By Katie Mercogliano ’14

In America, 73 percent of men and 55 percent of women watch football weekly. That means over half of women watch America’s favorite pastime, yet only 6 percent of women participate in Fantasy Football. This football season, I ventured into the extremely competitive, guy-dominated world of Fantasy Football.

I was invited by 10 of my male coworkers from over the summer to join their league. We all worked together at the baseball tournament, Cooperstown Dreamspark, I was one of two girls in my department and the only one who followed football religiously.

As interns, with the exception of showers, beds and bathrooms, we were always together working 16 hour days. These guys, ages 19-23, were from all different parts of the country, from Montana to Illinois. By the end of the summer, I was deemed the esteemed title of being ‘one of the guys’ and granted the honor of joining their Fantasy league (most likely to be an easy opponent, or so they surely thought).

Now, I may be a tomboy when it comes to watching and understanding sports, especially with football, but I still had one huge disadvantage; girls’ relatively low level of testosterone. High levels of testosterone are directly correlated to having a more competitive nature, so guys automatically have the upper hand in that aspect of the game.

What I lacked in competitive drive, I made up for with pure luck … and Andrew Luck. I was fortunate enough to receive the first-overall draft pick and took advantage of it picking up Viking Adrian Peterson. I later had  a chance to take Bronco Knowshon Moreno, Giant Victor Cruz and Packer Randall Cobb. These gifted offensive beasts have given me a perfect record of 4-0 so far this season. And to say the least, the guys I have gone up against are not very pleased.

Now, I’m still newbie in the art of trash talking, but I have received an extreme crash course throughout the past four match-ups. Instead of using the given discussion board, we all just created a group message that consists of some regular conversation and a lot of trash talk that hits below the belt. Most of it has content that is just a bit too explicit to repeat here in this column. But surprisingly, they did not hold back at all simply because I’m a girl. In fact, I have gotten harsher jabs for being a Redskins fan than for being a girl.

In all this, I discovered possibly the biggest non-biological difference between guys and girls. When girls have a cat fight, it’s vicious and unnecessarily drawn-out. Verbal daggers are thrown back and forth at each other with no mercy. When guys get into a fight, they toss a couple of insults into the conversation, threaten to “wreck” the other one, and about five minutes later, dap each other up and everything is okay again.

This difference is apparent in the dynamic with the guys and myself. While I have yet to threaten a physical fight with them (for obvious reasons), I’ve increasingly lost almost all the cautionary censorship I started with in my choice of insults, with the exception of the classic Sandlot quote, “You play [fantasy] ball like a girl.” I mean, I wouldn’t want to hurt their sensitive male egos too much.