The five people you meet at every fantasy football draft

1. The person whose schedule is impossible to accommodate

Were it not for this person, the time and date of your fantasy draft would be reasonably easy to set. Unfortunately, this person does not receive group texts and only checks his email once a week, leaving the commissioner to text back and forth with him for weeks.

Everyone else is at the mercy of this person, who has a schedule packed full of thoroughly unimportant things. They aren't work commitments, weddings or anything of the sort. They are activities that could easily be postponed or rescheduled for the benefit of everyone else in the league.

Thanks to this person, the commissioner must enter a labyrinthine phone-tag maze, maintaining multiple circles of communication and serving as this individual's personal agent and spokesman.

If you are the commissioner, you will bend over backwards to accommodate this person. After you annoy the Hell out of everyone else and reschedule the draft several times over, this person may or may not actually bother to come. If this person does show up, you will probably only see, like, his lower leg and part of his knee, because most of him is stuck in another temporal realm. You will still hear his voice, albeit in murky echoes, as he whines about everyone else taking too long to draft.

2. The person who tries to do a career's worth of scouting in two minutes

These things are true for me, and for 95 percent of you:

a) In the absence of obvious indicators (legal problems, injuries, losing the starting job, fantasy experts overwhelmingly talking a player up or down), you are not smarter than the pre-ranked draft order. You might feel like a player will "work well in his team's new system" or "feel the need to prove himself this year," but you actually have zero clue.

b) If you are trying to choose between two players, the difference in value between the two will probably not be large enough for you to stress out over. If it is, it will be for reasons you are not smart or informed enough to identify.

Unfortunately for you and your enjoyment of the fantasy football experience, you are not smart enough to know that you are not smart enough.

NFL players at skill positions have been scouted by dozens of experts for several years. Coaches endlessly study their game tape. General managers are perpetually trying to assess their worth. Right now, you are trying to one-up them with two minutes of Googling.

You will panic. You should have been reading this stuff while other managers were drafting, but you spent the last 15 minutes getting into a debate over -- and this is a universal certainty -- Libertarian politics.

This will severely compromise your enjoyment of the draft, and by the end of the night you will believe that drafting fantasy football teams for you is the responsibility of the government.

3. The person who isn't there on time, makes the commissioner push back the draft time, shows up late with a backgammon board instead of a laptop, and makes the commissioner push back the draft time again

This really did happen one time. You know who you are.

4. The person who won't stop talking about The League

The League is a kind-of-funny television program. I've probably seen a dozen or so episodes of it, had some laughs and at this point remember almost nothing that happened. It's just that kind of show to me: completely forgettable and somewhat enjoyable. That's cool. To your friend, it is a nexus of perpetual entertainment, and the lens through which the universe is perceived.

This person uses the term "trade rape" a lot. Ah, shit. This person is you, isn't it?

5. The person who drafts Shonn Greene

Real-life Shonn Greene is a perfectly talented running back who is probably a nice enough guy. Fantasy Shonn Greene represents the universal line of demarcation between players worth getting excited about and players who will disappoint you terribly.

Every single team in your league will have Shonn Greene at some point in the season. He'll be traded, dropped, added, dropped, traded, added and dropped. This is guaranteed, so drafting him would be a waste of a pick, but this person will draft him anyway.

This person could very well be me or you. In the 10th round, this person will realize he needs an insurance back on the bench. He'll be right there.

And if you draft him, he will haunt you for the entire season. He will rush for 53 yards and a touchdown the first game. You will start him in Week 2, and he will rush for 13 yards. Desperate to trade him while he has any value at all, you will trade him away for Philip Rivers, and how happy you are about this will be a testament to how miserable and broken Shonn Greene has made you.

He will ruin your winter. He will be everywhere, and he will never leave.