The regular season for NFL football doesn't start for weeks but that hasn't stopped trash talking among some of the people most invested in the game.

No, it's not the players or the owners, it's the guys (and face it, they usually are guys) in the collared shirts who own fantasy teams: guys like Seth, who asked that his full name not be used for an article on how to goof off at work.

Seth owns a team. He spends time every day working on his trades.

He checks the statistics, watches the games and keeps track of his players.

"Fantasy football is my life," he said.

"The games happen on a Sunday, you have to come in on a Monday and rework your whole roster for next week's game. It's a 24-hour-a-day job."

No wonder Mike Tomlin has so many assistants -- he even has to deal with the players.

Considering fantasy football players -- and those in baseball rotisserie leagues -- it is incredible that nationwide productivity has risen 20 percent in the last eight years.

While many employers have policies against using the company's computers for fun, be it football and baseball fantasy leagues, shopping on eBay or updating MySpace pages, it is generally not the activity that gets employees into trouble -- it's the inactivity regarding what they are paid to do.

"It happens all the time," said Jim Thomas, a labor and employment lawyer at Pepper Hamilton in Pittsburgh. "Usually someone is disciplined or terminated for not getting the job done. Later it's learned they weren't getting the job done for spending the day on the Internet or e-mail."

Generally, Mr. Thomas said, employees should not have any expectation of privacy for their computers at work. Employers tend to be fairly diligent in posting warnings that state as much. Some also block access to the great time wasters of our day: YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook and, of course, Internet pornography sites.

While fantasy football can take time, Mr. Thomas said companies tended to be more affected by March Madness, when so many employees are trying to check the games and even watch them on their computers that they use all of their employers' bandwidth, crippling the computers for work.

The other bad day for using the company computers to get work done is the unofficial holiday Cyber Monday, which follows the Thanksgiving weekend when workers start shopping online instead of working -- that, too, slows or crashes systems.

So, while Seth and his college friends are hanging out, sending trades back and forth and trying to decide whether to keep their running backs, at least they aren't limiting the ability of others to work -- like those holiday shoppers do.