Taken

I named one of my teams after the band Throw Me The Statue, but was dismayed to discover there was another team called 4-Toed Statue. I changed to The Brunettes, who happen to be opening for TMTS, though that wasn't necessarily on my mind at the time.

Rule #2 for fantasy football this year: Don't name your team after someone else's unless you are making fun of them.

Finally finding a league where I could use my original name of choice, I discovered I needed a QB in the first round of a 20-team draft; I had the sixth pick. The guy drafting first was going to take Michael Turner, which ordinarily is acceptable but not in a league where QB yardage gets the same point value as others, and you get half a point per completion as well as 6 pts per passing TD. Turner was outscored by over 25 quarterbacks in 2008 under these settings. I wanted Brees, Brady, or Manning at pick 6 and would have taken Rodgers or Romo and thought hard about Warner. Much to my dismay, the guy picking first started broadcasting the abnormality of the settings in the chat box.

Rule #3 for fantasy footballthis year: Don't advertise in the pre-draft chat box that people should check the settings. League commissioners are exempted from rule #3.

Anyone who doesn't check the settings on their own before entering the draft is unlikely to play out the season anyway. You might help them avoid early frustration by cluing them in, but something else will go wrong and they'll quit. I would happily have traded them Shaun Hill after the draft. Actually, I had to trade Hill because I made the mistake of taking two wk 6 byes - Peyton Manning being my starter. I quickly found a league mate who had done the same, and flipped Hill for Jason Campbell

Rule #4 Don't worry about taking two QBs with the same bye. Not a genius move, but easy to overcome

You're only starting one QB anyway, and if they're similar and you're doing matchups it's fine for each week but one. Last year I did this on purpose after Kurt Warner went undrafted in an autopick league right before the word came through that he was starting. I picked up Warner despite having McNabb on the same bye, as I hate McNabb as a fantasy QB. I flipped McNabb for Jay Cutler, and even if Cutler had been average not great, it didn't matter as I was only starting one QB in the first place.

Gotcha

i was in an auction draft recently with this guys who first insisted that you take your sleepers in the first few rounds not the top players. then they laughed at me for spending all my money early - larry fitz; andre johnson; michael turner; steve slaton and a $10 anthony gonzalez to fill out my key offensive positions (2RB, 2WR 1 W/R). Then I started picking my sleepers, and when I went $3 on Donald Brown and won him, the one guy says "who is that?"

Fantasy Football rule #1 for the year: do not talk smack in the draft if you don't know who Donald Brown is.

I also got scheffler for $1 at TE and garrard for $2 at QB.

free fall

while the red sox continue to find new ways to struggle, my fantasy baseball team is slowly making its way to the end of the regular season. i lost my last matchup 3-5 with one tie, but somehow my chief rival lost 3-6. it's nice to stay in first place, but the omens are not good; seemingly all batters on my team are hitting at .250 or below lately, and encarnacion has been terrible since coming to the al. he'd actually been decent right before the trade, so there was reason to hope.

oh that football

while i'm glad that the english premier league is about to get going again, i am actually talking about american football today and nearly always. this seemed like the proper time to start some mock drafts - an activity i recommend despite its pitfalls. of course i ended up drafting last, which left me with drew brees and calvin johnson as my first two choices. no intriguing running backs were left at that point. the last thing i want is to take brandon jacobs with the twelfth pick. clearly it's advantageous to take a running back early, and their value is the easiest to protect of any offensive position. i'm behind that logic, i'm just not behind it enough to take unreliable players with my top two picks.

mock drafting is the purest form of consequence-free fantasy sports. considering the rapidity with which online players abandon their teams, i shouldn't have been surprised when multiple mock drafters apparently abandoned their teams before the draft actually began. i suppose i should create a 'full auto' profile and draft three teams that i will plan not to touch all year. once one of them clinches a playoff spot, i'll go back to managing actively and try to win a championship. i feel the chances of this working are incredibly slim.

some decisions are easy

as a former yankees ticket package holder, i remain on their mailing list. just yesterday i had thought it might be time to sever ties, when i immediately realized that a window into the thinkings of a rival team might provide interesting information. today it provided an email titled "yankees make deadline deal." for some reason, i assumed they had acquired halladay, and i was excited to open the email and find out that it was jerry hairston jr! the peals of laughter in my head began immediately. i still love the fact that toronto absolutely refuses to trade their most valuable chip in order to allegedly compete in 2010 in a division that has the defending al champs and two franchises that seemingly print their own money and have managed to amass their own young talent while outbidding each other for every free agent worth having.

