Fantasy Football

Yes, I'm away at Worldcon this weekend. I'll post an entry all about it soon.

(Very strange to put your life on hold for four days. Yes, I'm writing this entry after the fact.)

Did I mention I joined a fantasy football league? Debbi's sister runs one every year, apparently, through Yahoo Sports, as well as a pick 'em pool. Debbi plays, as do several of her family and some of her friends. So I figured, what the heck; it should be fun!

The league is handled during an auto-draft system: Everyone can rank players they want before the draft, and mark players they don't want, and then the computer drafts all the players from everyone's lists. So I did some research beforehand and ranked a whole bunch of players.

This was harder than it seemed, partly because I'm not familiar with most players in the NFL, and partly because I don't understand the principles of player development and performance as well as I do for baseball. I mean, I'm sure there are some similarities in terms of age, injuries, etc., but beyond that I've never really looked at it. So it was sort of a crash course for me.

Debbi kept telling me that I was taking it way more seriously than everyone else. Which is probably so, but I feel that the research and the education therefrom are a lot of the fun of fantasy sports for me. (Plus the trash talking, of course.) I'm not going to treat it as a tremendously competitive league, but I am going to put a little work into it.

Anyway, for those who are curious, here's my team, "Off the Uprights", with the roster I'm using for the first week:

Pos	Player	Team	Round/ Pick
QB	Favre, Brett	QB-GB	1/3
QB	Manning, Peyton	QB-Ind	2/14
WR	Holt, Torry	WR-StL	3/19
WR	Smith, Rod	WR-Den	4/30
WR	Morton, Johnnie	WR-KC	6/46
RB	Smith, Antowain	RB-NE	5/35
RB	Smith, Emmitt	RB-Dal	14/110
TE	Sharpe, Shannon	TE-Den	10/78
WR/TE	Ismail, Qadry	WR-Ind	16/126
K	Vanderjact, Mike	K-Ind	9/67
DEF	New England	DEF-NE	11/83
DEF	San Francisco	DEF-SF	12/94
Bench	Brunell, Mark	QB-Jac	13/99
Bench	Brown, Troy	WR-NE	8/62
Bench	Green, William	RB-Cle	7/51
Bench	Barlow, Kevan	RB-SF	15/115
Bench	Conwell, Ernie	TE-StL	17/131

Overall, I'm very happy with my quarterbacks and kicker, and pretty happy with my receivers and defenses. I think the running backs are my weakness, and I'm not sure what I think of my tight ends. But tight ends aren't worth as much as the other positions anyway.

For context, this is an 8-team league, so it's pretty shallow (17 x 8 = 136 players overall, counting each defense as a player). Good players were out there after the draft. Also, it's a head-to-head league, meaning each week my team will "play" someone else's team, and whoever gets more points that week will win that game.

I think my chances look decent. But we'll see what happens when the bye weeks arrive.

I'm also in two football pools this year, one with Debbi and company, and one run by Rich, a grad school cohort of mine and one of the founders of my old fantasy baseball league in Wisconsin. These require a lot less thought (in a way...) since I just need to make some picks for all of the week's games, and I can do that in ten minutes or less.

So it seems I'll be paying a lot more attention to football this year than I have in the past. But that's not the worst thing.