Terrell Owens

I’m 7-6 and the #4 seed in a six-team league. #s 1 and 2 get a bye in the first week, so technically I’m a high seed this week, getting the 6-7 Soaring Yetis, whom I beat in our last meeting in week 12. He and I are the two worst n00bs in this league, in that we’re n00bs but we’re trying to wheel and deal, make a lot of moves, etc. The other newbie did better than us, and she let Yahoo! draft her team for her and hardly manipulated her team at all. Yes, yes, there’s a lot of messages there, and I’m trying to learn from them, but I didn’t know all that at the time. Anyway, I feel mildly confident because his team has streakier players than mine - they can go off for huge numbers, but their averages are mostly lower than mine.

The good news, as I already leaked yesterday, is that I won the round. The bad news, I yet again made poor decisions that left points on the bench. Once again, the key decisions are at QB, RB, and defense.

• I started Cutler (vs. Kansas City) over Manning (vs. Cincinnati). Fail, to the tune of 22-29.
• I started Brandon Jacobs (vs. Philadelphia) and LaDanian Tomlinson (vs. Oakland) over DeAngelo Williams (vs. Tampa Bay and their supposedly-staunch run defense) and Maurice Jones-Drew (at Chicago).  Jacobs: 5. LT: 15. Williams: 30. Jones-Drew: 15. So, half-wash, half-25 point screw up.
• Chicago had 9, Pittsburgh had 23. Yep, another 14 points on the bench.

So, despite winning my match (the Yetis only got 15 from all receivers and another 15 from running backs) I still left 46 points on the bench. I’d be a monster if I could just get out of my own way. This is particularly rough since I get the #1 seed next week, and he would’ve gone for 96 or so if he hadn’t had a bye. The other match that week also went 106-97, so both of them would’ve beat me.

It’s another multi-week update this time. In case your decision tree for reading this goes something like “why would I read 500+ words when I don’t even know if he’s still got a team at this point?” I’ll cut the drama - I won my 1st round game. Now, how did that happen?

For starters, I made some correct decisions for once in my fantasy life. In week 12, I didn’t really make any roster moves, other than deciding who should start and who should sit. Those decisions play out in three key areas: QB, RB, and Defense.  Cutler was facing Oakland which, despite being an awful team, doesn’t actually have that bad of a secondary, so I went with Peyton Manning instead; Manning out-scored Cutler 20-6 over a tough San Diego defense. Running back is a pretty tough bunch to choose between, but out of Brandon Jacobs (at Arizona), Maurice Jones-Drew (vs. the Vikings), LaDanian Tomlinson (vs Indy) and DeAngelo Williams (at Atlanta), I went with LT and Williams. Well, Jacobs was a late scratch for his knee and Jones-Drew tied my lower back (LT), so win #2. Finally, I had Chicago at St. Louis and Pittsburgh hosting the Bengals. Normally I’d take the home team, but Bengals/Steelers is a divisional game and I just figured that the Rams were going to bad, home or away. Sure enough, the Bears D outscored Pittsburgh 20-7. That week my opponent put up 107 points (that’s a lot even if this league), but thanks to a rare swath of sound judgement I managed 119 for a solid victory.

The win put me at 6-6 and, thanks to a very bunched league, within reach of the #2 seed! It would take a victory with a *lot* of points (to cover a potential tie-breaker) and a loss by a 6-5-1 team. Conceivable, but tough.

Really, Peyton Manning? Really, Marvin Harrison? I lost by more than you would’ve covered, so thanks for that. :p Yes, the Ceiling Cats are down to 2-4, getting pasted 108-91. Let’s take a look, shall we?

I’m going to stop trying to be clever, because clearly I’m not very good at it. At least, so far I’ve been terrible. This week’s mayhem? Sensing a tough game with the Ravens, I benched the ’til-now inconsistent Peyton Manning and the all-season weak Marvin Harrison in favor of Jay Cutler and Santana Moss. Marshawn Lynch had a bye, so he was out as well, but I’ve actually felt ok about Brandon Jacobs, and I’ve got to resign myself to the fact that LaDanian Tomlinson is whut brung me, so I gotta dance wit’ ‘im. That makes the lineup for this week:

• QB - Jay Cutler
• WR - Terrell Owens
• WR - Santana Moss
• WR - Roddy White
• RB - LaDanian Tomlinson
• RB - Brandon Jacobs
• TE - Anthony Fasano
• K - Nate Kaeding
• DEF - Philadelphia

Peyton was back to form.

Let me paint a picture for you. Yahoo! projected that this week’s game would be a 96-96 tie. Yes, the projections are often wrong, but there’s a consistency in the wrongness that you start to get a feel for after awhile. So no, it wasn’t going to be 96-96, but a pretty high-scoring affair seemed to be in order given the small league with teams full of stars. So, would me losing 69-54 surprise you? Let’s recap, shall we?

