Fish Fear Me

We Are The Champions

An old saying has it that sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, and I've had more than my share of good luck this fantasy football season. This Fantasy Bowl week has been no exception.

I made a very good move in playing Andy Dalton over Matthew Stafford and Jamaal Charles and Brandon Marshall put in very solid performances in support. However, the rest of my team fared less well and the result so far, with Anquan Boldin yet to play Monday night, is a fairly anemic 38 points. 

Anemic, but good enough to best my opponent who, lucky for me, is done now with only 35 points. Yep, my third Championship in this league and my sixth overall is in the bag. As is the total points crown and the highest weekly point total(unless Phil Dawson and the 49ers DST can combine for 60 points).

That makes it a pretty damn good year even if my failure to win my division has made it less than a clean sweep. 

I'm not certain, but Uncle Si might say that calls for a "Booyah!"

FFL: A Woulda/Coulda/Shoulda Weekend

It was a wild weekend in the NFL, making for a wild first round of the fantasy football playoffs as well.

For me the craziness started at about 11:50 on Sunday morning when I happened to catch a blurb that said Reggie Bush had slipped in pregame warm-ups and may or may not play. I had Joique Bell, his backup, on my roster but do I play him or Bush? Twitter exploded with frantic owners looking for info, maybe millions of them. At the last minute I crossed my fingers and put Bell in my lineup. It turns out Bush did sit the whole game and Bell got me 12 points. Whew.

Then there was the cold and snowy weather for some big games Sunday. I had figured it would mean some low scoring games but it was just the opposite with some NFL records set:

• Most touchdowns scored in one day: 90.
• Most touchdowns scored in a week: 104.
• Most points scored in a week: 859.

For whatever reason, that resulted in an amazingly tight points grouping in my fantasy football league. The eight teams playing yesterday totaled the following points: 52, 52, 52, 53, 53, 55, 58, 38. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that. That, of course, means lots of "if only I had played _______" among the losers. Heck, even the winners.

My game ended in a 52-point tie. If Matt Forte had gotten 2 more receiving yards last night I would have lost. If Brandon Marshall had gotten 99 yards for me instead of 100 on the nose I would have lost. If I had played Andy Dalton instead of Matt Stafford I would have won handily. As it works out, I get the win by virtue of my 42 bench points to my opponent's 39. Double whew. 

On to round 2, where I face my arch-rival this year for the third time. Hopefully my Coach plays his lineup a little smarter this coming week.

Stuff

-Our first real snow of the winter arrived yesterday. I got about 6" of global warming at my place, but places along the North Shore got as much as 3' by this morning. What I got at my house was a fairly wet and classic "heart attack" snow. Because it was colder up north what they got was probably a lot fluffier, but then 3' of snow is still 3' of snow no matter how fluffy it falls.

As often happens, right on the heels of the snow comes some cold air from Canada. We're looking at single digit highs and subzero lows overnight until at least Sunday, when the temp will climb all the way up to 14. Then another round of subzero lows will hit, with maybe a warmup into the 20s by the end of next week. As I noted before, I think it's going to be a hard winter.

-I made the fantasy football playoffs as the #3 seed, losing the #2 seed and a first week bye to my arch rival this year by three lousy points. So it goes. I play the #6 seed and there will be no smack talk from me considering that last year I beat the #3 team as the #6 team myself. 

-Good news for the rest of the world, bad news for the thieves:

Stolen cobalt-60 found in Mexico; curious thieves likely doomed

Is that not a giant wake-up call? Instead of security theater at airports, perhaps we should redirect some of theat effort into better security for these types of shipments. Maybe?

-I guess I can see it:

A new disorder is plaguing teenagers: Sleep texting

Reading and responding to text messages while asleep — called “sleep texting” — is an abnormal sleep behavior, similar to sleepwalking. It’s also a growing concern among doctors grappling with a sleep-deprived population: young people who can’t be separated from their cellphones. For teens, lack of sleep has been linked to obesity, high blood pressure and behavioral problems.

Dr. Mike Howell, with Fairview Sleep Center at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, estimates that as many as half of his young patients who report sleep problems have sleep texted. While some of those texts did little more than embarrass their senders, others were nothing to joke about.

“We’ve had concerns of people who have texted or called 911, not realizing what had just happened,” he said.

It doesn't surprise me that people who text all day might also text in their dreams, or in some semi-dream state. Something similar has occasionally happened to me after doing some rote task all day. When I was just starting out in the printing industry I sometimes had to sit in front of a basic collating machine for hours as it kicked out multi-page letters for me to cross-stack and hand staple. That night I would dream about that endless repetition letters coming at me. It was exhausting. 

The solution for me was to work hard and get promoted out of that crap. The solution for texters who do it so much that they dream about it is just as obvious: Back off on the texting so you can get some sleep.

