COLUMBUS, OH — At 2:47 a.m. Thursday, regional sales manager Brett Hollister attached a 41-page constitutional document to the GroupMe of an 11-team fantasy football league whose members have collectively suggested zero rule changes since the iPhone 6.
The PDF, titled Hollister Memorial Dynasty League: Governance Framework v9.2 (Final)(Final2)(USE THIS ONE), includes a 14-paragraph preamble, a flowchart explaining trade veto philosophy, and an appendix titled “On the Sanctity of the Toilet Bowl.” It was opened by no one.
“Brett does this every Labor Day,” said Kyle Petrocelli, 34, a league member who has not read an email from the commissioner since drafting Le’Veon Bell in the second round of 2018. “Last year it was 36 pages. The year before, 29. He’s just adding stuff. I don’t think anyone’s ever told him we don’t read it. We just say ‘lfg’ in the chat and he takes that as ratification.”
Sources within the document confirm Section 4(b) now allows the commissioner to award a “Spirit of Competition Bonus” of 1.5 points to any team owner who attends his daughter’s recital, and Section 11 establishes a three-person “Constitutional Review Subcommittee” that consists entirely of Brett, Brett’s wife Megan, and a man named Doug who left the league in 2021 and moved to Tampa.
The escalation has not gone unnoticed. According to Maren Doolittle, an organizational behavior consultant at Beacon Strategy, fantasy commissioners constitute one of the last unregulated municipalities in American life. “There is no oversight body,” she said. “A man with mid-tier authority at a logistics company can, in his off-hours, draft binding legislation governing the leisure activities of seven friends from his Sigma Chi pledge class. The Founders did not anticipate this.”
Hollister’s bylaws also include a five-page section on “Punishment Protocols for Last Place,” which this year requires the loser to spend 24 hours at a Buffalo Wild Wings wearing a homemade sash, plus an addendum specifying the sash’s font (Papyrus, bolded) and material (felt, not foam). League member Anthony Ruiz, contacted while picking up his daughter from kindergarten, said he had skimmed only the part about waiver wire priority and assumed the rest was “some kind of legal cover for if Brett wants to keep Saquon for the eighth straight year.”
Brett’s wife Megan, reached at the family kitchen island where the document was reportedly drafted between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. across four separate nights, declined to comment beyond saying, “He printed it. He printed all 41 pages. We have one printer. It took an hour.”
The document concludes with a “Spirit of the League” clause stating that the bylaws may be amended only by a unanimous vote of all active members during the in-person draft, an event Hollister has personally hosted in his finished basement every August since 2013 and which features a charcuterie board he refers to, in writing, as “the Magna Carta plate.”
As of Friday afternoon, the league chat had received 247 new messages, 246 of which were about Justin Jefferson’s hamstring. The 247th was from Brett, asking if anyone had any questions about Article VII.
No one did.