playing the game. With the begin- ning of the Internet in the 1990s, those numbers went through the roof. “I’m continually astounded by what has hap- pened to it,” said original GOPPPL member Scotty Stirling on NFL.com.

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