Fantasy Football

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod…I am seriously fucked, here. The question is, why now? After years and years of losing, why fire Matt Millen now? Does anyone know what this means? It means I am out on my ass once they get someone competent in there.

Three years I’ve been starting for the Detroit Lions. Three years! Without even so much as a worthy adversary for the job. Who the fuck am I, John Elway? Has this made sense to anyone other than Matt Millen, and maybe the Ford family because they are a gaggle of pussies? Of course not. But since it was happening to me, I was the direct beneficiary. Fuck this. I’m like the anti-Jeff Garcia. Over-appreciated and overplayed everywhere I go. I’ve got two of the ten best receivers in the game. Well, when Roy Williams is acting like a human being he’s one of the ten best.

It’s been a good run, right? I mean, we were 6-2 at one point last season. How many quarterbacks in the history of the NFL can ever say they were ever 6-2. Sure, we lost seven of our last eight to finish 7-9, but things were looking good there momentarily. I think at one point during the off season, we were even everyones dark horse to make the playoffs. That was patently absurd, but it still was.

Oh Christ, Millen. You’re a fucking twit but you were my twit. And my meal ticket. When am I ever going to find another GM as clueless as you to take me to the promise land. I’ve been lucky so far, playing for the pre-Holmgren Seahawks and the Bengals. I even had Bengals fans arguing to keep me the year after they brought in Carson Palmer. We went 8-8 his rookie season, which is like winning the Superbowl in Cinncy. I wasn’t a winner anywhere else but in Cincinnati and maybe Phoenix, but I wasn’t a loser anywhere else, either.

It has been a storied career. Maybe I can get one of those plum jobs that Gus Ferotte has, or even Kurt Warner. Warner is starting for a 3-0 team…Of course in his prime, he won two MVP’s and a Superbowl. But still, there are some really shitty teams with really shitty quarterbacks out there. I mean, at least I tend to throw for only slightly fewer touchdowns than I do interceptions. And I throw a shit ton of interceptions.

You know what would be a good destination for me in 2009 after they cut my lingering ass? Carolina. The Panthers always have quarterback issues, and the best they can do for backup is David Carr. That whiny little pussy always bitches about lack of protection from the O-line. Doesn’t he know how fortunate he is to even have a job? I’ll be Jake Delhomme’s backup. wait for the inevitable injury, have Steve Smith and Muhsin Muhammad make me look better than I really am, and voila! Guess who’s back quarterbacking a sub-.500 team?

Oh, who the fuck am I kidding Gus Ferotte could throw rings around me. I done. I am fucking done. Maybe I’ll just murder the new GM and thus deterring anyone else from taking the position. Eventually they’ll have to rehire Millen, who’ll be desperate enough to take the job, but I’ll have to rack up a sizable body count. Can I do this? I think I can. It’s just the Christian thing to do. There is no way some of these guys are getting the contracts they do if Millen isn’t there to offer them. I’m like Robin Hood, except instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, I murder the psuedo-rich and give to the wouldn’t be rich otherwise.

I the end, they’ll anoint me their savior, because this city wouldn’t be able to handle a winning NFL team. Any city dubbed “Hockey Town” doesn’t deserve an NFL winner anyways. They also have the Pistons who are perenially pretending to be in contention for a title. And even the Tigers have started spending money. No, this town needs me. They need someone who provides a glimmer of optimism with no tangible hope. This is the Detroit Lions way. And I embody it.

I am QB1 for the Detroit football Lions. And I am here to stay.

So, as shitty as our fantasy teams appear to be for the remainder of the season, it appears we were right about Marc Bulger (In fact we were right on with just about everyone on that list). And I don’t know if you noticed or not, but there is an epidemic of quarterbacks being used as the scapegoat for everything wrong with a team, and the epidemic was probably a long time in the making. The coach is usually the first to unreasonably get the ax so it was only a matter of time before the most important position on the field saw some of that unfair scrutiny effect his status on the team.