Moves during the week were minimal. I finally gave up on Kellen Winslow, if for no other reason than the QB throwing to him has been so inconsistent. I don’t know a thing about Anthony Fasano of Miami, but he was the highest-scoring tight end in free agency, so I picked him up. My opponent, The Ghost of Bill Mundy (inside joke at my company), grew worried about Aaron Rogers’ injury and replaced his backup, Ben Roethlisberger, with Trent Edwards of Buffalo. I had a feeling that Peyton Manning was going to get healthy against the Texans, as would Marvin Harrison, so into the line-up they went. And so the stage was set. My team:

• QB - Peyton Manning
• WR - Terrell Owens
• WR - Santana Moss
• WR - Marvin Harrison
• RB - Marshawn Lynch
• RB - LaDanian Tomlinson
• TE - Anthony Fasano
• K - Nate Kaeding
• DEF - Philadelphia

Streak!

Marshawn Lynch

After squeaking out a win by a single point last week, this week’s version of Ceiling Cats was high score in the league, beating my opponent by a comfortable margin. As I’m learning more and more each week, a lot of it was luck. For example, Santana Moss and Terrell Owens both had bit point hauls in the Washington-Dallas battler and I had both of them. 35 points out of my 3 receivers is a pretty darned good day.

Before the week, I had to do some shuffling as I had several byes to contend with. Peyton’s bye was no biggie since Cutler has been playing lights out this year, but Plaxico Burress and Brandon Jacobs had been doing well for me. The RB issue wasn’t so big since, after all, I had the #1 frickin’ pick of the league riding my pine - it was time for LaDanian Tomlinson to shoulder his load. The receiver issue was trickier since Marvin Harrison was on a bye, too. I decided to ditch Santonio Holmes of Pittsburgh, since he hadn’t been fit to start all year, and picked the inconsistent Roddy White back up, again.

Success!

Finally, a couple of moves that I made paid off. I dropped Cleveland’s Derek Anderson from my bench and picked up Jay Cutler (I know, obvious in retrospect but at the time it was mildly risky). I sat my #1 QB, Peyton Manning, figuring Indy’s weak line play was going to continue. Not that it mattered this week, but Marvin Harrison became available on the waiver wire and, as a sucky team, I had an early crack at him. I dropped Roddy White and picked Harrison up, although he rides the bench for now until he gets well.

In any event, I went into the week with the following team:

• QB - Jay Cutler
• WR - Terrell Owens
• WR - Plaxico Burress
• WR - Santana Moss
• RB - Brandon Jacobs
• RB - Marshawn Lynch
• TE - Kellen Winslow
• K - Nate Kaeding
• DEF - New England

Wiiiiiight.

So, last week we were giving our condolences to (also known as “laughing our asses off at”) Brain of Belichick, whose 1st pick (Tom Brady) had gone in the crapper. Welp, as you may recall from my post last week, my own stud 1st pick, #1 overall, was LaDanian Tomlinson, Mr. Turf Toe himself. God bless ‘im, I hope he gets better of course, but for just one moment allow me to say #(*&!@(#*&@ him!

Ok, better now.

In any case, between my star #1 player proving to be ineffective and Anquan Boldin going for 32 points for my opponent, the Soaring Yetis, I was doomed yet again. Despite being 4th in points scored, the Ceiling Cats are the lone 0-2 team. They are still, however, watching you you-know-what.

My match-up for week 1 was against the Belltown Motherbuckers (a co-worker’s dog’s name is “Bucky” and we work in Belltown). According to the projected scores I’m supposed to win comfortably. Her line-up:

• Donovan McNabb
• Reggie Wayne
• Torry Holt
• Dwayne Bowe (in for the suspended Steve Smith)
• Adrian Peterson
• Frank Gore
• Tony Gonzalez

Yes, she has some studs, but we all do in this league since it’s so small. Nevertheless, Yahoo! projects me as being up by 13.

I’ve held out on joining a Fantasy Football League (FFL) for years, for the same reason that I don’t drink: it’s not that I think I wouldn’t like it, it’s that I think I’d like it too much. I have friends who play in a dozen leagues and basically spend all of their free time analyzing match-ups; I can totally see myself doing that. So, I’ve avoided it.

Until now. (dunh dunh DUUUUUUNNNH!)

6 of us in my office got together on Tuesday night to conduct our draft through Yahoo’s free FFL tool. It’s a pretty slick operation, and the draft ran smoothly for the most part (more on that later). 30 minutes before the draft started, the system assigned the draft order. I was assigned slot #1.

The first pick in the draft, as sexy as it sounds, is not an unmitigated blessing. True, you can take the “best” player, but there’s a cluster of guys at the top who would all make excellent team anchors.  What you need to understand is that the 1st picker in the first round is the last picker in the second round. The order works like so:

• 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6
• 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1
• 1 - 2 - 3 - etc etc…

Player quality is a lot like a bell curve, with several outliers at the top of the scale before getting to a lot of gradual drift. While I’m new at this, I feel fairly confident that the 1st and 12th picks (which I had) could end up scoring less than, say, the 4th and 9th picks taken by the 4th picker.