NEWSLETTER
There are bad beats, and there are excruciating beats. And then there are wins that turn into something else after the fact.
Such was the tale of a crushing blow to a DraftKings daily fantasy contest player for the Bears-Rams game on Monday night:
Fantasy heartbreak: a stat correction shortly after Monday Night Football cost a man from St. Louis $997,000 in DFS winnings 😱 https://t.co/uTtIuUQryl
— Field Yates (@FieldYates) October 28, 2020
For 30 minutes after Monday’s game ended, Rob Huntze thought he had won the $1 million first prize in a DraftKings contest.
Everything had worked out perfectly for Huntze down the stretch of the Rams’ 24-10 win. One of Huntze’s lineups that featured both the Bears’ and Rams’ defenses had scored 92.79 points, the most out of the 176,470 entries. His computer screen showed a $1 million first prize.
He texted with friends and called his parents to share the exciting news and took his dog Achilles for a quick walk.
When he returned, he wanted to refresh his computer screen again, “just to see myself on top,” he said. “And, then, boom.”
His winnings dropped to just over $3,000 instead. I can’t even imagine what that swing of emotions would feel like. They say ’tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all, but that can’t possibly apply in this situation.
The play in question was a Jared Goff “run” that initially looked like, and was scored as, a sack. Watching live, although the Rams had all the incentive in the world to run the ball at that point in the game, the bootleg on 3rd and 9 sure looked like a pass play that blew up and resulted in a sack. But upon review, the official stat-tracker dude saw that the receivers were blocking down field, which meant it was more likely to have been a designed run for Goff. Thus, no sack. Thus, $1 million goes poof.
Of course, I guess the flip side is that, for all of this gentleman’s heartbreak, there was someone on the other side who thought they’d just barely missed out … only to find later that night that their life had just changed.