Right now if we look at top ten draft picks from the first ten years, very few of the quarterbacks taken have panned out to be even starters, much less in pro bowl contention. Currently, and this is just off the top of my head: Matt Leinart, Vince Young, Byron Leftwich, Alex Smith and even JaMarcus Russell (whom we’re already convinced is a bust) were all supposed to be leading their teams to the playoffs, and every single one of them is either playing on a bottom feeder or is currently a backup.

I think there are parallels here between how quarterbacks have panned out over the years and the futility of taking a quarterback too soon in your draft. I, of course, advised taking Tom Brady with the first overall (still stand by it because his numbers were so exceptional the year before). I guess the question is, how are we supposed to have any faith in a quarterback for fantasy purposes if every NFL team is so uncertain in who is going to help them produce wins? They tend to have a lot more on the line than you and I.

It's good to know that my team can go winless every year from here on out and I won't have an entire American city cursing my very existence.

I imagine in most fantasy drafts, Brady and Manning went one and two, and Drew Brees along with Tony Romo went three and four. Obviously the latter two are having better seasons than the former, so why is the common consensus in fantasy football so regularly incorrect? My argument would be that it is all subjective and no one (including us) really has an inkling as to what he is talking about, but really it might play to your advantage in situations like this to go against the tide.

There is no rhyme or reason why Romo seems to have improved on this season or Jay Cutler or even David Gerrard and Derek Anderson have gotten so much worse. But there were mounting reports about the reliability of Brady and Manning’s health, now Brady is done for the season and Manning limps around in the backfield like the gimp from Pulp Fiction. But unlike running backs (whose season output generally seems foretold) and to a lesser extent receivers, quarterbacks often go well above and below their seasonal expectations. This is all dependent on your league structure and whatnot, but if you are confident enough in your starters at other positions and have six bench spots, you can use at least two of them on additional quarterbacks.

Right now in our league, a guy drafted Eli Manning in the seventh, Kurt Warner in the tenth and Aaron Rodgers in the fourteenth. It may have seemed ridiculous at the time, but his team hasn’t been effected negatively by it in any way and now he has trade bait for two teams desperate for an upgrade, despite how tenuous the performances of his quarterbacks are. This is in direct contrast with me: I went for Peyton Manning in round 1 and despite having the last pick in the first round, I clearly should have gone with another wide out or even a running back (despite my past declarations to the contrary). Because while having the type of season Manning is having has been adequate to date, he is now an injury risk and his numbers pale in comparison to those of Tony Romo, Drew Brees and even Aaron Rodgers.

If I had taken, say Terrell Owens with that pick, gone with Eli Manning or Donovan McNabb in later rounds (something I was toying with), my team would look a lot more impressive, especially now that Marques Colston is out for the near future and probably won’t return to his pro bowl form (though Jeremy Shockey being out helps emphasize the need for his speedy recovery).

Obviously this isn’t gospel, if you think drafting a quarterback in lieu of a reliable running back is your best option, then by all means. But if one of those annual top four or five is unavailable to you, and you were bitten by the Tom Brady bug this year thus souring you to the concept of drafting a quarterback as well, don’t take someone like Larry Johnson or Stephen Jackson who we all know will put up paltry numbers just because every draft board says you should. Go with the receiver, because a top ten receiver is always reliable, so long as it isn’t Braylon Edwards, who was my second round pick.

Fuck you Browns, fuck you proper with a chainsaw.

Finally back in Columbus, trying to recover from the experience that is spending 2,200 miles in a Greyhound. Trust me, it is no easy feat. Anyhow, since all of our fantasy teams gargle balls and we didn’t follow any of it this weekend while we were across the country for football (albeit college), we thought we’d go a little off the cuff and recap some thoughts from the trip.

First off, if you are looking for current fantasy advice, we really don’t have any. We were driving all day the past two Sundays and the only game we made a point to watch was the Monday nighter between the Cowboys and Eagles. We’ll try to get caught up this week with some recent developments. Namely several teams with sudden quarterback issues.