derisive laughter for the day goes to:

the new york yankees

jp ricciardi

my favorite team isn't perfect today either, but i don't think i can derisively laugh at them

mark, sox, perfect

i received an important tip via telephone today: mark buehrle had completed 8 innings of a perfect game and i could watch the rest online. my laptop wasn't going to work - i tried a dozen or more times to get the stream to load - but a nearby computer did the trick, and i caught the tense first out of the ninth inning as wise saved the perfect game and a home run with a feat of defense in center field. the strikeout for out two was a perfect moment of exhilaration, and the groundout to end the game provided the sigh of relief and final realization that the dream of something amazing had come true. just a few days removed from tom watson's playoff loss at the british open, sports history continues to come at us.

fantasy baseball update: i'm in first place, and if halladay actually did get traded to the national league that would wreck the pitching staff of my chief antagonist. what's with ricciardi basically saying 'i'm asking too much to get a deal done?' please just take the prospects and run; you have no chance next year and halladay's value now is immense; a year and a half of this guy in his prime? wouldn't the yankees be going for this deal if they could? would you trade their young guys for a title? or possibly two? i thought so.

how my favorite celtic fixed things wtih my parents

Recently, I had a birthday. Although it was a bit anticlimactic, part of that reason is that my parents' generous offer to help pay for a car or bike purchase arrived in what I thought was just a card of some sort. Thus, I knew what the biggest birthday present of my life was before it even arrived. Unfortunately, this gift also led to some disagreement between myself and my mother regarding what sort of automobile I might wish to drive. See, of late, I have developed an abiding interest in doing something about my longstanding interest in forming a boy band. As such, it has come to my attention that the perfect car for me to own is a 2001 Mercedes-Benz SLK with about 60k miles on it. For any of you who didn't know, Mercedes is still a very legitimate name for your daughter and actually earns you no yuppie points, as the car was named for someone's daughter in the first place. If you are disappointed by this news, just remember that in general, last names and place names will earn you plenty of points. The SLK also seems to be a perfect answer to Bill Simmons' question about which modern vehicle is invariably driven by beautiful women and guys you want to beat up. I don't beat anyone up and I want to be in a boyband, so clearly this is the car for me.

I'm sure you may already have intuited that my mother did not agree that the SLK was the car for me. What you may not have known is that even my tactful failure to disclose the actual make and model of the $18k convertible I liked did not prevent a remark about how that was definitely not the sort of money my parents were willing to help provide. This also led to the inevitable comparisons to the 442 my parents owned when they were first married. I know a couple of things about this car: it was a convertible, my mother regrets the fact that it was ever purchased, it didn't last long, and a number of my parents' best 8-track tapes were stolen out of it while they were skiing. Those facts have led me to the following conclusions: convertibles are more versatile than many might guess, considering my parents were able to successfully drive a convertible american muscle car to and from a ski slope in the 70s; a hard top convertible like the SLK is a good idea, being more difficult to burglarize; and the people in this cautionary tale (my parents) were not bankrupted or (certainly in my father's case) permanently scarred by the experience of owning the vehicle in question.

Additional analysis has shown me why purchasing the used German vehicle in question would be not only more harmless than parental warnings have suggested, but could actually be beneficial to my social life. A lifetime of careful research into the history of certain individuals who raised me has shown that, while one of them may be ashamed of the other's having talked her into the purchase of a 442 in the early years of their marriage, she somewhat fondly remembers his ownership of a GTO during their college years. In fact, only with my in-depth historical knowledge of the situation was I able to dredge up this paradox. The same woman who once went out with a campus hero known to possess a GTO, only to find he was driving his mother's station wagon that year, resented this man's purchase of a 442 once they were married. Coupled with the following information - I am not married or in a relationship - this fact leads me to an important conclusion. I should totally buy the SLK, since not only will it further my professional goals, it will make other men jealous and will only lead to positive reminiscences from the woman I (theoretically at least date for a while at some point). Unfortunately, I did not have the time nor resources to come up with these life-altering conclusions during my phone conversation, which meant that my favorite celtic would still have to save my (soy-based) bacon.

correlation not causation

mjd signs a big contract. that doesn't have to mean he'll start declining rapidly does it? i guess i definitely don't want to draft him 2 years from now, but then i haven't wanted to draft him since...his rookie year when i got him off waivers. i sat him a couple times in favor of colston, and quickly learned to get them both in the lineup weekly. yeah, i won that league.

