Fantasy Mushing: Draft your Iditarod team and follow the race like never before

One is from dog mushing royalty; the other has never even been to Alaska, much less seen the Iditarod, but with equal enthusiasm for The Great Race Danny Seavey and David Hunt have combined to bring mushing into the world of big-time fantasy sports.

Back in 2013, Seavey, whose father Mitch and brother Dallas are two race legends, developed a fantasy mushing game using Google Spreadsheets, calculating all of the results, more or less, by hand.

He kept that going for four years, until one day he was contacted by a computer programmer from Texas, who had developed his own rudimentary Iditarod game and happened to see a video of Seavey talking about his game on the Iditarod Daily Show webcast.

“It was pretty labor intensive on him, calculating all of the data points,” said Paris, Texas resident David Hunt. “I reached out to him one day about the show and mentioned that I had this website. He messaged me back and said it was really good timing because he was getting ready to take an expedition of Chinese tourists to Nome and wasn’t going to be able to run the Iditarod game. So I very quickly got it going; it ran on the website in 2017 and took off from there.”

“It was all done through Gmail — pretty low-tech fun,” Seavey said. “It was just a fun way to get everybody involved. So much of it happens after the winner has crossed the finish line, so this keeps you engaged with the rest of the race. The way we designed the whole thing you had to pick a musher you’d never heard of, like fantasy sports in other leagues — it forces you to be interested the whole league, even out of market.”

The concept behind Seavey’s game is similar to salary cap-based fantasy leagues in other sports. A player gets 27,000 units expressed as pieces of gold rather than dollars, with which they draft seven mushers priced according to their expected performance between 1,000 and 6,000.

“Danny sets all of that,” Hunt said. “Setting the cost of the mushers is one of the most important pieces that makes the game work.”

Once the race starts, points are earned by finishing times into checkpoints, adjusted to how many dogs are on the team.

Fantasymushing.com also awards bonus points for performance in sprint zones, and even when the race is over, the fantasy game isn’t. More points are awarded at the banquet for the various prizes given there. At 200 points apiece, these bonuses can change outcomes dramatically.

Unlike fantasy football, fantasy mushing doesn’t actively, or at least intuitively promote gambling. In fact, it’s designed with schoolchildren in mind.

“Danny and I talked about (opening the site up for wagering), but the way we feel about it now is that a lot of people play it for free and we have a lot of schools that sign up their classrooms and give all the kids an account,” Hunt said. “So we really want to keep it more educational. There probably is more money we could make there, but the laws on fantasy gambling is a little vague and hard to figure out sometimes, so as of right now we’re going to err on the side of caution — and also we don’t want to make the Iditarod itself upset.”

Besides, it was a classroom setting that first made Hunt fall in love with the Iditarod.

“I grew up in Oklahoma and I learned of the Iditarod from my fourth-grade teacher,” Hunt explained. “She had been up to Alaska on a summer tour and brought that back to her classroom. She had us all pull names of mushers out of a bowl. I started following the Iditarod and the next year I saw the movie ‘Iron Will’ and that got me really hooked again.”

With the exception of his college years, Hunt followed the Iditarod religiously, though as he married and started a family, his chances of getting up to Alaska for the race diminished year by year. Around 2011 he developed an Iditarod game far less sophisticated than Seavey’s, and paired it on his website with fantasy games derived from other peculiar races all across the country.

It’s come quite a ways since then, boasting 2,471 participants last year with eyes on clearing 3,000 this year.

The site doesn’t track locations of users, but a corresponding Facebook page which has about the same number of followers as there are players, shows that more than half of the players live in Alaska, but there are others from all over, including Europe, Australia and Asia, Hunt said.

Hunt and Seavey don’t make a ton of money off of fantasymushing.com. They have one adventuring goods sponsor on their website, they collect some donations and sell branded merchandise on the site.

But just because you can’t gamble on fantasymushing.com, doesn’t mean you and your friends can’t use it to form your own leagues — or as they call them, ‘packs’ — and establish prizes, be they in the form of money or outrageous dares. In that way, it operates no differently than Yahoo Sports or espn.com as a host for collecting data and organizing results and standings.

“A slightly advanced fan might do well,” Seavey said. “It’s a way to make the stat sheets and info coming out more interesting. There’s a near rabid fan base frantically looking for any info online.”

One necessary step for the duo is to finally get Hunt up to Alaska to witness the race he’s followed so passionately since he was 9.

“It’s crazy to have this passion and never go,” Hunt said. “Hopefully we’ll at least go to Alaska in the summer.

I have two children 2 years and 5 years old, so I’ve kind of been waiting on waiting for them to get a little bit older so it will be an experience they’ll remember.”