-The Minnesota Twins are working to revamp their dreadful starting rotation by grabbing Ricky Nolasco and probably Phil Hughes from the free agent market. I thought Hughes was a done deal but I guess there are some details to be worked out. I like the Nolasco pickup a lot though I have my doubts about Hughes. The knock on him is that he's a one pitch wonder(fastball) who did develop a workable slider last year, only to see it get hit hard as teams saw him again later in the season. We'll see what other moves they make, but at least it looks like the Twins management wants to compete in 2014. That will be a major improvement in itself.

-I've been in something of a funk the last few weeks when it comes to blogging. I'm so pissed off at our nitwit president and the lying assholes who enable him that I can hardly stand it. Every day with those people it is a cascade of stupidity and lies that has become overwhelming. It's not just the paid liars in Washington anymore either, the rank and file of the Democratic Party is at a crossroads where they have to choose between Truth and Integrity or blindly supporting President Fuckup.

See? And that's the toned down version. 

Next Week: The Real Deal

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. My brother put on a spread for a small group of us that had a turkey and all the usual fixings. It was delicious, as always.

The topping to a nice day was watching Justin Tucker rack up 19 points for my fantasy football team. With 12 points from Mathew Stafford and 12 more from Reggie Bush that makes it a 43 point lead for me going into this weekend. I can't get too cocky because my opponent only had the Steelers Defense/Special teams going yesterday, so he has 7 more players(including Adrian Peterson) yet to go this week to my 5. Nonetheless, it's a very good start.

Before last week's win I had lost three in a row, so the best I can do is the #3 seed in the playoffs. My opponent this week gets that seed if he beats me and I would slip to #4. I'm still very happy to be 8-4 at this stage and in the upper bracket of the playoffs. It has been a good FFL year no matter what happens after this point.

Around here you can kind of get a feeling for how harsh the winter is going to be by how the jetstream acts in November. When it stays north of Minnesota and bottles up all of that cold Arctic air there's a good shot at having a milder or at least shorter winter. When it doesn't though, it's often like a dam breaking and we can count on wave after wave of Arctic air masses coming down from Canada. We've already had a couple of cold blasts this month, so I'm not at all surprised to read this:

Light snow streaks in Monday & Tuesday, but the main event comes Wednesday into Friday as a series of sloppy southern storms track across the Plains. Wednesday into Thursday temperatures may be just warm enough aloft for a wintry mix in the Twin Cities (mostly snow north and west). A second storm pushing northeast may drop all snow by Friday into early Saturday, with cold air firmly in place. It's still too early for any more details, other than to say that snow lovers may finally get their wish the latter half of next week.

Here's a gasp-worthy number: the ECMWF (European) model prints out a low of -17F in the metro a week from tomorrow. Remember, the coldest jabs of winter are usually preceded by significant snows.

Numbing cold lingers into the second week of December with a temperature rebound by mid-month.

That's just one model, but any way you look at it it's going to get cold. All of that will certainly slide east of here, though I don't know how far south it will get. The real deal arrives next week. We've been warned.

Zig Or Zag?(updated)

I suppose I shouldn't tempt the fantasy football gods, but at this point I'm having too much fun, win or lose. With 7 games remaining I could go 3-4 and still be assured of getting an upper division playoff spot. Here are this weeks musings:

• QB-Stafford at home against the Bengals or Cutler on the road against the Redskins(uh-oh, there's that word)? Cutler technically has the better matchup, but Stafford is at home, Calvin Johnson is listed as probable, and Stafford has the hottest hand right now. I'll go with Stafford.
• RB-What can I say? Jamaal Charles is the highest scoring running back in the league right now and Reggie Bush is #6. Add 10 points for week 3 when I played Joique Bell for the injured Bush and the platoon is actually #5. Doing my due diligence with the rest of my backs, Steven Jackson is still out and Jacquizz Rodgers has a terrible match up against Tampa Bay, a team that has yet to give up a TD to a running back. Charles and Bush it is, not that there was ever any doubt. 
• WR/TE-Brandon Marshall is a must start and currently #7 in WR/TE points. Vincent Jackson got hot last week and has a good match up with Atlanta, which has given up at least one WR touchdown in each game this year. What to do for the third receiver? The options are Boldin against Tennessee, which hasn't given up a WR touchdown since week 2. The injured(probable)Cecil Shorts against San Diego, which has given up 2 WR touchdowns in half their games this year. Jordan Cameron, who has gone stone cold since I picked him up, against Green Bay, which gave up 81 yards and 1 TD to Dallas Clark last week.  I would like to start Shorts, but I'm worried that even if he plays, he takes one shot on that shoulder and he's done for the day. I'm going with Cameron.
• My DST is the Ravens and my kicker is Justin Tucker. They are what they are. Tucker has been alternating hot and cold so far this season and this is his turn to be hot. Hopefully.