yes, once you (re?)pay for stuff you get it wirelessly

now that several media outlets have discussed the kindle 2, i have to take a moment to jot down my initial thoughts. at first i thought 'horrible price for something that makes me look like a nerd and really is only good for reading books...which cost extra.' then i thought 'isn't this what people would have said about the ipod?' i was so wrong to doubt myself like that.

the original ipod was a monumental achievement. the kindle is a rio - a trailblazer, not a masterpiece. when i first heard about mp3 players, i thought the idea seemed cool, but i didn't feel any need to buy one. i'd used macamp already and thought mp3 technology was cool, but the rio couldn't hold any more music than my cd player. the ipod changed that, and not just the capacity angle. i wasn't dying to get my hands on a nomad either. when the mp3 category really arrived, it was clear; i wanted an ipod from the moment it was announced.

a secondary issue is simply the cost of the media. it's easy to say 'an ipod can hold all these songs but they'd cost me a ton of money at the itunes store,' but the ipod allowed you to get all your music off your cds and into your pocket. if the kindle, at its current price point, allowed you to somehow just have all the books you already owned transferred to kindle format, it becomes a far more compelling product. let's say even just the books you'd purchased in the past 20 years. or 15 years even, the point is, i've seen one person use a kindle in public and i was snickering in my head about it. an expensive product that requires further expenditure to use is basically half baked if that's the reaction it provokes in others. the kindle's distribution model is nice, but it's a media company's dream, not a consumer's. it's a fancy new toy that will encourage some people to pay up again for content they already own in the old format.

just wondering

i'm tired, i'm still wearing a tie, and i just finished some cake. i really like cake.

march mfa challenge

new game this year. in order to qualify, you must:

be a college of some type

have a team in the men's and/or women's ncaa tournament

have either:

a. accepted me to your mfa program

b. failed to reject me thus far


elimination comes when either:

1. your men's and women's teams are both eliminated (or were never in the tourney)

2. i receive notification that you rejected me

current participants:

maryland
virginia commonwealth
ohio state
tennessee
(list is preliminary, and may include erroneous entries)

any questions?

buried under the dunes

i opened the refrigerator last night and found dozens of empty eggshells. the eggshells were piled in loose pyramids, monuments to chickens i'd never met and dishes someone else had cooked. for a moment i stood there, not thinking of the energy pouring from the chilled shelves or the whirring of the machine. i just thought of my own life, unready to be cracked open and poured into a skillet.

ten millionth

since there are so many articles about arod, i'm going to pretend to write about him and go off on a total tangent instead. i've never owned him, and clearly this isn't the year to try...unless you think you can nab a great replacement late. seems like it's always harder to get awesome guys now than it is later in the year. i played in that super competitive league last year, starting right after the all-star break, and managed to pick up huff right as he heated up. thing is, no one else grabbed him. closers were the ones getting taken on rumor alone, which makes sense as saves are a rare commodity. biggest mistake i made was to assume grabbing a set number of closers (3 i think) in the draft was enough. i soon loaded up on as many part-timers as i could, but made the mistake of judging rumors too much in some cases. it's stupid that i had feliciano on my team at one point but didn't bother with jensen lewis right when he got his first save...because i certainly thought about it.

with all the excitement about drafts right now, it's easy to overlook one thing. while it's crucial that you start your season in a strong position, there's always the chance that injuries you never could have forseen will take your team down. thus, the following question. are certain players definitely more durable than others? i wonder if any of us know enough to answer this. if it's just a matter of their having had a clean record of health, then chances are randomness catches up to them and that we cannot truly count on them as rock solid healthy guys. if, however, the issue is one of willingness to play through and perform despite pain, then guys who can do this have to be considered worthy of a level of extra consideration. most likely certain players fall into each of those categories, and knowing who they are may be impossible. thus, to even the advanced fantasy player, a decisive element of luck plays into the game. this is most true in head to head leagues, where yearlong dominance will not help you should you lose key players in august or september.

luck has it, i wasn't finished yet

more free advice at a time when you don't need it.

the terrible thing about keeping extra kickers and defenses on your bench is not just that they're so easily replaceable. it's the opportunity cost; those bench slots can do a lot more for you than just provide alternatives when your defense has a bad matchup. kicker is absolutely the worst position to double, and if you carry two kickers for more than one week a season, i just don't know why you're even reading this. i could argue that you don't even need to keep a kicker over his bye, but that might not be the worst offense in most circumstances. i did drop lance moore on his bye, i think, to keep a bye week kicker. the worst part is, my plan was to pick moore up again after the bye had passed. that is where you're in trouble. if you have a player who's already shown signs of breaking out, a player you want on your roster later in the year, do not keep a kicker over that guy.

