Some people spend autumn wrapped in a blanket, sipping something pumpkin that doesn’t even have pumpkin in it, dragging their families to apple orchards and maybe watching football in denim, jerseys and the classic leather boots. We watch football too. We just happen to prefer our weekends with a little dirt, a little blood, and the occasional questionable decision that doesn’t involve pumpkin-spiced anything.

If you haven’t noticed, our family hunts. We watch sports. We play Fantasy Football, and not in some friendly, everybody-gets-a-trophy kind of way. We play against each other. There are bragging rights involved, and I assure you, nobody is above rubbing a win in someone else’s face so long as there’s still a soft place to land in the camp trailer for the night and you still have help behind glass the next day.

This past weekend, my husband and I were out scouting for my deer hunt when we spotted a bighorn ram. Now, sheep weren’t even on the agenda this year. But when a good ram shows up, you stop and look. That’s just common sense. I did bring the EOS R6 for a reason.

We sat there in the scooter (as my friend Tonto likes to call it) watching him, glassing, enjoying the moment, not completely unaware that our Fantasy Football lineups were about to become a disaster.

Turns out, we both had the wrong players in our lineups waiting on game-time coaching decisions. And because we were somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with absolutely no cell service, there was nothing we could do about it.

Absolutely Nothing. Not even speeding across the wildlife refuge was going to save us at this point once we realized what we were doing.

I’ll take the blame. I was looking out the side window and I happen to be really good at spotting critters while we’re in motion.

We couldn’t fix our lineups. We couldn’t check scores. We couldn’t even argue with each other about who was making the bigger mistake. We both had the same guy on our team in separate leagues hopeful the injury wasn’t serious enough to keep them on the bench.

All because we were busy watching a sheep we weren’t even going to be hunting.

Now, some people might call that poor planning. I prefer to call it having our priorities temporarily rearranged by golden curls.

There are worse ways to lose a Fantasy Football matchup than getting distracted by wildlife. At least we had something interesting to look at while our teams would potentially go down in flames.

The moment we did get service, the ping from a fellow competitor who had text and left voicemail messages for us came through that we needed to get our shit together before the 10:00am kickoff. We were able to reply at 10:01. 61 seconds too late to do anything other than laugh about it.

That’s the thing about hunting families. People sometimes assume we spend the entire fall in camouflage, eating questionable camp food and refusing to acknowledge the existence of civilization.

They couldn’t be more right about how we’d like to spend it, but it’s not our reality.

We eat the best in camp. Better than at home most of the time.

We can appreciate a good sunrise over a ridgeline and a good football game. We can discuss the deer we busted one minute and argue over a play call the next. We can spend Saturday crawling around the desert and Sunday yelling at a television like the players can hear us. Or Thursday night. Or even Monday night. I mean, we do take Starlink and a TV to camp with us here in the lower 48.

Hunting doesn’t mean you have to give up everything else. It just means that occasionally, the outdoors win. And if you’re lucky, you get a story out of it. If you’re unlucky, you get a loss in Fantasy Football that your spouse, or father-in-law, will remind you about for the next six months. Or next season just before the draft.

Fall is full of variety around here. We want to fill the freezer, but we also want to know who’s winning the game. We appreciate the quiet of outside, but we aren’t above getting loud when our team scores. We can spend hours watching a hillside where nothing seems to be happening, then get impatient waiting through a commercial break or an unimpressive half-time circus.

We will happily (usually) watch three hours of football or three hours of a hillside. The mountains don’t charge for parking, and the players don’t require you to hike uphill to watch them. But both hobbies do require occasional sits in inclement weather.

There’s something pretty great about having both worlds. The competition, the trash talk, the traditions, and the time outside. One keeps us entertained; the other reminds us there’s a whole lot more to life than staring at a screen. Although, this time the screen might have been a good idea.

Points were definitely left on the bench this week.

I’m guessing Jason won’t be out of cell range on my hunt at 9:50am Sunday morning. But I make no promises that I won’t spot another ram or even the target species and make him forget all about his lineup again.

Fall isn’t for everyone. But around here, it’s scouting, hopefully hunting, football, friendly competition, and the occasional expensive distraction with horns or antlers.

And if you can’t appreciate a good bighorn ram, even when you’re supposed to be looking for deer, well, I don’t know what to tell you.

Just don’t ask Jason how his team ended up. I lucked out and won though. So there’s that.