It would all come down to the final night of the Fantasy Football World Championship’s postseason. “Le’Veon a Prayer,” the World Championship team owned by Kimra Schleicher (pronounced slish-er), headed into Monday Night Football needing to make up a 19.03-point deficit to become the first female Fantasy Football World Champion! The Fantasy Football World Championship, now in its fifth year, tracks and ranks the performances of all players and entry fees ranging from the free Mock Draft World Championship, to $35 Starter Leagues, all the way to the marquee contest, the Fantasy Football World Championship with drafts online from home or live in Las Vegas.
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On this seemingly innocuous play in the video below (with a little foreshadowing from Jon Gruden), Golden Tate’s catch made Kimra Schleicher the first female Fantasy Football World Champion! That’s $150K in her pocket!
When Kimra first entered FullTime Fantasy Sports’ main event, her team was grouped into a league comprised of 12 teams and assigned a random draft position. Some leagues draft in Vegas while others draft online from home, but ALL are competing to win their league and the title of World Champion. Players compete in a 13-week regular season against 11 leaguemates in the FFWC signature 11-man starting lineup, vying for the largest league prizes you’ll find anywhere! Dominate your league and walk away with 10 stacks of high society! That’s right, $10,000! Then, the top 4 teams from each league advance to the Championship Round in Weeks 14 through 16, where things really get serious. Competing for over $200,000 in prizes, the team finishing at the top of the leaderboard is crowned the Fantasy Football World Champion.
So what do you get for winning the main event?
- The $150,000 grand prize
- An all expense paid trip to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl and award ceremony
- The title of Fantasy Football World Champion
Kimra’s 2016 World Championship Run
Competing against a sea of men, Schleicher recorded the most points in her individual league on her way to a 9-4 regular season record. With her league’s individual playoffs wrapped up (netting her another $5,000!), the No. 7 ranked player in the world only had one task left to achieve—win the main event! After placing 100th in 2014 and 12th in 2015, 2016 was shaping up to be the year she’d been waiting for her entire Fantasy Football career.
Though 2016 was widely regarded as the year of the wide receiver, Schleicher zagged where everyone else zigged during this year’s draft. With the sixth pick, she was the first owner to select a running back rather than a wide receiver, adding Arizona Cardinals RB David Johnson to her squad. Then in the second round, she was able to land Pittsburgh Steelers RB Le’Veon Bell on a discount due to his three-game suspension to begin the season. Surely, the rest of the league overlooked what Kimra was able to see clearly as Johnson and Bell averaged the most and second-most Fantasy points per game in 2016.
With the top two studs in the game filling her two running back slots, along with top-five quarterback Drew Brees (who she selected in the 10th round) on her roster, it would come down to whether she could snag enough solid pass catchers to help lead her team to victory. Between rounds three and eight, Schleicher selected five wide receivers, including Golden Tate, Michael Crabtree, Sterling Shepard and Michael Thomas, all of whom delivered in big ways throughout different stretches of the season. Despite being selected off the board as the 51st and 30th wide receivers, respectively, Thomas and Crabtree miraculously finished as the No. 10 and No. 11 WRs in FPPG.
Kimra also benefited from playing the waiver wire wisely, adding Tampa Bay Buccaneers TE Cameron Brate just a couple weeks into the season. Little did she know that Brate would finish the year among the top ten tight ends in Fantasy Football. The one other critical waiver wire move she made was bidding for Cowboys QB Dak Prescott, who is in the conversation for NFL Rookie of the Year.
And just like that, one dump off pass to Golden Tate in garbage time in Week 16 counts all the same and pushed her to the World Championship!
My fantasy career started with a leap of faith, has been fueled by persistence and enhanced with the help of others to whom I am forever grateful. Winning has been my consistent goal, its realization is a most extraordinary experience!
While Donald Trump was able to prevent our country from experiencing its first female president, nothing could stop Kimra from becoming the first female Fantasy Football World Champion! Her determination, intelligence, and ability to stay entirely focused on the task at hand helped her shatter through Fantasy Football’s own glass ceiling.