There's the week 7 lineup. My opponent is 4-2 and from the QB through WR/TE positions has 5 of 6 good match ups. His team is no pushover. 

Update: My opponent put up a respectable 50 points, not enough for my even more respectable 64. 6-1, baby.

My correctly figured zigs were Stafford with a very nice 12 pts, Charles with a healthy 10pts, Vincent Jackson with an outstanding 17 pts, and Cameron Jordan with a TD and 2 bonus pts for a total of 8(he was due). Brandon Marshall had a less than stellar performance today, but nobody on the bench would have topped his score of 3.

I should have zagged: Reggie Bush managed only 3 bonus points while Jacquizz Rodgers defied the odds and came up with 2 receiving TDs today plus a bonus point. That's the way the FFL ball bounces, I guess. You kind of have to figure that you're going to miss one or two of those every week if you have good options. 

Which is a lot easier to say when you're 6-1.

On A Lighter Note

It was a big win for my fantasy football team this past weekend. I took on my previously unbeaten division rival and won by a score of 72-52. That leaves us tied at 5-1, but now I have the head-to-head advantage plus 20 points in the first second tiebreaker if it comes to that. 

I benched Matthew Stafford because I didn't like his matchup and I lost 6 pts with that mistake. Cecil Shorts turned out to be a bust for the week because he got hurt in the first quarter of his game, but looking at his teammate Justin Blackmon's 190 yards you know he would have lit up Denver too.

Other than that, I got good scoring from all the big hitters. Seeing Vincent Jackson finally break out was particularly gratifying since I picked him to start over Anquan Boldin and Jordan Cameron. I think he's going to get a lot more action with Mike Glennon as QB in Tampa Bay. 

Speaking of Boldin, I haven't given up on him. He can still be a decent matchup play, and if Mario Manningham comes back in the next week or two he could catch fire. Right now he's getting an awful lot of double coverage because the rest of the receiving corps in San Francisco is so weak, Vernon Davis excepted. That won't be so easy for opposing defenses when Manningham gets back.

In the real football world, the Vikings got creamed at home 35-10 by Carolina on Sunday. They were once again outplayed and outcoached. Matt Cassel threw two horrible interceptions, but it really was a dismal team effort on both sides of the line. There will be a lot pressure now to start Josh Freeman next week against the NY Giants and I think that would be a mistake. There are too many other things wrong with this team and throwing Freeman in there before a few of them are fixed will just poison the well for him too. I would give Cassel another chance while continuing to bring Freeman up to speed. Then I would hand the offense over to Freeman week 8 at home against Green Bay. 

On the death of Adrian Peterson's son: I don't think we know the whole story, so caution is in order when it comes to what Peterson did or didn't do regarding his son. That said, I didn't care for his demeanor in front of the media on Friday before his son died. I don't like that he heard that boy was his son three months ago and yet he hadn't met him until the child was on life support last Thursday. I don't like that he's had three kids with three different women. I guess that's all I have to say at the moment. 

W00T

A solid 50-28 win this past weekend leaves me 3-0 in FFL, my best start in some time. Unfortunately, another team in my division looks likely to go to 3-0 also, so I have to share the division lead. We're the last two undefeated at this point and will meet up in three weeks.

It was another solid week for my RBs. Jamaal Charles got me 12 points last Thursday and Joique Bell, in place of Reggie Bush yesterday, got me 10 more. A respectable 9 points from Stafford and an excellent 14 point performance from Justin Tucker took care of the bulk of the scoring.

I'm unhappy that Anquan Boldin, Vincent Jackson, and Brandon Marshall combined for only 5 points. Jackson left the game early with a rib injury and we'll have to see how serious that is. It looks like Marshall had a down game simply because Chicago jumped to an early lead and didn't do a lot of passing. Anquan Boldin worries me the most right now, as I watched most of the 49ers game and his quarterback, Kaepernick, looked awful. What made it even worse was it looked like they had established the running game with Frank Gore, so it should have been even easier for Kaepernick to both run and open up the passing game. Clearly teams have adjusted to his style and he and his coaches are going to have to do some adjusting of their own. 

Sitting on the bench is Cecil Shorts for Jacksonville, who didn't get in the end zone yesterday but had a very respectable 143 yards against a tough Seahawks defense. Then there's Tavon Austin, who I picked up after I dropped Sidney Rice yesterday. Naturally, Rice had a huge game with two TDs yesterday. I'll have to see who makes it through the waiver wire Wednesday night.

In the real world, the Vikes went to 0-3 after losing at home to, gulp, the Cleveland Browns. They simply got outplayed and outcoached. The offensive line that cleared the way for Adrian Peterson last year and did a decent job of protecting Christian Ponder is in complete disarray. Ponder was sacked six times yesterday and Peterson had to work awfully hard to get to 88 yards. Ponder looked decisive on short passes and had some zip on the ball, but he was terrible passing downfield.

