Yeah, well, whatever

 

Lots going on here at the palatial League HQ so I'm not going to have much of a post.

Had a waivers snafu occur this week which should serve as a cautionary tale for all owners. The Rbacks put in a blind bid claim on Monday for Taylor Heinicke and dropping Matt Ryan as part of the bid. Should have been pretty straightforward. But with no other bidders he was NOT awarded the Washington QB. 

Why? It seems that Dave came back on Tuesday and dropped Ryan preemptively. Cutting through all the minute details...the system saw the Heinicke bid but since the 'drop Ryan' part was no longer a possibility (having been dropped already) the bid was tossed as invalid. It didn't matter that Dave had an open slot or that no one else bid in the guy, the bid itself was bounced. At least that's the only explanation I can come up with. 

Lucky for David the guy he wanted was available this morning (and for only $5 as opposed to his original bid) and everything turned out for the best. I'm alerting everyone not to pick on Dave (it's an easy mistake to make) but to emphasize the fact that the system is not human and can't interpret your intent. Always double-check your work when it comes to blind bidding, especially if you go back and revise anything (bid amount, player to be dropped, add more bids, switch player priority, etc.) 

In a perfect system when Dave went back into the system on Tuesday evening to drop Ryan and add more bids a warning that the Heinicke bid was illegal would have been helpful. But you're pretty much on your own in these things.

 

Meanwhile...enjoy a little Marshall Tucker Band with the late Toy Caldwell. I saw them a couple of times in Houston at the old Sam Houston Coliseum and they tore the place up. Just a super live band.  

 

 

And my cutie!

Those vermicelli noodles took 10 minutes to eat and thirty minutes to clean up!

 

Horseshoes and horsesh*t

 

I'd always thought the above quote was uttered by Orioles' lefty Dave McNally but it turns out to be much older. No matter, it certainly applies to fantasy football as much as it does pitching. Want proof? I got bunches of it. Check this out:

That's a screen grab of part of our standings thru six weeks. The Flyers are 5-1, the Sticks are 1-5, a four game difference. Now look at Points For (PF)..the Flyers have scored only TWO more points than the Sticks. Two points over six weeks. Now go to Points Against (PA)...Flyers have had 522.5 scored against them while the Sticks have had to overcome opponents who tossed up 682.5 points. For the math-challenged that's 160 points, almost 27 points per week. Is it any wonder the Sticks are where they are? 

The Legends are even worse...they have scored only eight points less than the Flyers but their PA differential is 227! That's THIRTY EIGHT points per week. And on and on it goes. There are two things you can't control in Fantasy Football, the schedule and your opponent's score. Sure you need to draft well, pay attention during the season and submit a 'smart' lineup...but even if you do that there is no guarantee it's going to pay off. 

Luck goes both ways. This past week I made what I thought was a really good move. I picked up Deon Jackson of the Colts for $5 when it was announced that Taylor and Hines were both very much long-shots to play. I had him in my starting lineup...or so I thought. He name is written on my scratchpad right here on my desk with a star that means he's 'in'. But apparently I failed to push 'submit' or something because come Sunday I checked the scores and saw he had points on my bench! 

Which leads me to the awful Monday Night Football game just past. If you watched (and I can't imagine why you would have, Denver is awful, and boring) you saw Melvin Gordon (my starter) spend most of the game scratching his nose on the bench and Mike Williams (Jack's starter) get shut down almost totally. The result is my three point lead melted to 2.5 at the end of regulation. But the Rams extended the game into tortuous overtime.My lead was down to one when Williams hauled in a pass in overtime. My rookie mistake didn't hurt me due to dumb luck.

This and that... I read somewhere today that fantasy scoring is down 15% so far this season. I don't know about that but it was sure off this past weekend. I guess part of it was the first round of byes. Only two teams scored over 100 points. In the first five weeks we had either six or seven break that barrier every week... no time for much more this week. I'm trying to clean up some past seasons webpages and download the stats I want to keep before this all goes sideways.

The great Neil Finn and Crowded House. A song I never get tired of.

 Brooks, one of our former owners, stops by with my pretty little pixie!

Marino Re-incarnated? (aka this week's foolishness 2.0)

 

NOTE: I had a nice long post written. I'd taken a deep dive into comparing Dan Marino and Josh Allen in terms of our fantasy league numbers compared to their peers. But the Blogger app had other ideas and destroyed the formatting, making it pretty much unreadable. Here's a shorter version, with fewer stats...

The conventional wisdom among fantasy football experts is to not take your QB too early. The scoring among the top tier of quarterbacks is normally spread across a narrow range. Sometimes one guy will break away from that pack though, and prove to be a difference maker. Mahomes was that guy for a bit but he's settled back towards the pack. Now we have Josh Allen. Look at the top scorers through Week 5 in our league:

 

A few things jump out at you...The 3-point spread between the #5 scoring QB (Wentz at 22.8) and the #14 QB (Lawrence) is LESS THAN the 5-point spread between Josh Allen and his nearest competitor, Lamar Jackson!

