I’M STARTING TO ANNOY MYSELF NOW.

Like a lot of people, I’m in a fantasy football league. I find myself constantly checking my team, constantly thinking about what trades I can make or what free agent pick-ups I should look into, and constantly talking about it to my roommate, who is also in my league, and even my girlfriend – who doesn’t care or know anything at all about fantasy football and usually just ignores me.

I can see how that might be irritating.

But I ask her about fantasy stuff anyway, like whether I should start Brent Celek or Zach Miller for instance. (I’ve even gone so far as to ask her which names she likes the best. Her top three in order at the start of the season were Wes Welker, Matt Forte – she pronounces it “fort” – and Johnny Knox. I traded away Forte last week, so she wasn’t happy about that.)

Of course, there are multiple reasons fantasy football has become so popular. The most basic one is that watching football games is fun, and since you have players representing multiple teams every weekend, you have to watch a lot of football games to follow your guys. You get to call the shots for your own “organization,” and you develop genuine like or dislike for the players on your team. (Now that I think about it, that last reason is kind of weird.)

But as enjoyable as it is to prepare for your league’s season, execute the draft, sign free agents, make trades and set your lineup every week, fantasy football has changed me as a fan – and I’m not sure that it’s a good thing.

Fantasy sports are inherently individualistic. You are one person controlling a team comprised of individual players from across the 32-team NFL. Instead of watching games and taking in an entire play, you find the player on your team – if he’s on the field – and fixate on him. The old big-picture approach to watching football has been replaced by a much narrower one.

Sometimes I’ll be sitting there on Sunday (or Monday night) watching a game with other people in the room and find myself saying something like, “C’mon, give the ball to DeAngelo.” I continue to do this even though I immediately think to myself, “Shut up, Dave. No one cares about your stupid fantasy team.”

As I’m reading Kansas City newspaper blogs looking for new information about how Todd Haley and Charlie Weis will use Jamaal Charles coming out of the bye, I realize that I miss following just one NFL team and getting to know everything about it. Having a good fantasy squad entails gaining more than cursory knowledge of most teams in pro football. Simply put, I’m not following my favorite team like I used to.

Fantasy or no fantasy, stats can be fun – although no sport rivals baseball and its numbers – but when they become bigger than the outcome of a game, that’s a problem. I used to only care about how my team and the rest of its division did every weekend, but now a Lions-Bucs game means something to me. Every minute dedicated to cellar-dweller games like that takes away from time spent following my favorite team.

Isn’t living and dying along with the team you follow what it’s all about?

Because it has changed the way I watch and follow football, sometimes I feel like fantasy is unintentionally playing a sick joke on me. Kind of like if you hang out with a girl, get her number, then find out the hard way that she accidentally gave you her mom’s number. (True story. It didn’t happen to me, though.)

If you’re like me, you’re being affected by the tension between being all about your favorite team and being all about your fantasy team. Of course, fantasy football isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so it’s up to us as fans to figure out how to successfully do both. (Thankfully, fantasy does not extend to the NFL playoffs.)

aybe we’ll have to choose. Maybe we should just draft players who play on our favorite team. But something tells me neither of those solutions have any chance of working out.

So will I – and thousands of others along with me – continue to play fantasy anyway? Absolutely. But we need to get back to the way it was before a 10-yard, fourth-quarter carry by Mike Tolbert in a 41-13 blowout meant something. After all, the – hold on a second I’m just checking my fantasy team.

Dave Finn is a senior in the College and a former sports editor at THE HOYA. COUCH TALK appears every third issue of HOYA SPORTS.