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  • My boneheaded draft move

    Matt 4:34 pm on 9/02/2010 | 7 Permalink Reply
    Tags:

    Double FacepalmI hate how much Brandon’s going to enjoy this post, but there’s a good lesson to be learned here so I’m obligated to write it.

    Our esteemed League of Champions held its draft on Tuesday, and overall I’m pretty satisfied with how my team came out. However, what I’ll likely remember most about this draft was the mistake I made in round 5. I had the 10th pick overall and drafted RB-RB-WR-WR to start. QBs were flying off the board, and by the time my pick came around in the 5th round, only one guy was left on my list of third-tier QBs – Joe Flacco. I couldn’t stand the thought of counting on the likes of Carson Palmer or Brett Favre this season, so I was sweating it as the rest of the league made their 5th-round picks. To my relief, Flacco did fall to me and I scooped him up without a second thought.

    Two seconds later, Brandon typed: “Stupid pick!” I was halfway through typing an impassioned defense of my high regard for Flacco this year when he elaborated, “You could have had him next round. 11 and 12 already picked QBs.”

    D’oh. He was right – had I taken the time to check, I would have noticed that the teams with the 11th and 12th picks already had drafted their quarterbacks and weren’t likely to take a QB2 in the fifth round – so I could have taken a third running back or wide receiver instead and grabbed Flacco in the sixth round five picks later. Percy Harvin was available and I almost definitely would have picked him up had I thought to do so.

    Instead, here’s how the picks went:

    ROUND 5

    10. Joe Flacco 11. Arian Foster 12. Michael Bush

    ROUND 6

    12. Percy Harvin 11. Justin Forsett 10. Brent Celek

    Ugh. I made the best of a bad situation by taking one of the highest-ceiling tight ends in the league, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t rather have Harvin or Foster.

    Moral of the story: Don’t get tunnel vision. Pay attention to the teams around you and who they’re likely to pick so that you don’t end up drafting a player earlier than you have to.

     

  • Keeper draft tonight

    Matt 12:41 pm on 8/29/2010 | 3 Permalink Reply
    Tags: marc colombo,

    I’m in can’t-think-about-anything-else mode for the big event at 7pm tonight, the draft for our keeper league, which is now entering its fifth season. It takes time and effort to build up a mature keeper league with 12 dedicated participants, but it’s so worth it for the long-term strategic element keepers bring.

    Each team can keep up to three players, and you give up your pick in the round that’s two higher than the one the player was drafted in the previous year (so if the player was drafted/kept in the 8th round in 2009, you can sacrifice your 6th-round pick to keep him in 2010). If the player was undrafted, you give up your 12th-round pick to keep him. Brandon’s giving up his 2nd, 11th and 12th picks to keep Ray Rice, Mike Wallace and Jermichael Finley, while I’m giving up my 8th, 10th and 12th picks for Dwayne Bowe, Steve Breaston and Mike Sims-Walker. It’s obviously all about maximizing value by getting to draft your keepers much later in the draft than you’d be able to get them otherwise, and on that count I think we’ve both done pretty well here.

    In unrelated but kind of awesome news, a real live football player is following us on Twitter. Weird:

     

  • The power of the all-position cheat sheet

    Matt 2:27 pm on 8/28/2010 | 7 Permalink Reply
    Tags:

    Most experienced fantasy football managers organize their cheat sheets like Brandon did here – separate rankings for each position. If you have a good understanding of the relative value of each position, it makes sense to keep things organized this way so you can quickly identify the best player at the position you’re hoping to fill in a given round.

    For newbies, however, a combined cheat sheet makes a lot more sense. A co-worker recently asked me for some advice before her first-ever fantasy draft, and I told her to keep it simple and just go by the CBS Top 200 Players list. I told her to simply cross off each player’s name when as they were called and take the highest-ranked player every round until the mid-way point, at which point she should start making sure she had enough players at each position. She promised to “stick the the sheet” as closely as possible.

    Here’s the squad she wound up with in her ten-team league with many experienced fantasy footballers (and a few other novices). I envy this team. Deeply.

    She had the first overall pick. The round each player was taken in is indicated in parentheses.

    QB

    Matt Schaub (4)
    Alex Smith (12)

    		 RB

    Chris Johnson (1)
    DeAngelo Williams (2)
    Cedric Benson (3)
    Cadillac Williams (5)
    WR

    Miles Austin (6)
    Steve Smith (7)
    Sidney Rice (8)*
    Donald Driver (9)

    		 TE

    Visanthe Shiancoe (10)
    Zach Miller (11)
    DEF

    Cowboys (13)
    Patriots (14)

    		 K

    Lawrence Tynes (15)

    * Draft was done before the extent of his health issues were known.

    Now obviously she’s got some concerns at WR with Rice’s situation, but aside from that – did she own this joint or what? I give her tons of credit for sticking to the sheet and drafting RB-RB-RB right off the bat, which was probably pretty nervewracking.

