A look inside Chiefs reporter Brooke Pryor’s all-girls fantasy football league

This isn’t a fantasy advice column.

So if you’ve clicked on this headline hoping for some guidance on who to sit and who to start in Week 1, you won’t find it here. In fact, you should probably do the opposite of whatever I do.

Instead, this is a (hopefully) weekly peek inside my all-girls fantasy football league.

In 2017, 59.3 million people played fantasy sports in the U.S. and Canada, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. The largest chunk — 71 percent — were male, leaving women to make up the remaining 29 percent.

I’m happy to say that I’m one of the 29 percent, along with the nine other women in my league.

Founded by my friend Kelsey, we’ve been doing the all-girls league for four years now.

The league, “Run the World: GRILS” — yes, girls is misspelled, no we don’t know why we haven’t fixed it over the years — is pretty low-stakes. Some years we haven’t wagered any money. This year, we’re doing a $20 buy-in.

There are 10 players this year, and I only know four of them — Kelsey, Sarah, Erika and Taylor — in real life. The rest are connected through Kelsey and Sarah, whom I became friends with during a study abroad semester in college.

The group is a diverse one. Six work in Washington, D.C., including Kelsey and Sarah, who work for Customs and Border Protection and the Justice Department’s public affairs office, respectively.

Another is a scheduler for a house member from California, one just finished her masters in International and European Politics at the University of Edinburgh and another works for an automotive product manufacturer in Ohio.

“I had played one season of fantasy previously with people from work which was majority men, so it was exciting that I would be playing with all women,” Erika wrote in our email chain. “I work for an automotive product manufacturer in Columbus (Ohio) which is a male dominated industry, so having an all-lady league is a refreshing opportunity to discuss football with someone other than a middle aged father of three.”

Preach, girl.

We have Steelers fans, Giants fans, Patriots fans, Browns fans and fans of watching football with friends on Sunday afternoons.

And of course, we have me. You’d think a football writer would have an unfair advantage in a fantasy football league.

You’d also be wrong.

To be clear, I’m not bad because I don’t understand how it works. I’m bad because I’m a big softy. I draft guys who I’ve covered and ones who I have a genuine interest in following off the field. It mimics my approach for telling stories on the beats I cover, which works great for reporting and not so much for competitive fantasy football leagues.

Last year Erika — team name Gurley Show — won the league, and Sarah came in second. Laura, known this year as Gronk A Donk, was third. Honestly, I have no idea where I finished, but I know that I didn’t win any money. Based on the fact that I had the third pick this year, I’m guessing I was somewhere toward the bottom.

With my drafting habits, I know that’s shocking.

I know some fantasy leagues have elaborate draft ceremonies and make an event out of it. That’s not what we did. Kelsey, the commissioner, sent out an email Sunday night to schedule it. We exchanged emails in a thread through Monday afternoon and hastily decided that Monday night worked best for all of us.

Because Sarah was catching a flight and others had other fantasy drafts, Kelsey gave us 30 seconds per pick.

Talk about stress.

I can’t pick out what scented candle I want at Target in 30 seconds, much less decide on which players will help me to a yet another mediocre finish.

My team — Post Mahomes — started out on a strong note, picking up Todd Gurley with my first selection. As a fellow North Carolinian, Gurley fits my rule of drafting guys I have some kind of connection to.

In between rounds, I tried to FaceTime my fiancé for some advice, but things were moving so quickly that I got stressed and ended the call before he could really help. Big mistake.

He did advise me to draft Christian McCaffrey, which I did. I briefly covered McCaffrey’s brother, Max, at Duke, so it still adheres to my draft method.

In the next round, I finally put my NFL knowledge to use. I was torn between drafting Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce, but ultimately went with Kelce because I think he’ll get more targets than Hill based on the preseason.

Then I started to panic in the 30-second windows.

I drafted both Demaryius Thomas and Emmanuel Sanders in back-to-back rounds. I don’t have a good explanation for it, either. I was about to autodraft a defense out of my cue in the seventh round, and I saw Sanders’ name on the list of top available players, so I just pulled the trigger with a second left. Their Bye Week is going to be painful.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one who panicked under pressure.

Taylor drafted three defenses and three quarterbacks, and Kelsey forgot to draft a backup quarterback.

I feel good about my starting lineup — Deshaun Watson, Gurley, McCaffrey, Thomas, Jarvis Landry, Kelce, Sanders, Bears defense and Sebastian Janikowski. My bench is almost entirely players from OU, UNC or North Carolina: Adrian Peterson, Sterling Shepard, Tarik Cohen, Kenny Stills, Gio Bernard and Mitch Trubisky. Calvin Ridley rounds out the bench as the only non-NC or OU tie.

This week, I’m opening up the season against Kelsey (team name: Captain Kirk And The Giants). She’s ultra-competitive, so I’m already preparing to get my butt kicked. She’s starting Phillip Rivers — bolo tie and all — against KC’s secondary, so I like her chances even more.