What a strange, topsy-turvy week of fantasy football that was. The day started off like every Sunday does with me building and tweaking my teams as the 1pm cut off point approached with all the naive enthusiasm of a kid on his first day at school. With a clear two fingers in the face of logic and reason I believed that all my times would some how take down every competition they had been entered into and that I would have a pirate’s bounty worth of cash by the end of the day.
Then the games started and nobody, not the players I had rostered or the ones I hadn’t, seemed to be doing anything. There was a point early on Sunday afternoon where I actually wondered whether a big GPP might be taken down by a team scoring under 200 points. And if this fanciable notion were to actually happen, why couldn’t it be me. I had a team with a Rodgers, Nelson, Adams stack that was somewhere around the bottom 1,000 in the millionaire maker and as the afternoon sun peered in the glass doors of my living room and the clock marched towards 2 o’clock I allowed myself to dream. The Packers were destroying the Panthers, Rodgers was throwing it effortlessly around the hardening turf of Lambeau and if Jordy could just catch another say, two TD’s, this dream might have a shot of growing into reality.
Then Russell Wilson started going berserk, Golden Tate caught a 75 yard touchdown pass, Sammy Watkins caught ALL the passes, the Packers destroyed the Panthers just a bit too much and that’s even before Peyton and the rest of his merry bunch of pass catchers broke every record going, at least I think that’s what happened judging by NBC’s superlative laden broadcast. I didn’t win the $1,000,000, in fact that team who earlier in the afternoon had filled me with such hope crashed and burned to 51,717th place finishing with a thoroughly demoralizing 115.40 points. I was a cool 126.22 points behind the winner. How embarrassing.
Anyway, the weekend wasn’t a complete loss for me and as I foolishly enter this bankroll crushing tournament every week my expectations of winning the thing have fallen more in line with the statistical chances of me winning and so the crushing disappointment isn’t quite as tough to handle.
I wrote last week about picking two different teams, one based on my early week gut feeling and the other following a week of research. Let’s take a look at the results of both teams.
Early week team
Late week team
So the late week team did considerably better than the early and I’m happy about that, I think. I don’t know, would you rather have really good instincts here or better research skills? It’s only one week so luck and randomness have to be factored in of course but if anything I’m glad my time and effort actually paid off.
The biggest bonus to my second team was adding Sammy Watkins who scored more than 7x times his salary. He was an absolute beast. I felt pretty good about putting him in and he obviously paid off. His low salary also let me pay up to get Jordy Nelson. As I alluded to above, I thought he was in line for a monster day but after such a hot start he finished with 18 points. Nelson caught a 59 yard touchdown pass on the opening drive, followed that up with 3 more catches on the next Green Bay drive and that was it. His fantasy scoring was over with 6.36 left in the first quarter. Hard to be annoyed with 80 yards and a touchdown but….. actually it’s not that hard. I am annoyed.
Elsewhere, the Cutler Kaep swap was the right call but overall it was just two poor decisions at the QB spot. I was starting to feel confident watching Kaepernick put together that drive at the end of the 2nd quarter and he made plenty of those classic ‘Kaepernick’ plays running around making ridiculous throws but once he threw that awful interception at the beginning of the 3rd, San Francisco were done and alas, so was Kaepernick (Am I the only one who has to look his name up every.damn.time I write it?) That didn’t stop me slamming something, I can’t remember what, in disgust as I saw Blaine Gabbert enter the game. This is where fantasy football turns me into an irrational knucklehead. I didn’t care that it was the correct decision and could even have been made the drive before, I WANTED KAEPERNICK TO SCORE MORE POINTS!
The other main difference in final point tallies came down to the swap at tight end and it was a strange one. Jordan Cameron accumulated 1.5 points with just one reception. He had an ownership percentage of the 20.7% in the millionaire maker so a lot of people were banking on a better performance but this is always the risk when you roster pass catchers on teams with below average QB’s. This wasn’t all Brian Hoyer’s fault as the Browns failed to get anything going offensively but he missed a wide open Cameron in the red zone in the first half and over all the tight end was targeted 6 times as Hoyer compiled an anaemic stat line of 16/41 for 215 yards.
Donnell proved that the Cowboys can indeed be attacked through the TE position as he tallied up a respectable 14 points but those two fumbles left a sour taste in my mouth as it cost the Giants any chance of getting back into the game. Is it me or does there seem to be an unusual amount of drops and fumbles this year? I don’t know if it’s poor concentration from offensive players or improved tackling but it’s one of the most frustrating parts of watching football to see a guy you have in your team drop or fumble the ball.
None of the big names really dominated at tight end this week with relative unknowns like Cooper Helfet and Gavin Escobar finishing as two of the highest scoring players at the position. I saw Helfet rostered in a team high up in the millionaire maker and his ownership percentage was 0.00%. I originally put that down to a shot in the dark but upon further inspection the Seahawks ruled out Zach Miller before the game on top of their No.1 Willson already being out due to injury so maybe this was just somebody paying really close attention to the in actives list on Sunday morning. If so, it was a shrewd move and I'll be sure to bring it up next week when when my girlfriend attempts to bring me knick knack shopping on Sunday morning.
As for defense, I think my feeling of it being a complete crapshoot held up. In case you didn’t know, the Jacksonville Jaguars were the highest scoring fantasy team this week. There isn’t much more to be said. As for my teams, the Browns scored one point more but they had a higher ownership percentage and were more expensive than the Steelers. For this week I’m again going to be using my strategy of looking for a home team going up against a shaky QB at a discount price. Outside of the Lions there isn’t really a dominant D right now.
I think that just about wraps up the two teams. The running back change was a wash and Marshall went down (shouting at least) with Cutler. Golden Tate was phenomenal, Rueben Randle was less so, #analysis. Luckily I stuck my second team in the millionaire maker and they finished 6,385th giving me the minimum payout. After missing out on that 2 weeks ago by 0.02 points I was happy to at least get some return on the competition that seems intent on destroying my bank roll. I’m going to select another gut/instinct team right after this and put it up in post tomorrow followed by a researched team later in the week and we’ll see how they both fair up on Sunday. Thanks for reading and feel free to leave comments/criticism below.
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