This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Aug. 6 Fantasy Football issue. Subscribe today!

ARIAN FOSTER DOESN'T hate your fantasy football team. He won't hate you if you draft him or even if you bet against him, and if you ask him about this "fantasy stuff," as he calls it, he will tell you that even though he makes fun of it -- fantasy football, after all, is fantasy -- he's actually kind of indifferent about the whole thing. "Either you play or you don't; it doesn't bother me either way," he says. "But people think it does." And that bothers him. "People take it so seriously, but it's not even a tangible thing! It's all just silly, man. Fantasy football isn't real."

Foster, whose first name comes from Aquarian, the astrological water bearer whose moniker means "the holder of knowledge," is extremely real. And he makes a point of it, this realness, he wants you to know. Desperately. He is 25 years old -- a fantastically fortunate and rich 25-year-old, granted, one whose prodigious talents as a running back just netted him a five-year, $43.5 million contract (he'll see about $18 million this year) with the Houston Texans. But he's also just three years out of college, still a kid who favors the standard young-male-athlete uniform of T-shirt and baggy shorts unless he absolutely has to wear actual clothes, and he's still just trying to do what's expected of him while striving to keep his dignity and individuality intact. "I don't mind being entertainment," he says. "What bothers me is when people dehumanize their entertainers. And that's what people don't get."

Foster then sighs deeply and launches into a lengthy explanation of the "fantasy thing," which will be a continuing theme of the day. "I got a really bad rap after I pulled my hamstring last year during the preseason. People were like, 'Oh man, I've got to change my roster around!' " he says, alluding to what would become a war of words with bloggers and fantasy owners. "What's hard to grasp unless you know someone involved in the entertainment industry" -- because that's what the NFL is, it's entertainment, he reminds me pointedly -- "is that when a player goes down for injury, something on his body is hurt. I know that's part of the game and what we signed up for, but to dehumanize us like that is kind of odd to me. I mean, I was going into a contract year, and this season could either make or break me. I'm coming out of a year when I led the league in rushing, and I came back and worked for league minimum." In his case, it was $525,000, which he notes is still a lot. "But say you get hurt and that's your last paycheck from the NFL. That's not going to last you long. After taxes it's only around $350,000, which you might be able to stretch out over a few years, but that's if you're great with it.

"So all these thoughts are going through my head, because that's the stuff that runs through your head if you're battling an injury. Even though it's a hamstring, hamstring injuries can linger, and in my eyes I was still fighting for a job, still fighting for respect. So when people are writing a whole bunch of things on Twitter like, 'Damn, you ruined my fantasy,' or 'Are you going to be okay for my fantasy team?'... I mean, fine, but how could that be the first thing that pops into your head? To a kid," he adds. "And that's all we are. Who has it all figured out when they're 24 or 25 years old?"

All of this is said in a long, relatively stream-of-consciousness breath in the living room of Foster's sweet four-bedroom rented house ("I'm still not sure where I want to live for the rest of my life") in a nice, but not too nice, section of Houston, where we have met on a scorching hot day in June without publicists, managers, agents or other handlers. This lack of professional overseers is refreshing, and it's partially a trust thing -- "They know I know how to handle myself" -- as well as a familiarity thing: I know Foster, having spent the better part of the fall of 2006 reporting on his University of Tennessee football team. Back then, he was a 20-year-old kid who'd turned his dorm room into a rap studio and kept a plastic Uzi-style pellet gun at the ready to engage in epic battles with his buddies. Today, he's got a wife and a 3-year-old daughter and many other trappings of adulthood, though he's still intent on creating a music studio in his house.

Right now, there are boxes everywhere. Foster and his wife, Romina, moved in two weeks ago, and he's sitting on a large gray-and-white suede sectional couch, drinking a bottle of water and fiddling with the remote for the new flat-screen the cable guy has just finished wiring for probably every station imaginable. As for other material accoutrements, there are none, really. In the driveway is a 3-year-old white Ford Midas truck, a freebie Foster received from an endorsement deal. Hiding in the garage is an even older and more nondescript car that Foster bought during his time on the Texans' practice squad. And that's it: no Benz, no Bentley, nothing flashy, nothing tricked out.

A massively ripped, impressively tattooed kid, Foster is wholly bling-free. "It's not me," he says. "I don't need more cars. I don't need fancy rims. I don't need a chain. I don't need earrings." He did have a pair of QZs in college, but once he became a pro, he got rid of them. "I didn't need them anymore," he says, and ponders this for a moment.

He looks at the TV. Foster can talk about virtually anything and does. But then, hold on. What is he watching? He has no idea. In his last apartment, a loft he and Romina lived in until a water heater broke above them and mold started to spread in the walls, he knew which channels were which. He could find all of his shows. But now he's got some new service and -- he checks the program guide -- he's watching Living Single, a '90s sitcom starring Queen Latifah. "I don't even know what's what anymore," he says. And for a moment, Foster looks just a tiny bit perturbed. Then the moment passes. "Whatever," he shrugs.

He's Zen. Trying to be, anyway. There's a gigantic portrait of Buddha in his dining room, waiting to be hung. Foster has become famous for his signature bow, the yogic Namaste he performs in tribute to the football gods every time he scores. He studied Buddhism for a while. He studies a lot of things, actually -- religion, science, "anything that's intriguing, really" -- and right now, Foster is conducting an independent study of quantum physics. "It's a theory that kind of says each atom is conscious -- every single atom is conscious. Think about that. That's crazy!" he says. "If you pick up a grain of salt and zoom in 1,000 times, it's doing things inside that it wants to. And it chooses. And when you look at it on a global or universal scale, to me it suggests that it's all interconnected, that we're all kind of on the same plane as energy." He stops, embarrassed...