Lose your fantasy league, suffer the consequences: Inside the wild world of last-place punishments

On the eve of a prestigious amateur bodybuilding competition last month in Boca Raton, Florida, one participant called organizer Maria Bellando with a pressing question.

"Is it mandatory to shave your whole body?" Ty Harrelson asked.

No, it isn't mandatory, Bellando replied, but every bodybuilder does it.

"Make sure you at least shave your privates because we can't have hair in that area," Bellando added.

When Harrelson showed up for registration the next morning, Bellando picked him out before he even revealed his name. Harrelson's legs and arms were unshaven and his spray tan was at least a half dozen shades lighter than anyone else's. The 26-year-old asked to buy posing trunks on the premises because he didn't own any.

Harrelson appeared even more out of his element to Bellando when he stepped on stage in front of an audience of several hundred to compete in the men's heavyweight division. It wasn't just that his broad-shouldered everyman physique lacked the extreme muscle definition of the Herculean competitors beside him. The dead giveaway was Harrelson glancing over at the poses they were doing and then trying his best to mimic them.

"Ninety-nine percent of people that are competing in our shows are serious athletes that have been prepping and training and doing this stuff for years," Bellando said. "We knew there was something strange going on, but we didn't know what it was."

It wasn't until after the show that Bellando learned Harrelson did not participate in the NPC Southern States Championships by choice. Entering a bodybuilding competition was Harrelson's punishment for finishing last in his fantasy football league last season.

Last-place punishments have long been a fantasy football staple, providing incentive for a league's bottom-dwelling managers to keep trying after they've already been eliminated from playoff contention. In recent years, leagues have become increasingly creative and ruthless with their punishments, making the battle to avoid last place as high stakes and pressure-packed as the race to finish first.

One recent fantasy loser suffered the indignity of taking a blowup doll on a dinner date . Another had to run a roadside lemonade stand in the dead of winter. A third dressed up like the "Very Hungry Caterpillar" and consumed the exact sequence of food items from Eric Carle's famous 1969 children's book.

The last-place finisher in Caitlin Clark 's league completed a 17-hour bus ride with no screens and no entertainment, the Indiana Fever star told the New Heights Podcast last December. That's nothing compared to how far podcaster Joel Solomon traveled for his punishment. The last-place finisher in Solomon's league had to watch Super Bowl LX in exile this past February from an international city of the league champion's choosing.

"Has anyone else ever flown to Mumbai, India, to watch the Super Bowl in a hotel lobby at 5:30 in the morning as a fantasy league punishment?" Solomon posted to X, alongside two photos showing him watching the Seahawks demolish the Patriots on his laptop.

Diabolical punishments typically don't require the last-place finisher to fork over thousands of dollars on airfare and hotels. A group of friends from Buffalo, New York, recently dreamed up a clever idea for those in a more modest tax bracket.

"JOSH SUCKS AT FANTASY," read the billboard Luke Baxter and his leaguemates rented in February 2025 at the corner of Kenmore and Elmwood Avenues in North Buffalo. A photo of Josh also adorned the billboard, as did a plea from Josh's leaguemates to "roast him" at a Google Voice number they provided.

It was Baxter's responsibility to propose punishment ideas before the 2024 fantasy season after he finished last the previous year and endured a polar plunge in an icy lake as penance. His mind immediately went to punishments that wouldn't be over so quickly.

"Thirty seconds of pain wasn't enough," Baxter quipped. "I wanted the next last-place finisher's pain to last a whole month."

The billboard Baxter chose was a five-minute drive from where he and his leaguemates once went to high school together. More than once, Baxter touched base with Josh to make sure the punishment wasn't too extreme. Each time, his friend reassured him that it would be a fun story to tell their kids one day.

Over the 30 days that the billboard stayed up, hundreds of texts and voice messages poured in, some from former classmates, teachers and coworkers and others from complete strangers.

"My favorite voicemail was from an Uber driver," Baxter said. "The whole car started roasting Josh — the driver and his passengers."

Suggesting a painfully awkward last-place punishment backfired on professional hockey player Connor Marritt. When he finished last in his league last season, the Tahoe Knight Monsters forward had to endure the indignity of doing it himself.

Borrowing from a funny video he stumbled across while scrolling on TikTok, Marritt proposed that the last-place finisher in his league would have to play nine holes of golf with strangers without using a golf ball. Worse yet, the last-place finisher would be forbidden from revealing that a fantasy football punishment was the reason he was play-acting every shot.

