Late-Round Perspectives: Pat Fitzmaurice

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Pat Fitzmaurice is a managing editor for FantasyPros and BettingPros. He's a Milwaukee native, a Wisconsin badger, a proud dad, and he loves his Packers. Everyone should wish him a happy birthday, too. These are his late-round perspectives.

Is today your birthday?

Pat Fitzmaurice (0:30)

It is my birthday.

JJ Zachariason (0:31)

Okay, now I feel terrible that you're recording an episode of Late-Round Perspectives on your birthday.

Pat Fitzmaurice (0:37)

Hey man, it's, you know, birthdays don't mean much this time of year. It's a pretty mundane day. It's work, and then, like, you know, getting some dinner with the family. I think my daughter's making something for dessert. But yeah, man, don't worry about it.

JJ Zachariason (0:53)

Well, happy birthday, man. Thanks for spending your birthday with Late-Round Perspectives. I really appreciate it. I like to start these shows off by sort of allowing the listener to understand the guest a little bit better, to understand your background, what you've done in your past, how you've become a fantasy football analyst, all that good stuff. You have an extensive journalism background, which I found very interesting. How did you become a fantasy football analyst, aka the coolest, definitely not nerdiest job in the world?

Pat Fitzmaurice (1:22)

Yeah, this job where every day the morning shave is optional. It's not a bad thing. So okay, I'll try not to make this too windy and you can interrupt as needed if you want to drill down on anything. But you know, so like my buddies and I, when we were kids, we were all like sports nerds and just lived for sports. And I mean, the thing that would like get me out of bed every day was like the sports section of the newspaper. It was still the old school newspaper era and, you know, like running downstairs to open the front door and get that paper and read the sports section was like just nirvana to me. So that sort of cultivated an interest in sports journalism. And I kind of decided early on that I wanted to be a sports writer at some point. And then as luck would have it, my maternal grandmother got remarried. She my my grandfather had died when I was really young.

And the guy that she got married to was the former sports editor of the Milwaukee Journal and had been the Green Bay Packers beat writer for the Milwaukee Journal during the Vince Lombardi era. So yeah, so this guy, his name was Chuck Johnson. And you know, Chuck and I hit it off and, you know, told me some great stories about like, you know, Vince Lombardi once physically threw him out of a Christmas party.

And you know, like he got yelled at in the Olympic Village once by Howard Cosell, like he had these great stories. And he also was like really into, I don't know, he had a way of talking to me about like the English language and like the rules of the road of journalism and doing it without being in too much of a lecturing way. So I was kind of interested in hearing about all these things. And like there are certain pet peeves he had that soon became my pet peeves.

So anyway, yeah, I was on the journalism track, got to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, became a journalism major, worked at the one of the two student newspapers, eventually became an entertainment section editor.

And then I was out of college for a couple of years and I was working at a chain of suburban newspapers, like weekly suburban newspapers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I'm doing like news. And I had this good friend from high school and college who was trying to get me to move down to Chicago. And you know, back to the newspaper thing. This was when people still look for jobs in the want ads of newspapers. And he saw one for Pro Football Weekly looking for an associate editor, took the time to clip it out of the newspaper and mail it to me, like snail mail it to me.

So I get this, I apply for the job and I end up getting it. And so yeah, moved down to Chicago and I'm working for Pro Football Weekly. And that was my first professional job in the sports media. Now that was like maybe 15 to 20% fantasy, although fantasy was probably 80 to 85% of what we talked about in the office during the day, but yeah, so it was just more like NFL coverage for this. We called it a magazine, but it was more like a tabloid style newspaper. And so I was there for two years. It was a dream job, except it didn't pay enough for me to live on. So I had to leave and take another job in Chicago and I left on good terms and one of the higher ranking editors asked me if I wanted to do some freelancing in fantasy football. And I said, sure. So like starting in, God, I think it was 2000, JJ, I was, I started doing weekly fantasy rankings in the year 2000 and writing like a weekly fantasy column.