And then there were 53.

Cut down day in the NFL came and went this Tuesday with teams having to pare down to the 53-player limit. Most teams started the day with right around 100 players in camp. At the end of the day, a little more than half that number were still standing. It was like musical chairs with helmets.

Cut down dates used to come in sections. There was the first cut, which generally weeded out the wishful thinkers from the real guys. The next, about a week after that, separated the projects from the here and nows. And finally the last cut, which got the team down to the player limit. That was the day every remaining player waited for — with both hope, and dread.

For some it meant a job. Even a career. For others it meant “Thanks for stopping by — have a nice life.” The day was marked by nine words that no player ever wanted to hear: “Coach wants to see you, and bring your playbook.” The person who delivered that dreaded message was generally a young staffer who was referred to in every camp, as “The Turk.”

On cut days, players on the cusp would wake up and listen to every footstep coming down the hall in the pre-dawn hours. If the footsteps went past the door, that meant somebody else was getting the bad news. If there was a knock on the door and the dreaded nine words followed, the player had two thoughts. 1) Maybe the coach made a mistake, and 2) I probably should have graduated.

We have a tendency to think of baseball as a metrics-driven game. But over the years, football has become the same. I confess that the Combine does provide measurables by which a player can be at least somewhat judged. But I also think that there’s a lot less thinking that goes into the intangibles that separate one contributor from another. Brock Purdy is Exhibit A. He’s too short, too slow, and his hands are way too small. Unfortunately you can’t measure heart, discipline, or football IQ with an app, a clipboard and a stopwatch.

And that’s why 47 guys who heard the knock of The Turk and heard those nine dreaded words, are either hoping to get noticed by another team or at least catch on to the practice squad someplace before they have to think of the next five dreaded words: “Fries with that burger, sir?”

Fantasy vs. reality

All right, enough blather about the San Francisco 49ers and their outlook for the coming grind. Let’s talk about something really important: Fantasy Football.

I believe I have made my viewpoint on such trivial matters very clear in this yarn in the past. I’m not a “follow the crowd” kind of guy. I stopped doing brackets for the NCAA tournament when I realized my dog had beaten me three years in a row. I finally quit when the goldfish picked George Mason to reach the final four.

I was the kid who wore his new clothes on the third day of the school year, long after the cool kids had shown off on opening day.

I never bought a Beanie Baby or a Pet Rock. I thought the Macarena was a drink at Starbucks. I’m yet to get my first tattoo and I got rid of the nose piercing after suffering a serious jowl wound while sneezing.

But I do play in a Fantasy Football League, and I do so because ours was one of the originals. To say that this phenomenon has grown is to make the great understatement. Last year 29.2 million people played Fantasy Football. It’s now an $11-billion industry. Who’da thunk it?

And here we are about to enter our 39th year, and most of us have gone from acne cream to Geritol in what seems like the blink of a few generations. Our league is so old, Jim Thorpe was the first player drafted.

There is still a core group of us who gathered in a conference room at HBO in New York almost four decades ago for our first go ’round, and actually it was Dan Marino who was the first pick of our first draft (with apologies to Jim Thorpe). It took hours to complete that first draft (etching all those names onto a slab of granite was quite time consuming), and we wouldn’t know the standings until our commissioner was able to tabulate the statistics and snail mail them to our houses. We’ve had a few participants who have moved on to the great Fantasy League in the sky and they’ve been replaced by a few newbies who are now a couple of decades in themselves. Our rookie is about to start his sixth season.

We’re spread all around the country now and the draft night conversation is as much about kids and family as it is about x’s and o’s. In fact kids, in some cases, have become part owners of the not very valuable franchises in our league. I still operate my team solo. My current dog only participates in the Westminster Kennel Club League and embarrassed herself last year when she drafted a mutt like she is in the first round. The goldfish left us years ago in a horrible toilet bowl mishap.

Thanks to Christian McCaffrey I somehow managed to win the whole thing last year and this year, he’ll be gone by the time it’s my turn to select. So, what to do, what to do? I’ve been pouring over mock Fantasy draft sheets. I’m so confused. Right now I’m leaning toward selecting Dan Marino (assuming Jim Thorpe has already been picked). I might not win, but it would provide many draft night laughs.

And that’s why we started this thing in the first place.

Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native. Email him at barrytompkins1@gmail.com.