Fantasy Football

Oh yeah, the playoff games. As you could probably tell from today’s earlier post, I was woefully unimpressed with the Dolphins-Ravens match-up, particularly the Dolphins performance. Chad Pennington made Phil Mickelson look collected at Wingfoot with his showing yesterday afternoon. If you actually used any of the players from this game in your fantasy challenge, then bully for you, but I still think you’re an idiot. Unless you had Baltimore’s defense (five forced turnovers and a solid effort all around) the outcome probably left something to be desired. God help you if you were enough of a homer to take Chad Pennington.

The follow up was an improvement, but not much of one. Compared to Saturday Sunday’s games were like watching grass grow. Philly came out and gave the Vikings a pretty thorough and convincing beating. If anyone thought that Tavaris Jackson could impede Minnesota’s progress, then you thought right. His game statistically speaking wasn’t the worst of the day (that honor belongs to MVP runner up Chad Pennington), but it really should have been. We are in the playoffs, after all. Even if he wasn’t the worst of the four quarterbacks playing on Sunday, he was the most responsible for his team’s failures. In fact, I will go so far as to say of all the people on the field, he was solely responsible.

On the sidelines Brad Childress should definitely endure some of the blame. Set aside the fact that the offense looks inept and one-dimensional 90% of the time they take the field, and that he is obviously limited by his quarterback options, he didn’t do any adjusting to potentially help aid his struggling QB. Take for example, when there were roughly six minutes left, Minnesota was down two scores and clearly not advancing the ball down field anytime soon, wouldn’t it had made sense to pull Jackson out in favor of Ferotte. I mean, Gus isn’t exactly Tom Brady, but he’s clearly the better pocket passer of the two and thus more likely to hit open receivers when time is of the essence.

But no. They ended up punting, then getting yet another stop out of their defense, then he fumbled the ball on their last offensive possession of the game. All while the coach sat idly by waiting for Tavaris Jackson to do something everyone knows he’s incapable of doing: Leading an NFL team to victory in the waning minutes of a game. I’m sure the Minny fans who came out at the last second to purchase tickets appreciated it.

Still this wasn’t a problem for just this game, but pretty much the entire season. With the slew of quarterbacks set to enter the 2009 draft, I expect Minnesota to address this need direly. In fact, if I’m Detroit, I attempt to take advantage of their situation and trade away the rights of the first overall to them for a slew of middle-tier picks.

In short, I’m not sure how dominant Philly was but rather how dominant Minnesota made them look. The Eagles are going into the Meadowlands next week, to play a Giants team that has since adjusted to being top 10 receiver-less since the last time they crushed them 20-8, shortly after the nightclub self-inflicted gun wound incident. If they resemble the type of team they showed then and last night, I think we’ll be looking at yet another NFC title game for Donovan McNabb and the Eagles, if not, I’m sure a once banged up but rested Giants squad is going to come out swinging.

That’s pretty much it. We’ll try to dedicate a full post to each game this upcoming weekend from now until Friday. Until then, hopefully something relevant and interesting to fantasy football will come to mind so we can try to stay on topic.