I'm actually kind of a politics geek too, so I'm totally signing up for this. This may be a sign of depression setting in - are there seriously like three more months before Yahoo opens up the fantasy football signups?

Here are the details on the deal. Does anyone really use Fanball for anything other than player news? I've never found any of their offerings to be all that compelling.

In case you hadn't heard the news yet, recently the Denver Broncos top receiver, Brandon Marshall, was injured in a freak "fast food bag" incident. According to Stats.com:

Marshall could miss up to four months of off-season preparations after slicing his right forearm in a freak accident. Marshall said he slipped on a fast-food bag Saturday while wrestling with family members at a Florida resort and put his right arm through a home entertainment center.

In a statement, Broncos head athletic trainer Steve Antonopulos confirmed reports Marshall "sustained right forearm lacerations to one artery, one vein, one nerve, two tendons and three muscles.'' Marshall might be ready to resume football activities in time for the start of training camp in late July.

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Brandon and I are in a keeper league that got its start in the '06 season. I'm the commish, and I've been pretty happy with the system we have in place for keepers. It's relatively conservative, it's fair, and it rewards good judgment on player potential while not going so far as to slam the door shut on teams who didn't make the best keeper decisions the previous season. The system we use is after the jump, and after using it for two seasons, I feel comfortable recommending it.

But that doesn't mean I think it's necessarily the best system in the world. I'd love to try something a little more extreme - something with few limits on how many players I can keep, and how long I can keep them. That, to me, would be the epitome of the keeper league concept. Really, I'm just curious to hear about any system you've tried and liked. If you'd be so kind as to share, please do so in the comments.

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I had fully expected him to spend the season splitting time with Julius Jones, and he'd probably be perfectly adequate in that role, but the Seattle Times is making it sound like the bell may be tolling soon:

[Seahawks president Tim] Ruskell said that Alexander had not been released. When he was asked about Alexander's future, Ruskell reiterated he had not been released.

Alexander's agent, Jim Steiner, did not accept phone calls at his office Tuesday, and the representative who answered the phone said there was nothing new to report.

When the team president is saying that you haven't been released, but not taking the next step to say that you will not be released, that's not a good sign. Your agent refusing to answer his phone is an especially bad sign.

JaMarcus Russell is a big fatty.

Warrick Dunn's a Buc again. Could get interesting with Earnest Graham, who was arguably the biggest surprise of 2007. He probably won't challenge Graham for the starting spot, but he could steal some carries and (especially) looks. (The question with Cadillac Williams isn't whether he'll start in '08 - he won't - but rather whether he'll ever start in the NFL again).

Julius Jones is officially a Seahawk, and if he was getting half of the carries in a backfield shared with the man-beast that is Marion Barber, it seems pretty likely that he'll get something similar in Seattle. One thing's for certain: Shaun Alexander's days of being a fantasy RB1 are long gone, never to return.

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We're going with a somewhat more refined, cleaner look for our second season (which, by the way, is only 179 days away, not that I'm counting). Things seem to be working OK at the moment, but I'm sure we're bound to run into problems in the near future. We'll try and work out the kinks before the hordes of people Googling fantasy football cheat sheets zOMG start to show up around late July.

P.S. I know this has nothing to do with the topic of this blog but holy wtf the intarwebz are asploding!

Apparently the Raiders have decided that Javon Walker is a better receiver than Randy Moss and have agreed to sign him to an insane 6 year, $55 million contract. If the Raiders couldn't get it done with the greatest receiver of this era, then why the hell would they think they could with Walker? How can they justify paying Walker so much money, especially considering the fact that he's coming off a season where he played in a whopping five games and that he's only started every game in a season once in the past six years? Many questions surround this move by the Raiders, but one thing is certain...they will be a bad team again next year, unless JaMarcus Russell turns into Tom Brady over night.

Sara, AKA the Fantasy Football Librarian, is featured as a guest blogger on the NY Times football blog The Fifth Down this week. Her blog, if you haven't checked it out already, is home to an absolute wealth of fantasy football information, so it wasn't surprising that I learned something new from her Times post - apparently there's a documentary about fantasy football out there. This I gotta see.

It's still ridiculously early, but there are already a few published mock drafts for next year's fantasy football season out there...

NFL.com: I find quite a few nits to pick with this one. One could certainly argue for Tom Brady as the top overall pick, but despite the terrible year for tailbacks that 2007 was, I'm still taking Tomlinson with the top pick. They've got A-Pete 2nd, and while he's plenty tempting, I'll take the sturdy LT over a guy as injury-prone as Peterson any day. Ronnie Brown (12) goes too late; I'd grab him mid-1st-round for sure. Same with Joseph Addai (8) - what in the world did he do this season that would make him anything but a top-5 pick?

The Hazean's mock first round: Now this is more like it. Every pick makes sense to me. The only things I'd change would be to bump Addai (3) above Peterson (2), and to drop Peyton (8) down to 10 or so, which would slide Gore and Lynch up. To be honest, I really wouldn't draft him in the first round at all this year. I truly believe he and Harrison had something special, and since Harrison doesn't seem likely to ever be the threat he once was, I think Peyton's numbers, while they'll continue to be pretty great, won't ever reach those astronomical 2004 levels again.

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