Week 17 - #nobodyknowsanything

First, let’s start with a list.

1. Waiting in line at a store with two registers open and 8 closed.

2. Losing the remote control.

3. Calling a customer care department for any reason.

4. Attempting to speak to a human from a customer care department.

5. Skip Bayless.

6. Having no milk in the morning.

7. Internet trolls.

8. The sound of a vacuum cleaner.

9. People listening to obnoxiously loud music on public transport.

10. Passwords not working on websites.

11. Having to have 428 different passwords with different combinations all using upper case, lower case, numbers and at least one of @,£,$,%,&,*, and being told you need to change them every few months.

All of these things are more enjoyable than losing in all my cash games on the last meaningful play of the last game of week 17. Antonio Brown, you are a wonderfully talented player but the level of vitriol I felt for you as you beat the Bengals CB and ran for a touchdown was off the charts.

Granted this was a team with a final points total of 121.46 so on the surface, there isn’t a whole lot to complain about but as you probably noticed, week 17 was a pretty low scoring affair. This team also included Vincent Jackson who conveniently left the field in the first quarter after catching one pass for eleven yards. Having a player on your cash game line-ups leave the game with an injury in the first quarter is somewhere between noise on public transport and Skip Bayless on the annoying list.

Before I get to the point of this post I’d like to indulge in some more self-pity for a moment if that’s ok with you. Cast your mind back to week 16 and the joy of a full weekend of games (tip a forty to the curb for the regular season). Last Monday night football of the year. Broncos Bengals. My spluttering cash game line-up has survived Drew Brees’ selfish attempts to ensure I lose money and is slowly creeping up the scoreboard thanks to DFS GOAT C.J Anderson.

On the final meaningful drive of the game he catches a bunch of passes and rushes for 27 yards. One more catch or another run over 10 yards would have put me into the top 50% but instead Peyton decides to join Brees’ spiteful club of making sure I lose money and he throws an interception. I missed out on cashing a pretty substantial amount of cash games by about one point. I’m not going to go back and check the exact amount as it’s the equivalent of creeping on a facebook page of the guy your ex girlfriend is now dating. Only bad things can come from it. You need to move on.

A quick addendum to this section of self-pity. I had a healthy dose of both Arian Foster and Le’Veon Bell yesterday. Bell in cash and GPP, Foster justGPP. Couple that with Jackson’s injury, the Vikings skill players collective no show (more on that below) and you end up with a teeth gnashing, pillow pounding kind of day. Many mistakes have been made over this 17 week season but none more egregious than investing the amount of money I did in a slate of games that just screamed volatility and unpredictability beforehand. All good bankroll practices were thrown out the window and full on tilt mode was activated for the afternoon games. The results were not pretty.

But we move on, and we move on to another list. Here follows a list of things that makes everybody feel stupid and hammers home the prevailing narrative throughout the entire fantasy football season, #nobodyknowsanything.

Eric Decker scored more points than….everybody.

To counteract the self-pity, get ready for some some smug self-congratulatory behavior. I had Eric Decker on my $400k Gridiron Draft Kings team and he was 0.7% owned. Naturally my team also had Bell and Foster but you knew that already. Granted Decker is a WR for the New York Jets but 0.7% seemed ludicrously low. He basically doubled his highest score of the season against the Dolphins, in Miami, with Geno Smith throwing him the ball. He had more DK points than our all mighty ruler, King Odell Beckham Jr.

Geno Smith scored more points than…..everybody.

Want to know how many line-ups had Geno Smith in the Gridiron contest? 0.0%.

According to PFF Miami has the second best pass rush in football and the Jets have the second worst passing offense so this was a pretty easy one to predict. By the way, Colin Kaepernick put up the third highest amount of points on the week. He was 0.5% owned.

Ryan Lindley threw for two touchdowns and 316 passing yards.

Ryan Lindley love giving away bibles.

And he’s really struggled since being inserted as a starter for the Cardinals. These are things I know about Ryan Lindley. I did not know that he would put up so many passing yards against the 49ers defense. Other things I don’t know: how to rewire a plug and the capital of Chad. Fortunately, the internet can provide answers for these two queries, the internet DID NOT tell me to play Ryan Lindley in fantasy football yesterday.

People saying “he’s just not a good football” player.

See Coby Fleener and Matt Asiata. Simple rule of thumb, if they are playing for an NFL team they are at the very least ‘good football players.’ Coby Fleener had another high scoring fantasy day yesterday and Matt Asiata has scored 10 TD’s this season despite being the two most maligned players throughout the year.

Michael Floyd finally caught a deep ball for a touchdown. And then he did it again.

Ah Michael Floyd. The greatest DFS troll of the season with an honorary mention for both Rueben Randle and Colin Kaepernick. Continuing the trend, Floyd was 0.3% owned and those lucky 72 odd teams got a tasty 38.3 DK points for their ballsy move. Floyd’s previous high? 20 points all the way back in week 1. Floyd was a highly touted low priced guy throughout the early weeks of the season which means he falls into that well known ‘we all thought we knew something, then we all thought we were wrong and felt annoyed by it but it turns out we were kind of right, except that it was too late’ category.

Injured players.

We are aware that players suffer injuries of course, cut cruelly, it’s also something that’s almost impossible to predict. In fact picking a player with an injury concern is a savvy GPP strategy. But nobody can know who will get injured during a game and the sad reality is that a football player getting injured is far more likely than a player in any other sport. It’s a tough way to lose money no doubt but something you have to be aware of. Jackson, Bell and Foster all hurt my teams yesterday, I’m sure there were many more. All the rotogrinders articles and PFF stats will not save you from a pulled hamstring or a torn ACL.

Dez, Tony & Demarco.

I know some people played the Cowboys yesterday but did anybody really expect them to play almost the whole game? And if they did, they surely couldn’t have expected Romo to throw 34 passes and Murray to have 20 rushing attempts in what ended up being a complete blowout.

I didn’t, but maybe I’m just bitter about the fact that my sneaky GPP stack was Luck and Hilton instead of Romo and Dez.

Lamar Millar rushed for 178 yards against the top ranked PFF run defense.

This game made no sense. It’s o/u was 41 by the way. It finished 37-24.

Chris Owusu.

Chris Owusu is a wide receiver for the New York Jets. He had a 23 yard rushing touchdown yesterday. This was the first rushing attempt of his career. Moving on…

A Thielen.

I’m not looking up what the ‘A’ stands for. Yesterday started unspeakably bad for me so about half way through the first set of games I had to take myself away from the TV. I went to get some dog food. It was a relatively drab affair and it calmed my bubbling rage towards the events transpiring on the television screen. I returned to see that the Vikings had finally scored a touchdown. Hooray I thought. Until I saw it was an ‘A Thielen’ catch and not a Charles Johnson one or an Asiata run. I don’t know who ‘A Thielen’ is and I do not care to, I just know that he was not meant to be catching touchdowns yesterday.

The Vikings offense.

The Vikings had been on a nice run leading into their home game against the Bears. That’s the ranked 30th against the pass and 27th against the run Chicago Bears in case you were wondering. The Vikings had put up 30+ points in 3 of their last 4 games (the outlier here was against the Lions) and just last week they scored 35 against the Dolphins in Miami. They scored 13 against the Bears…….sigh.

You keep on being you NFL, you big beautiful enigma, and we’ll keep on trying to work you out.

I could go on but I need to go walk my dog and clear the week 17 mist of confusion from my brain.

Happy bloody New Year.