Fantasy Football

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.