     

  • Matt 12:05 pm on 8/28/2010 | 0 Permalink Reply
    Tags: evil incarnate, shanahan

    The Wall Street Journal has already deemed 2010 fantasy football’s Year of the Head Slap thanks to the myriad suspensions, holdouts, running back committees and generally unsettled starting lineups heading into the season. Few things are ever as clear-cut in the NFL as fantasy owners would like them to be, but this season does seem to be more fraught with uncertainty than most. I blame the return of Shanahan.

     

  • Prize Leagues: WTF, ESPN?

    Matt 5:16 pm on 8/23/2010 | 5 Permalink Reply
    Tags: ,

    I just noticed this prize leagues thing on ESPN’s fantasy football website. Apparently, you can pay $29.95 per team to join or start a league that is functionally exactly the same as a free league, but at the end of the season you might just maybe win some fabulous prizes, such as… Best Buy gift cards? (Three total will be awarded, for a grand total value of $5,000.) The real kicker is this part:

    100 Winners [sic] Circle points will be awarded to each Prize-Eligible League Champion for every league won… The approximate retail value (“ARV”) for each League prize is $15.00.

    So if you win the league that you paid $29.95 in real money to enter, you’ll win $15 in Winner’s Circle Points, which as I pointed out last season are basically equivalent to skee-ball tickets at the penny arcade.

    Tellingly, I had to create a league just to find out how much it costs – they don’t reveal the price until you get a few steps along in the process (reminds me of an online store that waits until the final checkout page to tell that you the shipping on your DVD will be $9.99).

    Who the hell does this?! Actually, come to think of it… if I pay my $29.95, am I more or less guaranteed to win the grand prize because I’ll be the only person on the planet who signs up?

     

  • Matt 4:04 pm on 8/17/2010 | 2 Permalink Reply
    Tags:

    Brett Favre’s on a plane headed for Minnesota. Looks like he’s coming back, I guess. Whatever.

     

  • Matt 11:35 am on 8/16/2010 | 2 Permalink Reply
    Tags: ,

    Glen Coffee’s retirement at age 23 is mind-boggling to me (and I think the smart money’s on him coming back to the game at some point), but in the meantime it makes rookie Anthony Dixon pretty interesting as the new backup to Frank Gore, who’s been less injury-prone as a pro than many expected him to be but will have to shoulder more of the load now. That’s good news in the short-term for Gore owners, but it could turn into a mid-to-late-season boon for those who take a flier on Dixon in the draft. He certainly looked ready against the Colts last night – 100 rushing yards (including a 5-yard TD run) on 21 attempts, plus three catches for 21 yards.

     

  • Matt 9:25 am on 8/13/2010 | 3 Permalink Reply
    Tags:

    See, this is why being a Bills fan and a fantasy football enthusiast are bad for your self-esteem. CBS projects Lee Evans as our top fantasy receiver, with a whopping 828 yards and 5 TDs. After that,

    … James Hardy will be Buffalo’s second-leading wide receiver with 24 grabs, 323 yards and three touchdowns. Marcus Easley gets 22 catches, 284 yards and two scores. Steve Johnson, the likely opening-day starter opposite Evans, gets 16 catches, 221 yards and one score.

    I need a beer.

     

  • Ask the Geeks: Collecting League Fees

    Matt 9:05 am on 6/30/2010 | 4 Permalink Reply
    Tags: league fees, league management

    Andrew asks:

    Hi, I am trying to set up a FF league with some of my buddies from college. Problem is, we are all located in different places, which makes money collection very difficult. What site do you recommend for our league  so that we could collect the money through a service such as paypal? Thank you for your help.

    There are a number of services out there that offer to help with fee collection, but I’ve never felt compelled to use any of them. Collecting league fees can be a pain no matter how you slice it, but I don’t see how a third-party service will make things so much easier that I’d be willing to pay a fee for their service. If you want to give one a try, take a look at WePay, which launched this spring with some venture capital funding and received a positive writeup in TechCrunch.

    For the keeper league that I commish, I collect via check or PayPal (which no longer charges any fee for personal transactions) and then dump all the money into a secondary savings account that my wife and I have had forever and never touch. This league has been together for a long time, and guys are always pretty good about getting their fees in before the draft with minimal kneecap-bashing on my part. For a new league, you’ll want to make it abundantly clear that there are repercussions for not getting league fees in on time – for example, you could lock down add/drop privileges for anyone who hasn’t yet paid until they do. Just make sure to clearly define those rules ahead of time, and be obnoxious enough about it so that nobody can claim they didn’t know the rules.

     

  • It's aliiiiiive...

    Matt 12:14 pm on 6/18/2010 | 2 Permalink Reply
    Tags:

    After a much-needed break from the fantasy football blogosphere over the offseason, we can’t help but be drawn to all the intriguing noise coming from the NFL this spring. (Shortened preseason schedule? Yes please!) Brandon’s getting married in a month so his time might be a bit limited over the short term, but we’re ready to get this thing going again.