In regards to our trip however, we will say that after watching USC pummel the Christ out of OSU, and Georgia do the same to Arizona State, we advise that in your next keeper draft you should draft Chris Wells (his absence was more palpable than his presence could have ever been), Terrell Pryor (he’s not Vince Young), Joe McKnight, Patrick Turner, Knowshon Moreno and AJ Green.

I don’t give a shit how premature it may seem. Don’t ask questions, don’t even bother looking any of these players up if you do not watch college football, just do what we say and for once you won’t regret it.

-Also on the football end of things, hitting 7 of 8 games in a $12 eight team parlay is about the worst thing that can happen to someone while in Vegas. You have to be incredibly lucky to hit 7 of 8, and knowing that not only did you do just that, but you needlessly tacked on an eighth game and that cost you any payout (much less a $2,200 one), well, lets just say that the only game I won at was Hold ‘em.

-Speaking of Vegas, the place is overran with Europeans these days taking advantage of the weak dollar. I for one welcome our brethren from across the pond, but it seemed like any time I brought this up they managed to take offense on some level or another like they thought I was angry with the situation; when actually I thought I was paying them a compliment. Some bridges just can’t be mended, I guess.

-On the flip side, I’m pretty sure every American woman I talked to in that city was a call girl of some sort. Maybe I was going to the wrong places or something, I don’t know, but this seems to be the effect of a relatively weak currency, the place toting said currency is flooded with foreign tourists and a healthy percentage of the native women start working the corner. Basically, Las Vegas is now Brazil.

-In short, I think NFL quarterbacks should be the happiest people on the face of the Earth that their isn’t a team in Vegas. You already need all your faculties (understatement) to play that position to the point that only about four or five quarterbacks are reliable on a weekly basis. Can you imagine Eli Manning having the game he had yesterday if he was coming off an all night blackjack bender at the Palms? Or worse yet, Matt Leinart? I suppose we are getting ahead of ourselves, before you can tank a game you have to be invited to play in it.

-Speaking of Trojans, as an OSU fan we couldn’t have been happier to be cooped up in Venice Beach after the drubbing that our Buckeyes took. Why is that you ask? Mainly because football doesn’t exist in Venice. Basketball does, football doesn’t. Generally when you go to a city for a nationally televised football game, like, say, OSU vs. USC, and people ask you where you are from and you reply “Ohio” and they retort, “Oh, what’re you here for?” and you say “the game”, it is usually implied that you are talking about the aforementioned match-up. But in Venice you get a “Oh, the UCLA game?” response, and nothing warms your heart more after watching your team get trounced and publicly humiliated (yet again) on national television.

Yes, basketball is alive and well on Venice Beach, there were even some drunk fucking brats from the midwest playing at 3am. Or so I heard.

-And finally, as great as the ASU coeds are, they really have nothing on the food served in the stadium. Oh dear lord. We don’t know if it was the fact that we hadn’t eaten in the past day (literally), or the sun was particularly draining (we were frightened to drink alcohol) or if the food was really all that we are making it. Forget the coeds, I want to roll around naked in a bed with about four dozen of their chicken wings, Indecent Proposal style. Wait, what?

Anyhow, we’ll get back to normalcy later this week. Our neighbors can still hear our screams that linger from the Greyhound ride.

We’re just posting today to tell you we won’t be posting for awhile, we are taking a much needed vacation out west. Yes, its been a grueling three weeks and we need some time away. We won’t be able to write anything until at least Monday after we look at box scores and what have you, and I wouldn’t expect anything until at least Tuesday or Wednesday.

There is plenty going on between fantasy owners now having to rearrange their roster as the result of a natural disaster (the least of anyone’s concerns, to be sure); Romo, while definitely being a good samaratin, is way too soft to ever win a Superbowl; Tomlinson is now preparing to pull a Beanie Wells on Chargers fans; Ricky Williams has seen Jerry Maguire one too many times and Terrell Owens draws more attention to himself, of which we are wittingly enabling. Fuck.