the kicker/defense problem is only one example of how you can mismanage your bench. in many leagues that i have been, the trade market is far from efficient. unless you're playing with people you know will make a lot of moves, do not horde talent at one position expecting to deal it for something else. i was in the lucky position in one league to draft romo (early) and cutler (late). before romo's injury, i lucked into an even better situation by flipping him and hines ward for brees and sjax. i made it look like a grab for an underperforming rb, when what i really wanted was to swap for brees' more atrractive fantasy playoff schedule. yeah, that's right, after week 2 i was looking at the playoffs. somehow the move was attractive enough to my trading partner that he snapped it up immediately, helping me avoid the bad luck of romo's subsequent injury. in most leagues, you can't get that deal done, and you can't get much for cutler. i managed to finally deal him and ginn for colston, but i already had wayne, marshall, and bowe starting for me at wr. back to my point, however: while getting a cutler late in the draft as your backup is great, you can't draft people you don't need and hope that you can flip them for something you want. that's just wasting your bench space.

here's the real issue: your bench can be like an investment portfolio. you should be looking for values and high potential options late in the draft, but looking for people that will help your team, not trade bait to help someone else's. besides providing security if someone goes down, the bench should be where you stash people you are counting on to improve as the season continues. to some extent, you should trust the talent in stronger portions of your starting lineup to keep you out of trouble. concentrate your late round longshots on positions where you sense weakness. i finished third in league where my customized autodraft strategy backfired and left me with a bench full of backup nfl qbs. not backups for my team, backups in real football. of course, my starting lineup was stellar: mcnabb at qb; peterson and jamal lewis at rb; wayne, andre johnson, and boldin at wr; and clark at te. i happen to strongly dislike mcnabb, so i did two things to fix my qb situation, which i saw as my clear weakness. first, i picked up warner, who was rumored to have the inside track on the cardinals' job (and who was stellar late in the '07 season). the fact that he went undrafted makes little sense, but i saw weakness and made a grab. then, since i can't stand mcnabb anyway and he had the same bye as warner, i traded him for cutler. end result: i was as set at qb as every other position.

running back was my second glaring weakness; i looked at the hype and early returns, grabbing slaton and chris johnson. in this ppr format, slaton outscored ap and chris johnson was close to his level. hoping to grab depth, i shopped peterson before the season, trying to trade down at rb and land a receiver. no one was biting, so i kept him, as he was clearly not valued high enough around the league for me to bother trading when i only needed bye week guys. i took desean jackson as my fourth receiver, hoping he would pan out and knowing i didn't need to make a deal just to make my bench look better. i dropped clark early, not wanting to keep an injured te on my bench, and picked him up again when he was healthy. it might seem crazy to give up your seventh round pick for nothing, but te is generally a low reward position, so i hate investing two roster spots on it. with what soon proved to be quality depth at rb and qb, i could have dealt someone, but i had no real needs. sure, my juggernaut of a team lost in the semifinals, but that's going to happen. it also didn't matter that lewis failed to deliver fourth round value, because i made the right waiver picks at rb. maybe the wr early, many rbs late strategy is a pretty good one.

i'm so in love with pancakes

is it possible that jay cutler might end up as a qb bargain again next year? he's been brutalized in the press for not winning, which has absolutely no bearing on his fantasy value, but could affect his draft position. the whole issue with his coach possibly looking to replace him with cassel might even be overplayed. if you had a chance to trade for a guy you just won 11 games with, wouldn't you look into it? i think that has nearly no bearing on how much you like your existing qb. face it, cutler is not peyton manning. if josh mcdaniels was taking over the giants and there was a chance of sending eli somewhere and coming back with cassel, he would have taken it. well, maybe that's just because eli's not worth it. the guy won a super bowl. trent dilfer also won a super bowl.

what round would you need to take cutler in for him to be considered a bargain? the sixth? i suppose he's not a tremendous bargain there, unless you expect him to take another big step in his development next year. i think you have to consider brees, manning, brady, romo, warner and possibly rivers as the guys who should be drafted before him. i'd have to look more closely at the numbers, but i'm not even incredibly happy about taken warner and especially rivers before cutler. i suppose i would prefer whichever of those three fell to a lower slot. if it was warner, i would want a very good backup.