    Brandon and I have been talking about a few changes we’re planning on making this season to make the blog more useful to our readers and fun for us to manage. To us, the best part of running this site is the discussions we have with commenters, so we’re going to continue to improve that aspect of the site as best we can. We’re also going to focus more energy on weekly positional rankings – we get so many Ask the Geeks questions along the lines of, “Who would you start this week, Player A or Player B,” and positional rankings would help answer some of those (but not all of them, of course, given flex positions and wacky scoring systems).

    So anyway… Vince Young FTW.

     

  • Matt 11:25 am on 5/20/2010 | 0 Permalink Reply
    Tags:

    If you’ve got Santana Moss on your keeper squad… bad news.

     

  • Matt 1:19 pm on 2/09/2010 | 0 Permalink Reply
    Tags: randall gay

    OK, this is pretty funny.

     

  • Matt 7:22 am on 1/11/2010 | 2 Permalink Reply
    Tags:

    If Steve Breaston doesn’t get a chance to start somewhere in the NFL next season, it’ll be a shame. He led the team in receiving with 125 yards and was utterly unstoppable in the 4th. His one-armed catch (while a cornerback was getting amorous with his other arm) was just plain nasty. Bob Young of the Arizona Republic thinks the Cardinals might finally be figuring out that they’re at least as good a team without his Boldin’s whiny ass as they are with it.

     

  • Playoff Fantasy Football Options

    Matt 1:32 pm on 1/02/2010 | 9 Permalink Reply
    Tags: ,

    I’ve never been a huge fan of playoff fantasy football. If real fantasy football is chess, playoff fantasy football is checkers. Or Candyland.

    Nevertheless, sometimes you just aren’t ready to let the fantasy football season die. If that’s you, there are a few sites where you can get your fix. If I’m going to spend any time at all on one of these, there’d better be a decent payoff that I can pretend I might win, so I’ve listed the prizes for each here. (More …)

     

  • No stone unturned: DEF sleepers

    Matt 5:01 pm on 12/23/2009 | 15 Permalink Reply
    Tags:

    Whether you’re in the finals or the semis this week, now is not the time to remain blindly loyal to the defensive unit that’s taken you this far. It’s certainly tempting to stick with what works, but given that DEF is by far the most opponent-dependent position in fantasy football, it’s more than worth it to check the waiver wire for defenses with juicy matchups. (More …)

     

  • Matt 12:29 pm on 12/20/2009 | 0 Permalink Reply
    Tags:

    RT @MollyQerim_ESPN – Matt Ryan..Michael Turner…Steven Jackson…Larry Fitzgerald…TO all in

     

  • Matt 10:48 pm on 12/19/2009 | 12 Permalink Reply
    Tags: matt millen, short bus

    Matt Millen, calling the game with the Saints down 21 in the 4th quarter: “You can sense some urgency now on the part of New Orleans.” This is a man who truly deserves his reputation.

     

  • Matt 8:56 am on 12/17/2009 | 9 Permalink Reply
    Tags: stupid fantasy sports

    If you’re feeling down because you’re already knocked out of your league’s playoffs and can’t stand the thought of a football game tonight without fantasy implications, turn that frown upside down – Fantasy U.S. Supreme Court is IN THE HIZZOUSE! Imagine the trash you’ll be talking when you correctly guess the vote split on the upcoming federal campaign spending case! That’s three points sucka!

     

  • FFGeekSmackdown Update

    Matt 10:11 am on 12/14/2009 | 7 Permalink Reply
    Tags: bad decision-making,

    As I mentioned last week, Brandon and I wound up squaring off in the first round of both of our biggest leagues. Heading into the Monday night game, a split looks pretty likely. Both matchups are still technically up for grabs, but Brandon’s in better shape than me overall – his lead in our keeper league is pretty much a stranglehold, and it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that he’ll be able to overtake me in the League of Champions matchup as well.

    Keeper league (screenshot): All those years where Brandon kept drafting Brandon Marshall two rounds early just because he had the same name finally paid off. Breaston’s not going to get me anywhere close to the 29 points I need, I think that’s pretty clear. But I’ll probably break the 140-point mark for only the third time this season and still lose.

    League of Champions (screenshot): Andre Johnson came up huge; I just hope that plus the 5-7 points Crabtree will probably get me is enough to hold off Gore and Alex Smith. I’d be feeling a whole lot better if I’d started McNabb over Roethlisberger, that’s for sure. This is exactly the kind of decision that will haunt me for years if I lose this one – what the hell was I thinking starting the QB of a team on a downward spiral in zero-degree conditions?!

     

  • Matt 6:24 am on 12/11/2009 | 3 Permalink Reply

    Wow, Pittsburgh – what happened? I guess I was a little off about Roethlisberger – which is just frigging great because I started him over McNabb against Brandon.

     

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