Michael Robinson never understood fantasy football. Every year, he'd get asked to join a league; eve...

1. Making academics a fantasy sport
Michael Robinson never understood fantasy football. Every year, he'd get asked to join a league;
every time, he couldn't commit. With retirement looming this past winter, Robinson finally had a
little time on his hands, and he acquired a team. He loaded it with talent and went up against his old
teammates Marshawn Lynch and Russell Wilson.
Smack was talked, standings were pored over. And in the end, Robinson's team lost, foiled by a ...
15-year-old gymnast.
The MVP of this fantasy league, a 5-foot-3 girl named Asia Farmer, was part of a pilot program
Robinson recently started in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia. There are initiatives to get kids fit
and to try to protect them from concussions, but Robinson doesn't think enough is done to promote
academics. So he started sort of a reverse fantasy program at his alma mater, Varina High, and
divided 30 freshmen into three teams in a competition for points based on grades, attendance and
community service. Farmer is a studious type who doesn't like missing class, and, unfortunately for
Robinson, she was on Wilson's roster, proving once again that quarterbacks get all the glory.
"The interaction with the kids," Robinson says, "that's the most rewarding thing."
In February, Robinson won a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks. It was especially meaningful
because of all that he went through in the 2013 season -- the allergic reaction to anti-inflammatory
medicine he suffered in training camp, the hospital trips because he was so violently ill, the 30
pounds he lost. Robinson was cut in August, but got a call to come back to the team around
midseason. Ultimately he got what every NFL player wants: to go out a winner.
That was fantasy. He went to the White House, met the president and posed for a picture with Earl
Thomas next to Abraham Lincoln's statue. He made a cameo appearance on "The Young and the
Restless" and nailed his lines.
What he does now, with the teenagers in Team Excel, seems much more real.
"When we were done, the confetti was falling, and I was so grateful to be there," Robinson says of
the Seahawks' Super Bowl XLVIII victory. "I had a tough year being sick and all the little things,
being cut, and then coming back this way. ... I just felt like there was an emptiness. There was a joy I
was anticipating that really wasn't there. I couldn't figure it out.

2. "I came back home and took a tour with a group called
Communities in Schools. When you see these kids and
they find out I was a Super Bowl champion, they go
crazy. You appreciate what the Super Bowl does for
you. You appreciate that platform. But you also see
what really matters to us [as a society]. What did I
really do for all this?"
Resources to succeed
Robinson was lucky. Although he grew up within walking distance of a couple of the roughest
neighborhoods in Richmond, near drugs and gangs, he never was pulled in. His mom had huge
expectations. School came easy for him, and she knew it. When he got a C, or even a B, she warned
him that he wouldn't be able to go to football practice if his grades didn't improve.