depending on who's waiting for a qb in your league and how you're doing overall, i'll take cutler over roethlisberger, because again this is fantasy not reality. perhaps the pittsburgh line will protect him better next year, but he still hasn't been a guy who throws for a lot of yards. that's never good; the one nice thing about a jay cutler is that you'll get good yardage points even when the td numbers aren't astronomical. i tend to think of rivers as a td-only guy also, but he threw for a lot of yards last year. problem is, people were drafting him relatively high in '07, got disappointed, and then watched him have a career year in '08. i'm not sure i want to be the guy paying with the expectation of a repeat performance. still, i was irrationally afraid of him last year; he was going in the 10th round in leagues i was in and i had no interest in him as a backup. as for other qbs out there, i don't want mcnabb, i don't know where to take cassel, and if you're wondering about the other manning, rub your giants super bowl pennant for good luck before you draft him in the third round.

let's take a minute to discuss draft strategy. while it's become controversial to stick with running backs as your top draft choices, i think they are the safest high draft picks. if your guy goes down and you're stuck with his backup, it's generally the running back position where the greatest value is preserved. there are times when someone steps up and does great at qb or wr. however, you can't keep a matt cassel on hand in case every tom brady goes down. look at how long it took cassel to become a valuable fantasy commodity. as someone who drafted derek anderson in one league, i can tell you that he was not a viable starter in the early going. perhaps if you believe cassel can happen again, you find a boring/reliable backup and, when your big qb pick goes down for the season, stash his backup for a solid six to eight weeks, no matter what. that's great if your team is stable enough that you can afford the bench spot. you don't have to pull stunts like that with rbs. in recent years, backs have routinely stepped in to fantasy relevance in their first couple of games in a featured role. anecdotally, it seems wide receivers can do well when they have a great qb and especially when they're stepping in as the second option. wide receiver seems tough to predict; didn't it seem obvious hixon or someone would step up for the giants?

of course, you don't want a pointless rb in a high slot instead of a standout wr or qb. you could even argue that in leagues with safer playoff formats (i was in one where 8/10 teams made it), you might not even want to draft an rb before round 5 or so. start the year with a quality platoon guy or overlooked starter, add a couple rookies, fill your bench with rbs on teams that have good systems, and get a top qb and 3 wrs with your first 4 picks. that's a workable strategy in a lot of situations. the picks would still need to fall your way, and i can't really say who i'd want to take in rd 1. btw, i'm tempted to take hasselbeck late (11th rd?) if he's available and my starter is rock solid, but there could be better options i haven't thought of yet.

finally, is anyone else waiting for the chevy volt to generate mass anger? what happens when the battery life claim - 40 miles - turns out to be like all these macbook batteries that are quoted at 5 hours? i've owned 2 powerbooks and a macbook in the past 6 years, and you can safely get a couple hours plus on a charge. what happens when the volt turns out the same way? 20 miles all electric doesn't sound that great to me. even if it's 40 at the outset, how long before the aging battery is down to 50% of its original performance? maybe this whole battery thing is a genius move by car companies. they've made cars more and more reliable, so that you can get 100,000 miles out of even lower quality vehicles (hi neon). now, with hybrids and all-electric vehicles seen as the future, the inevitable battery life issues that will come up could either help sell new cars quicker or just lead to some fat maintenance bills.

falcons preparing to make a trade?

k, i really think i'm ready for michael vick to come back to the nfl. i want him to be great, live a great life, and set an example of how to grow up and get past your transgressions. who knows if any of that will happen.

reality for real

i'm glad to see that bud selig's reported desire to hand the home run crown back to hank aaron is not something i made up in a weird dream. while avoiding judgment one way or the other on the issue, i am happy to know that i did not dream about the home run record last night.

the record's just not safe

alex rodriguez exceeds low expectations by sounding human in his apology over his past steroid use. i wonder how this will be received generally.

go hank aaron.

dreams are silly

i think i am really enjoying the fact that i'm not playing fantasy sports at the moment. the football season ended so well - my teams finished 1,1,2,3,10 - that it doesn't really matter that the one terrible team was in the league that matters the most. you have to wonder sometimes if it's time to just give up. i do have a streak of 3 straight years winning a championship on my primary account - that's 3 championships in 8 leagues - so maybe it's worth taking a shot at keeping that up. i've kicked around the idea of doing a half-season baseball league; i get so bored of fantasy baseball. i have also found that it's still pretty entertaining to read about fantasy basketball (which i have never actually played) without having a team. no pressure, all fun. maybe not as much fun as running a team when it's going well...but football is probably the one fantasy sport that's the most enjoyable and that i'm most likely to continue playing.

ultimate matchup

arizona vs oklahoma for the bcs championship next year.

nearly impossible, but one can wish