As I'm sitting at the airport, I'm silently hoping that a player on my opponent's fantasy football team has a horrible game and barely scores. In all likelihood, my wish won't happen, but I have pored over ESPN projections and even taken time out of work to look at my fantasy football team, and what went wrong in my likely loss this week.

It is yet another reminder that I'm taking fantasy football too seriously.

To my own defense, fantasy football often means more than just fantasy football. It's my way of reconnecting and maintaining relationships with friends from college and home. I don't consider myself the best at staying in touch with people I don't physically see anymore.

But fantasy football is consuming those relationships in an unhealthy way. I will engage in boastful arrogance that, in the words of my friends, "offends the fantasy gods". I am a Philadelphia Eagles fan, and yet I have rooted against the Eagles in games that feature players on my fantasy football team.

Fantasy football has rapidly become an addiction. I do whatever I can to maximize my chances at winning on a given week, especially since I am a team in the hunt and on the border of making the playoffs. I check out players on the waiver wire almost every day. I try to finesse and negotiate trades with my friends so I can burn them.

In all of this, I forget that I am playing fantasy football for my friends, and that, well, real life is more important than fantasy football.

It was a couple of weeks ago that it dawned upon me that I was starting to value fantasy football over real football players and real people. At some level, fantasy sports were beginning to dehumanize these real players into mere analytics and statistics.

It was week 4 of the NFL season, and I was watching my Eagles were playing the Green Bay Packers during Sunday Night Football. Only three minutes into the game, Packers running back (RB) Jamaal Williams got brutally hit helmet-to-helmet, and had to be taken off the field in a stretcher.

My first thought wasn't one of empathy and wasn't one of concern.

My first thought was "damn, Jamaal Williams is on my fantasy team."

Let me make it clear that in no case is fantasy football more important than the safety and health of a player. But in that moment, and many moments like it in the past, I've lost sense of what really matters, and I know many fantasy football owners do too.

We start seeing the poor numbers and statistics of a football player as a greater reflection on their competence or toughness, rather than the flow of the game and luck. We start forming opinions of people we never met, that we've never watched.

I know this is true of many fantasy football players' mindset because it's true of mine: when you win, it's a sign of your craftiness and aptitude as an owner, and a sign of your opponent's inferiority. When your opponent and archrival wins, it's a sign that they got lucky and a sign that situational factors like injuries and a lack of luck affected your loss.

In psychology, the effect is widely documented as the fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational factors, like luck, for their own behavior and outcomes, while over-emphasizing character and personality traits for someone else's behavior and outcomes.

The truth is that luck is more at play in both our own and our opponents' successes, that in fantasy football, it's better to be lucky than to be good.

Fantasy football is a petri-dish microcosm of life itself, a reflection that life is subject to situational factors like luck more than anything else. Although I am a Christian and do believe in divine intervention, the truth is that it's better to be lucky than to be good. And when we're lucky, it's a larger reflection that our successes weren't meant to go to our heads, much like our failures weren't meant to go to our hearts.

If it's true of fantasy football, then it's also true of our lives, jobs, careers, and relationships. I consider myself, by God's grace, someone who's very intentional of where I put my priorities, hard work, and time. I prize relationships and people above all else, but there are inevitably times as a new teacher under a lot of pressure and stress that I'm teaching a curriculum over my kids, anxious not to fall too far behind. I have to make choices that enforce school policy and expectations on a day-to-day basis that aren't popular, that do make my kids not fall too far behind.

And I read an article from Jennifer Rich in The Hechinger Report, an education newspaper, that urged me to remember this:

"Never forget that you are teaching children, not a curriculum. It's okay to break some of the rules some of the time to meet the needs of the children in your care."

It was in reading that I reflected on my adherence to the curriculum and my obsession with stats in fantasy football that I felt an overwhelming shame: I was valuing numbers, principles, rules, and the law over loving people.

When I focus on the curriculum, it's more about the script than my students. When I focus on the numbers game behind fantasy football, I'm focusing on the numbers over my friends and the players themselves.

Sometimes I have to give myself the stark reminder that so much of outcomes is based on luck and factors wholly outside my own control. And even though that realization is determinist and deflating at face value, I find it freeing. Abiding by the law of numbers and trying to assert control over outcomes, whether in something as important as being a teacher or in something as trivial as fantasy football, reduces life's complexity to linear, cause and effect relationships.

And anyone who's seen enough of the world and life can tell you that life is not a bunch of linear, cause and effect relationships.

Living under the guise that we need to abide by a given set of rules to achieve success is limiting, simplistic, and defeating. Princeton Professor, Johannes Haushofer, released his CV of failures, he wanted people to know not to take their failures too personally and attribute them to their own shortcomings.

"The world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days," Haushofer reminded us.

Romans 7:6 tells us that "now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code." That law, so often when it comes to life, is that we have to abide by the traditional rules in whatever game we're playing in. But the world, as Haushofer reminds us, is stochastic. We will never have full control over anything -- we can only have influence.

Instead of focusing so hard on being good, we can learn to surrender and realize it's better to be lucky than to be good. And since we don't have control over being lucky, we don't need to stress and worry so much over trivial things anymore.

We can focus on our "whys" and why we're doing what we're doing anyways, whether it's people, students, friends, kids, or relationships. And in realizing that luck is more important than control, being good, or talent, we can finally be free.