Sweet, Sweet Fantasy Baby

In case you missed Trebor's comment yesterday, here it is:

"How come no mention of your fantasy team???? In our league their I was lucky to get a win after sittin Romo..who knew NYG would decide not to cover Witten.

What a bad week for most fantasy owners... heres some players that I think would be started in 100% of leagues, are tops at their postion and could have lost the week for a fantasy owner. Larry Johnson, Steven Jackson, Maurice jones drew, Willie parker, rudi johnson, reggie bush, mcallister, could go further down into the #2 backs. Really bad week for Running backs... Drew brees (clements from NYJ got as many points), Favre, Young, Leinart. Fitzgerald, Colston, deion branch (maybe not top but for a #1 wr to get no catches), even disppointment with TE's such as Cooley, Heap, gonzo and veron davis.

Point is if your in a fantasy league you likely had 1 of these players in my case the team which the editor helped draft I had 5.... not a good week. But these guys will bounce back, you can't be giving up on the season this early, the rediculous trade offers will come in from (In one deal i was offered derek anderson for brees... then almost equal rb's and wr's in there as well). Suggestion is don't blow up the team just yet, but maybe socut out the waiver wire, as there were some suprising performances this week."

My response is that I want to have an NFL Review on Tuesday and the Fantasy discussion on Wednesday. So here we go...


I hate Fantasy Football.

Well maybe it's not as bad as that. But after this past week I remember why I swear off Fantasy Football every year. It's not just that my team sucks - which it does - it's that Fantasy makes you root against yourself, sometimes in more than one way. To wit - I had Donald Driver of Green Bay and Reggie Brown of Philadelphia on my team last week and they just happened to be playing each other. In addition to that I had also placed a wager on Philly to cover the spread on the road. So there I am, sitting on my couch, clutching my betting tickets like some sort of wino at a dog track - and I don't even really know what I'm rooting for. I guess I wanted Philly to win by 6 but by a final of like 48-42, with Brown and Driver catching two TD's each. As it happened neither caught a TD - Brown only caught one ball - and Green Bay won outright. So I was screwed all around.

If you want a hilarious description of why a person shouldn't play fantasy football, listen to Bill Simmons' podcast from this past week with Adam Carolla (click on the Sports Guy's World link on the left and then find the BS Report). Carolla's story is basically that he doesn't play Fantasy Football because he's seen first hand what it does to his friends. The same way he's never been in to alcohol after seeing what it did to his parents. It's fantastic - a must listen. I also love him referring to Fantasy Football as Fairy Tale Football.

I also feel I should respond to Trebor's comment, as I feel it is at least in part a veiled criticism of how I've run my Fantasy team so far. So here's my story.... Because our Fantasy league was an automated draft you have little or no real control over who you pick - in the end it's basically random. I ended up with a team of what could best be described as, "random dudes." Now I have no desire to manage or cheer for a group of guys that I didn't select and didn't want - I'm talking to you Reggie Brown and Chris Chambers.

What I've decided to do is to make up a team of guys I actually like and are available through trade, free agency and the waiver wire. Since I basically had no star players that I could build around, I had to blow the whole thing up and start again.

This is not me throwing in the towel by any means - although most people seem to think that. This is me trying to make something of my own creation that I can cheer for. I want to get together a group of guys who haven't been given a chance yet. I'm going to give them their big break. Calling my team an All-Sleeper team is a little pretentious but I'd like to do something along those lines. I think the "No-Name All Stars" would be better - although they're not really all no-names.

As I think I said last week, the team I was handed was probably just good enough to miss the playoffs. Why would I want a team like that, that I didn't even pick, when I could create something of my own that just might surprise some people? At least its going to keep me interested. Instead of losing every week because I don't have a top-flight QB or even RB for that matter, why wouldn't I at least want to lose on my own terms?

After all that, this is the line-up I'm going to go with:

QB - Matt Hasselbeck
RB - Marion Barber
RB - Chris Brown
WR - Wes Welker
WR - Jacoby Jones
WR - Donald Driver
TE - Alge Crumpler (I'll probably move him somewhere down the road)
K - Steven Gostkowski
D/ST - Seattle

The last thing I have to say is that I will never, under any circumstances, join a league with people I don't know again - unless those people I don't know are vouched for by people that I know and trust.