Everyone in Marritt's league became friends while attending the same youth hockey academy in British Columbia. They immediately embraced Marritt's punishment proposal. And, of course, they took pleasure in it even more when an ill-fated early-season Deebo Samuel-for-George Pickens trade put Marritt in jeopardy of the dreaded last-place finish.

"It came down to the final Monday night of the season," Marritt recalled. "When the second-to-last-place team pulled out a victory, I was like, 'Oh my God, I'm going to have to do this."

To his credit, Marritt leaned in. All the way in.

Randomly paired with two older men named Graham and David at the Michaelbrook Golf Club in British Columbia, Marritt smoothly pretended that he "had a really bad case of the shanks" and that hitting imaginary shots was a "visualization technique" to fix his swing. Throughout the TikTok video of his round discreetly filmed last month by one of his leaguemates, Marritt can be seen admiring a supposedly perfect tee shot, checking his yardage and bemoaning an occasional mishit.

At one point, he points to an empty spot a couple feet from the hole and asks Graham to tap in his imaginary putt. Later, when David asks earnestly if he can walk through Marritt's putting line, Marritt somehow avoids breaking character and urges him not to worry about golf etiquette.

"I couldn't believe how supportive Graham and David were," Marritt said. "Like, if it was me on the other end, I'd be like, 'Who is this whack job going around with no ball? Golf has gotten this guy so messed up that he thinks this is going to help.' But they were offering me swing tips."

Video of Marritt's punishment did millions of views after Yahoo and ESPN reposted it, but his two graying co-stars were unaware of it until the hockey player reached out and told them they were "getting some very positive reviews."

"They were great sports about it," Marritt said. "They want to play another nine holes."

The venue for Cole Bray's January 2025 last-place punishment was Wake Forest's largest on-campus dining hall. Bray's leaguemates decided to publicly shame the finance major by requiring him to walk a marathon while weaving between buffet stations and crowded seating areas.

For 9.5 tedious hours, Bray walked the same tedious figure-eight-shaped route , breaking the monotony by listening to music, switching directions or grabbing an occasional glass of water from a friend. The more laps around the dining hall Bray completed, the more confused stares he received.

"I honestly wish I had something that said I suck at fantasy, so that people knew what I was doing," Bray said. "I remember this group of girls looking at me like, 'Has this kid lost his mind?' There was an employee in the dining hall who thought I was having a mental breakdown."

More people caught on to what Bray was doing by the time he neared the 26.2-mile mark. The room erupted in cheers when Bray jogged through a toilet paper finish line. A dining hall employee even presented him with a tiny plastic trophy in honor of his accomplishment.

"I had some blisters on my feet, but it wasn't too hard," Bray said. "Honestly, the worst part was having to walk back to the dorm afterward."

To Harrelson, the physical pain of completing a marathon sounds manageable compared to the crippling anxiety that he endured. He shed about 30 pounds training for his bodybuilding debut, yet the idea of posing on stage in a red Speedo still terrified him.

"I have never been more scared of doing something in my life," Harrelson said. "I was sweating and shaking, and then I mentally blacked out. I don't even really remember being on stage."

His buddies, of course, remember. A half dozen of them were in the crowd laughing hysterically. The video that one of them captured of Harrelson in the bodybuilding show has nearly 650,000 likes on TikTok and even recently aired on ABC's Good Morning America.

The TikTok video was how Bellando learned the real reason that Harrelson participated in her bodybuilding competition. When the video began to circulate across social media and beyond, friends started texting Bellando, 'You're famous now!"

When Bellando and Harrelson subsequently spoke on the phone, she asked him why he didn't tell her he was fulfilling a fantasy football punishment.

"I thought I was going to get in trouble," Harrelson said.

Bellando assured him that she thought it was a fun idea and that she was grateful for the free publicity.

Among those who got a kick out of Harrelson moonlighting as a bodybuilder was his boss at Native Construction Group. Now in Harrelson's office there's a life-sized cutout of him flexing in his red posing trunks.

"I've had distant family text me and my mom like, 'Oh, is this Ty?'" Harrelson said. "People we don't even really talk to, people that live in other states. I can't go anywhere down here without people asking about it. It was pretty crazy."