But alas, we’ll have to leave you to your own resources this weekend. Best of luck and to all of you Peyton Manning owners we offer our advance condolences. Trust us, we know how you feel.

Fuck you, Marques Colston. I didn’t even want you on my fantasy team in the first place, but taking you with the last pick in the fifth round was just too alluring to ignore. How do you respond to this act of charity so your name isn’t lingering around on the draft board like Brady Quinn in 2006? Well, not only do you fuck me with a four point performance for opening week, you neglect to give the proverbial reach around by going to injured reserve for a third of the season.

For six weeks I have to find a replacement for you. Christ, why can’t you just call it quits for the year so I can drop your dead weight off my roster? Everyone knows that the Saints are winning with or without you and you’ll be a shell of your former self when you return. You are the most expendable “stud” receiver in the history of the NFL. Yet you have managed to put up suitable numbers in each of your two years in the league, so we bit. 50th overall and virtually every fantasy board has you ranked higher, in addition to every remaining receiver having issues be it on or off the field. We take a risk against our better judgment.

Oooh, nice job on torching the Lions. You're now in Michael Turner territory.

And you fuck us tremendously. We knew the ball would be spread around too much in New Orleans this year with the acquisition of Jeremy Shockey. David Patten and DeVry Henderson are both serviceable options, not to mention the ascendance of Robert Meachem and Lance Moore. Plus the running backs, namely Reggie Bush who is essentially a receiver as well. Way to prove us right, “stud”.

This isn’t over Colston, and if you don’t surprise us by returning to form immediately after your rehabilitation, that tweaked finger you sporadically had surgery on this week without telling anyone for some inexplicable reason will feel like an ocean breeze, got it? We’re going to be particularly vengeful when The Vikings disembowel Peyton Manning this Sunday.

Fuck head.

It was a relatively boring slate of games. A couple close ones that were actually entertaining (Tampa-New Orleans, San Diego-Carolina), some soul-crushingly slow but competitive contests (KC-New England, Jacksonville-Tennessee), the usual plethora of blowouts and a bunch of undefinable contests that we couldn’t stand to watch because our fantasy team looked like shit.

We don’t want to get to self-involved, but it really was an outstandingly shitty performance from all angles. Braylon Edwards (he should invest in some gloves), Marques Colston and Maurice Jones-Drew were all outscored by Tennessee’s defense (which admittedly looked nasty), Peyton Manning had a great game even with all the dropped passes from his receivers so his fantasy tally was rather mediocre, Seattle’s Defense was shredded by Buffalo’s special teams and Jonathan Stewart’s running load wasn’t nearly as high as advertised. In short, we had two guys go into double digits with Manning and LenDale White, and White had exactly ten points.

Fucking Christ. You couldn’t buy luck that bad. If you look back at our rankings for all of the positions, how everyone performed relative to where they are ranked, it is about as accurate as anyone could hope for something so random. But every single slip up seemed to be active on our roster. It is early, but this is discouraging.

Anyhow, some highlights from the first Sunday of the 2008 NFL season:

-It’s good to see that the Bengals were able to use that great field position to, in return, give Baltimore poor field position. Some say it shows a lack of offensive firepower. We here at talking fantasy football call that efficient. It wasn’t exactly eye-candy, and we were stuck with it in central Ohio. Also, one thing we learned about this game: Carson Palmer fucking blows. There. I said it.

This about sums up the Browns performance.

-Speaking of which, we got the Browns-Cowboys game, and Dallas just looked solid on both sides of the ball and like a fantasy goldmine. The Browns looked like they had maybe the fifth worst defense in the league behind St. Louis, Detroit, Cincinnati & Houston. I mean, did Barber have a run shorter than 7 yards? Even the commentators were marveling over the amount of plays over fifteen yards. You knew it was going to be a long season for their defense when they stopped a third down conversion in the first quarter, and their defense acted like they had just won the Superbowl.

