Fantasy Football

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.