I was informed today that Fantasy Football started in the 80s. So I'm curious about how people would play it before the internet. Would people meet to have matches set up or just do it among friends?
There's a really interesting 30 for 30 documentary on this (I believe it's on Netflix) where they interview the guys who invented modern fantasy sports as we know it, the original Rotisserie Baseball league.
Basically it was created by a number of baseball obsessed newspaper editors and other media types (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Okrent) who as he describes it would keep the roster sheets and then tabulate out the points based on the publication of the daily baseball scores. Apparently the introduction of the fax machine was what really made things easier as you could send lineups and results that way much more easily than over the phone.
NFL game stats were published and available in newspaper sports sections each week. The job of the league commissioner would be to manually calculate scores based on those stats.