Do you remember a time before fantasy football? Neither do we. The game adjacent to the game has become so inextricably a part of Sundays in the fall that it's hard to remember that once, in a galaxy far, far away (like, before DirecTV Sunday Ticket far), NFL games were watched mostly because of an allegiance to a team, and not at all because you were sweating out your fantasy football matchup against Jan from Accounting. And while the increased awareness of concussions and CTE means football may have an uncertain future, the advent and meteoric growth of daily fantasy sports* foretells an unequivocal certainty: so long as the NFL does have a future, so too does fantasy football—a rather robust one. So we called up (individually) seven people who know it better than their immediate family members probably want them to, and asked them to tell us all about the dystopian future that might soon be our fantasy football reality.

How Has Fantasy Changed the Game Already?

Matthew Berry, Senior Fantasy Analyst, ESPN: The truth is, a decade ago, you would have a real football conversation and then a fantasy conversation. And I believe these days, honestly, they’re the same thing. Because when I sit here and ask, “How are the Patriots going to be affected by Tom Brady missing four games?” that’s interesting to Patriots fans, NFL fans, and Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski, Julian Edelman, and Dion Lewis owners.

The (Fantasy Football) Players Club With experience comes knowledge. Here's how long each of our experts has been playing fantasy football. — — — — — — — — — — Berry: 1988 Robins: Mid-90's Klosterman: 1990 (Later, in '96' or '97, joined the "Jello League" which he still plays in today) Torre: Fall of 1998 or, maybe, "99ish" Evans: 1995 (First pick ever? Barry Sanders) Loza: 2006 Bales: "Maybe 15" years ago (So, 2001. Maybe)

Jason Robins, CEO, DraftKings.com: There's a whole lot of people who grew up watching football a certain way and watch it a completely different way now. When I grew up, I had a favorite team, and I usually watched those teams’ games, start to finish. And I kind of knew what was going on in the rest of the league but I didn't necessarily know who was the best wide receiver on the Arizona Cardinals at the beginning of the year was or something like that.

Matthew Berry: For somebody like [Cleveland Browns tight end] Gary Barnidge, who plays in a town for a team that’s struggling on the field, the only people in America who knows who he is are fantasy owners.

Chuck Klosterman, Author of But What if We're Wrong?: People in their mid-20’s don’t even really remember pro football without a fantasy football component. Like [running back] LaDainian Tomlinson, when he goes into the Hall of Fame, I think the main thing that a lot of people will remember him as is the greatest fantasy player ever. He had the single best fantasy year anyone has ever had. He didn’t win a Super Bowl. There was only a couple of years when I think you would argue he was the best back. But from a fantasy perspective, he’s real memorable. So I do think it will have some impact on players’ legacies.

How Will Fantasy Change the Way We Consume Football?

Pablo Torre, Senior Writer, ESPN: Now, my entry point on Sunday is not: Time to sit down and watch this game. It’s RedZone: Hook my brain up to this Matrix-like device, put this manic announcer's voice into my brain as we travel through the world like Professor X in X-Men. I'm just getting touchdowns fed into my veins. And that's a fantasy football development. Let's be clear about this: That's the reason why it's that popular and why it was made.

Brad Evans, Columnist, Yahoo Sports: RedZone is one of the world’s most marvelous inventions. It’s like: Polio vaccine, fire, and the NFL RedZone channel. Those are the marvels of humanity.

Pablo Torre: We've seen games where there are cameras on specific players, far more than on other ones. What if I sold you a package on TV, where I gave you however many roster spots you have and a camera on each of those people? It's always on them, no matter what. Why can't we do that? Why isn't that how people would consume it?

What if the world becomes more invested in fantasy football than actual football?

Brad Evans: You’d have to have so many shots and so many cameras and so many producers to cut it, but oh, God, that would be glorious. Basically I would sit in my house with a bag of Cheetos, and I would never wear pants again. I mean what would be the point? I would be divorced, my kids would disown me, but it could be worth it. That sounds spectacular.

Chuck Klosterman: Certainly that jump is not as insane as the jump between how football on TV looks now and how it looked in 1960.

Brad Evans: Fantasy is why the DirecTV Sunday Ticket package has been such a huge success. It’s why ratings are through the roof. It’s why players are making unprecedented stacks of cash. Everybody’s benefiting from Fantasy, and I don’t see that slowing down. If you were to take a scientific poll of 100 self-proclaimed NFL fans, I would say 65-70% are probably active fantasy football players. It’s just going to get closer and closer to 100%. We saw that in the Bills/Jaguars game that Yahoo broadcast last year. That was a game that was early in the morning. We had unbelievable numbers. Tens of millions of people streaming the game online, watching two bad teams. The reason why they were consuming it was because somebody had Allen Robinson or somebody had Tyrod Taylor. And they gotta see how it pans out for fantasy purposes.

Pablo Torre: I'm getting increasingly futurist here, but we're getting to a place where the formal structure of football is less important than the superstructure we've built around it. What if the world becomes more invested in fantasy football than actual football? Those things can benefit each other. But there comes a point where, philosophically, we have to reckon with the idea that we don't actually care about the teams as teams. We just care about the players as they are now [our fantasy team’s] fake employees.

Matthew Berry: There are certainly a few people who just aren’t necessarily “football fans” that just data crunch and number crunch and it’s just all about the competition. But do I ever think fantasy football could become bigger than the NFL? The answer is no for me.

Chuck Klosterman: I’ve got a friend whose kid is nine years old. He’s a real, real good athlete. But him and all of his friends talk about their fantasy football teams constantly. Much more than they talk about the Jets. There was a huge shift in the ’80s, where the parents would be upstairs watching television and the kids would be downstairs playing Atari. The idea that what they were seeing on the screen could be manipulated never seemed weird to them. That’s why it was so easy for them to start using home computers, and it was very difficult for their parents, because their parents were kind of socialized to believe that looking at a monitor was a one-way experience. So the idea of watching football as something where the main objective is for your own sort of game, that you're watching this and they’re actually playing for you, I think young people probably do think that way. So if it was 25 years from now, I don’t know if fantasy football would be more popular than football, but I don’t think the difference between the two would be that great to the average consumer.