Unlike my FFL team, it may be time to write this season off.

FFL Update

As long as the Bengals DST doesn't score about five TDs tonight I should be able to go 2-0 so far this season, a much better start than the 0-3 from last year. Production dropped pretty much across the board this week, but I'm not panicking. Quite a few of my players had tough matchups yesterday, so I figured it might be a down week. The Minnesota DST came through for me though, and offset a big chunk of that downside with two TDs for me.

The Vikings aren't that good on defense this year, but both Cordarelle Patterson(kickoffs) and Marcus Sherels(punts) have great return skills. Patterson started the day with a 105 yard return for a TD and defensive fumble recovery and runback for a TD got me the second. The odds aren't good for a shutout from the Minnesota DST, but there's a reasonable chance of somebody scoring each week.

The Vikes couldn't close the deal yesterday in Chicago and fell to 0-2. I think Christian Ponder had a decent enough game to hang onto his job, barely. He wasn't helped by his receivers either. A drop by Jarius Wright in the end zone cost a TD and the failure of Jerome Simpson to attack the ball led to an interception. Not to mention perhaps a drop in confidence in him from Christian Ponder.

AP has had some moments in the sun, but he hasn't gotten traction like he did last year. He has 193 rushing yards after two games, an average which won't get him close to 2,000 yards let alone his goal of 2,500. 

NFL Week 1: Good, Bad, And Ugly

Good: My fantasy football team is leading 58-28 61-28 this afternoon with Anquan Boldin still going for me and Pierre Garcon and the Texans DST left to play tomorrow for my opponent. That's likely going to be a win for me, but in any case it's a good start to the FFL season. The only downside is I left 13 points from Reggie Bush on the bench, which would have been nine more points compared to the back I played, Steven Jackson.

Bad: Things looked to be a romp for the Vikings today when Adrian Peterson scampered 78 yards on the first play for the Minnesota offense. It was downhill from there. Sloppy play and penalties hurt both teams, but another inconsistent effort from QB Christian Ponder kept the Vikings from countering a great game by Reggie Bush. Not a good start for the Vikings.

Ugly: Ndamukong Suh does some good things off the field, but on it he's arguably the dirtiest player in the NFL. This afternoon he went after Minnesota center John Sullivan's knee on an interception return for Detroit. He was flagged for a 15-yard personal foul and it cost his team a touchdown. Here's the play(Sullivan is #65 in white, Suh is #90 in blue):

(click the image to enlarge)

Sullivan was well behind the play and very lucky that he didn't receive a career ending knee injury. If the NFL is really serious about eliminating those types of illegal blocks they will suspend Suh for at least three games. I mean really, the very first game of the season he goes after a knee, which almost seems like he's spitting in the eye of the NFL commissioner. 

Suh denied it was intentional after the game:

"I wasn't by any means going for his knees," Suh insisted. "He knows that."

Well, judge for yourself. It looks intentional to me and given Suh's history going back many years I say he's a lying, scumbag, son of a bitch. I hope I live long enough to see him denied a place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame because of all of those dirty stunts.

Drafty

So, the 2013 FFL Draft is complete. I stuck with my strategy of taking two backs first, then two receivers, then I grabbed Reggie Bush with #5 and Matthew Stafford with #6. While I was in the draft I felt good about how it was going, but upon further review I'm having second thoughts. That might be a good thing, since just about every team I've been happy about has turned out to be, um, less than stellar.

Here what I think will be the starting lineup this week and the backups: 

• QB-Matthew Stafford, DET
• RB-Jamaal Charles, KC
• RB-Steven Jackson, ATL
• WR-Brandon Marshall, CHI
• WR-Vincent Jackson, TB
• WR-Cecil Shorts, JAC
• K-Justin Tucker, BAL
• DST-MN

I was pleased to get Stafford as QB as I think he will have a bounceback year. His backup is Jay Cutler who, who knows, might be a better tandem play with Marshall than what I think. He's at least a serviceable backup at this point and can cover Stafford's week 9 bye.

I have Reggie Bush as a third RB option and I picked up Jacquizz Rodgers, ATL as insurance against Steven Jackson getting hurt. I picked up Mikel Leshoure as the same insurance against Bush, but I think I might have blown that one. Will have to see. I may dump him for Joique Bell or flip-flop and pick up Charles' backup.

My fourth wideout is Sidney Rice, SEA. I think Russell Wilson will improve on last year and consequently so will his receivers. My final wideout is Anquan Boldin, who I grabbed in the later rounds. He may be the first to go if somebody breaks out week 1 or 2.

I went with no backups for kicker(bye week 8) or defense(bye week 5). I'll deal with those weeks when they come.

I think I'll have some tweaking to do after the first week, assuming I don't have a full scale fiasco on my hands. Hahaha.