There are three 'tiers' at the position at the moment. The third tier are the ten guys in green above. They include a fourth round pick, a last round pick, and two free agent acquisitions. As I mentioned these 10 are basically interchangeable, separated by a short field goal worth of points.

The 2nd tier had Jackson, Hurts (Channelview's own) and Mahomes. And then there is Allen, alone at the top. 

What does this tell us? I see it as meaning that the conventional wisdom is both right and wrong. You can find a perfectly fine QB in the middle to late rounds of a draft, sometimes even after the draft. But some guys coma along that can pick up a team and carry it. Guys who make a week-to-week difference in game outcomes. Dan Marino was one, Josh Allen is another. 

For those of you who were not around in our first decade here is an amazing stat...Dan Marino was taken by the Dolphins in the 1983 draft. he was good as a rookie but went to another level in 1984. Between that year and 1990, a stretch of seven seasons, the EHFL teams that had him as their QB won the league SIX times! 

Can that sort of streak happen in this era? I don't think so. Back in Marino's day we had a 'TD scoring only' format, with 6 points for a TD pass. It was truly a QB-dominated league. And Marino's number of touchdown passes gave whatever team he was on a big edge.. Our scoring now is much more balanced, both across positions and within any one position. 

Having said that Josh Allen was Rick's QB last season and has the Bombers on top of their division this year and they are also an elite scoring team at the moment (2nd in the league). It's entirely possible that Josh Allen can be this era's Golden Ticket and if so, he's worth a first round pick no matter what the experts say.

Other stuff.. the good news is we are done with early Sunday (London) games for a few weeks thankfully. The next one has the Jags playing their annual overseas contest in Week 8 I think. BTW..why the hell don't the Jags just move to England and be done with it?... The bad news is we begin bye weeks (as if I didn't have enough trouble filling out a lineup of guys who are not on crutches)... 

Weirdness Abounds... The Sticks are 0-5 but second in their division in scoring... the Legends have had 625 points scored against them. That's at least 90 more than every team except the Sticks. It's just shy of 200 more than have been scored against the Blizzard!..btw, we are fresh out of unbeaten teams now that the Flyers and Bliz lost. Which reminds me..I pay for a newsletter/weekly advice and then I completely ignore the advice. Had I taken the adice to heart and started Geno Smith and Travis Etiene I'd still be undefeated.. I'm just not smart I think.

Let's go back in time for a live performance of a masterpiece from a musical genius, Steve Winwood and Traffic.  

 

 

 And what has become a weekly tradition..my cutie!

 

Disclaimer: No child was hurt in the making of this video!

Some Days You're The Nail...

 ...and some days you're the hammer! Hell, some days you can't even tell which you are.

Well, that was...umm...interesting. Where to begin? Howsabout with the Lincoln Legends. Thru three weeks they had posted 224 points, total. That's under 75 a game. This week they explode for 169. The Sticks run up 120 in that game and lose! That 120 is a point more than double(!) the Flyers' total (59) and yet the Flyers won! Good lord, fantasy football is a cruel, cruel mistress. Hey Howdy Hey.... the Legends have five of the Top Ten game scores in league history. The Holes (twice), Flyers (twice) and Strawmenn make up the rest of the list. The Legends' 169 this week is tied for 5th best all time and is two points shy of the team record of 171 set in 2019.

More weirdness...Only two teams scored under 90 this week. And those two played each other. I should be embarrassed by a winning total of 59 over the Nats' 54 but fuck it, I've had my share of screw jobs in 42+ years in this league. I'll take and move on. 

I'm trying to find out if: A) 59 is the lowest winning score in the 'modern' (performance scoring) era, and B) if we've had so many 90+ scores in a week previously, and C) if a team has ever won with four starters scoring two points or less. I suspect the answer to all three is 'Yes' but I'm having issues with previous seasons' webpages. I think it has to do with the inaccessibility of the files I had on the old web storage site. I'll get it straightened out.

More Random Number Crap: The Bombers hit 143 this week and yet weren't close to being the high scoring team. BTW..they are the highest scoring team so far in 2022. Yup, Tight Ends Inc.©  is at the top of the points chart.... that 59-54 Flyers-Nats game...the two lowest totals of the year across all teams. It is not the lowest total of the performance scoring era (2004 and onward) however. It's not even close. The record for fewest points by both teams in a game is 73 which was hit twice. In 2006 the Bliz beat the Strawmenn 49-24! In 2008 the Flyers beat the Nats 38-35. So me and Dan have a shitty score history. LOL... It's worth noting that back then there were seven player lineups and no PPG. But still, those are lousy scores....

Webpage Blues...I'm pretty much fed up with issues on our league site. The majority of the problems stem from conflicts between my customization and MFL's back end changes. Other snags  are the result of me having to make a new account at the web hosting site. But, whatever it is that's behind them, the issues are pretty annoying. I may just go with a bare bones site next year or change platforms completely. I'm tired of spending time with this stuff.

Haven't heard any Merle Haggard lately so here he is with Tammy Wynette doing Today I Started Loving Again, a terrific song.

You know who doesn't care about your running back troubles? This sweet little pixie!