-Oh, and thanks FOX for not taking us to the Carolina-San Diego game. I don’t give a shit if CBS had rights to it, sneak a fucking camera onto the field.

-If you heeded my advice and took Tom Brady early in your draft, my apologies. All signs kind of pointed to something like this happening with the rampant speculation about that boot he was wearing. Funny thing, we were playing the kid who drafted Brady in our league and we still couldn’t capitalize. Also, all of you who drafted Maroney, Welker, Moss, you all have my condolences as well.

-I think I may have mentioned my trepidation about the Rams fantasy potential this year. So while we were getting mud-stomped all day yesterday, at least we can hang our hat on being right about St. Louis for a week.

-Is it too early to consider this a bounce back season for Reggie Bush? The NFC South is all of a sudden looking remarkably competitive. Even Atlanta ran up 35.

More on all of this later, including top surprise performers of the week. Though its fairly obvious who is heading that list.

So we held our fantasy draft for my league that I actually care about the results of, and uh, needless to say, I do not like the team I ended up with.

After scrambling to make sure my nitwit friends knew when our draft was and what the stipulations were despite telling each of them at least five times, I was rewarded with the last pick in the first round. And that is fine, we’ve said before we would rather have the last than the first, first round pick. But being too far one way or the other, with each couplet of picks you have to take into consideration how the rest of your entire league is going to draft each of their next two rounds, and that is virtually impossible.

Bottom line is, we are going to find something to bitch about regardless of where we are picking because fantasy sports seems to be the one facet of life that we are incapable of being reasonable about, and this was no exception.

This is basically what we turn into on draft day.

The team isn’t all bad, but I felt as if I was treading water the entire time and ended up taking players I might otherwise not want. No one wants to hear the intricate details of any fantasy football draft other than their own so I’ll keep this pithy: we were seduced by the temptress that is the yahoo rankings, which we often disagree with but assume the fellow teams in our fantasy leagues use as a template for how they draft. And they do, just to a limited extent we did not anticipate. If yahoo is a hooker in the brothel that is internet fantasy rankings, then she has VD, is forty-five years old, and on Sunday night we had a Jimmy McNulty like stupor going on.

Other notes, we went with Peyton Manning as our first round pick, he has fucked us in gambling before (both for and against…think Pittsburgh, playoffs 2005 as the most egregious example) and we know he will in fantasy as well. Braylon Edwards, Marques Colston and Maurice Jones-Drew as our first running back made up rounds 2-4 for us. Notable picks that may seem out of place (either too high or low) were Matt Hasselbeck in the 9th round (hopefully trade bait for a couple teams in my league), Kenny Watson in the 8th and Bobby Engram in the 12th.

We have little justification for how we drafted Colston so high and just as little explanation for getting Hasselbeck in the 9th, but that tends to be the nature of these things. You have one guy who overdrafts all his players, someone always ends up with an aging and injury prone roster, one team that looks loaded one and one that looks dreadful; and you just sort the chips as they come. Unfortunately for us, the one aspect of our team that we like relative to the rest of the league is our backup receivers (Vincent Jackson, Bobby Engram and Mushin Muhammad). That, I have to imagine, is not a good sign.

Some highlights from the draft were Philip Rivers going in the second round to a guy who was auto-picking clearly with his own rankings, because not even Yahoo can fuck things up that bad. Supposedly he is counting on a really, really big year from the NC State alum. Also, Eddie Royal being drafted in the 12th (at all is surprising, really; by the same guy who took Rivers), Boldin falling to the fifth and Derrick Mason to the 15th all kind of blew my hair back.

Here are our draft results if you want to ask us for further explanation. Despite our provocations in the last paragraph, we can talk incessantly about why we opted for each player we did. And if you look at how we ranked players a couple weeks ago, it is pretty true to form. But go ahead, tell us how mistaken and misguided we are.