No matter how simple I try to make it, this commish thing continues to jump up and bite me. Looks like I failed to update on the rules page what I intended to change for this year. It says that the sixth playoff qualifier (the one based on points) needs a minimum of six wins. That was fine in our 13 game season days but I thought a seven win minimum would be appropriate in a 14 game season. I brain cramped when I edited this years rules and was so used to having a six win minimum that that's what I typed.
I have no intention of allowing a six-win team knock out an 8 win (or better) club from the post-season. I'll do what needs to be done to avoid that even if it means expanding the playoffs to include more teams. Doing that might require eliminating a bye (or byes) for the top seeds and if that happens it might piss someone off but we shall see. Of course if it's my team that gets bumped I'll take the fall. Whatever.
Next year we will go back to just having wildcards based on records. I've always believed that a really good team with bad scheduling luck shouldn't be punished but I'm not going to go through these shenanigans anymore. Just not worth the effort.
NOTE: After all this time I discovered I had restricted comments to those with Google accounts. I've changed that setting so anyone can comment on how adorable my granddaughter is! Or anything else.
Last year while I was still just contemplating the changes we made for 2022 I never foresaw the scenario we are looking at today. Last week we had SEVEN teams at 5-3 and a couple more at 4-4. We've somehow managed to flip that script and now we are looking at two clubs at 6-3, SEVEN at 5-4.
I had hoped for more competition when we went to redrafting every season. Looks like we have that competition! But the cliché 'Be careful what you wish for' keeps going through my head. Unless something happens to break up this iceberg at the top of the league before the season ends I'm going to need a much more powerful computer to parse the damn tiebreaks and figure out who makes the playoffs.
I've brought in some extra equipment and a few software engineers just in case. Here's a live look-in at League Headquarters as the team runs through it's paces.
This is the second crew I hired, btw. The first guys spent a few days on that machine, walked out to me and said "Fuck it, let's just give Hogan the title and call it a day!" I shit-canned those clowns in a hurry.
Notes and Quotes... Nine weeks down, five to go...and how 'bout those Ridgebacks?!? ... here's something I just now noticed: six of the seven 5-4 teams are 2-1 in their division, both 6-3 teams are as well. That won't help me in the least if things don't change... Screw Kenyon Drake. I picked his ass up twice this year and he was an unfulfilled promise. Padilla nabs him and the guy runs wild on Monday Night. (ツ)╭∩╮
The Blizzard are tied for first in their division but rank 11th in scoring. Interesting, but given how goofy things are at the moment, not too surprising... Worth mentioning that Joe Mixon (in the Sticks' win over the Bombers), outscored the Nationals 52-48…That's the first time a player has outscored a full lineup this year. I need to go back and check the last time it happened. It's pretty rare, the equivalent of a guy shooting his age in golf I'd wager. Rarer still would be a player outscoring his opponent's lineup that week... Mixon and Justin Fields combined for 94(!) points for the Sticks.. That's easily the top one team duo of the season... Mixon's total ties him for second for most points in a game behind Drew Brees' 53 point total in Week 8 of 2015... The $5 FCFS waiver price has made a big difference in waiver cash remaining. Most years we'd have a couple teams down to double digit bank accounts by now.
I meant to include these points last week but I got sidetracked...
#1..I still plan to look really closely at using a dedicated TE as part of the lineup. It's been a shallow position so far this year but even if it remains that way it will throw a wrinkle into draft strategy. "do I jump on a stud TE early? Do I wait for a second level guy a few rounds in? How about just streaming TEs?" And strategy wrinkles are a good thing, IMHO.
#1A..If we add the TE how do we construct lineups? We have 8 spots. QB and Kicker take two. What should we require for the other six? It has to have a minimum of one at each position so QB-RB-WR-TE-K leaves three slots. I tend to think the optimum way would be to require 2 RB, 2 WR and allow one Flex player from the ranks of those same slots.
That would look like this:
1 QB
2/3 RB
2/3 WR
1/2 TE
1 K
An alternate setup could be requiring just one player at each slot and having what amounts to three flex players. Like so:
1 QB
1-4 RB
1-4 WR
1-4 TE
1 K
I'd lean towards the first scenario but I'm open to suggestions.
#2.. One thing I've noticed over the last couple of years is that our 9 pm Wednesday night waivers sometimes don't process in a timely manner most weeks. I believe that 9 Central on Wednesday (10 Eastern) is the most popular time for leagues to schedule waivers. I know the five other leagues i have access to (I served as co-owner for drafting purposes) all have waivers scheduled at that same moment. I'm thinking of moving ours up or back 30 minutes next year. I know one league opted for Tuesday waivers for just this reason. But I like letting everyone have a couple of days to do their due diligence prior to wasting $78 on a guy who had 23 points the previous week and won't score 12 total the rest of the way.
It's really a minor thing but it's one that bugs me every week, even when I'm not bidding.
Don't believe the hype... I'm using Google Chrome again since Firefox seems to have gotten slower and slower for me. No problem with Chrome until I clicked on some of the EHFL Links on the league site that lead to stuff like Playoff Record by Owner, etc, etc. Chrome gives me a red page warning of a "Deceptive Site Ahead". That's just incorrect. There is nothing involved with the site hosting my records documents or the docs themselves that is in any way harmful. To view the records you'll need to click through using the 'Details' button the present and then the last link in that page which allows you to go to the 'unsafe site'. I'm working on a resolution but in the meantime it's perfectly OK to check the pages there.
EDIT..when I checked this morning (Tuesday 11/8) to see if the links still led to a warning page I found the site appears to be down, or at least my files are not accessible. If it's not a temporary glitch I'm going to have to find a better solution.
Another edit... as of late this afternoon things appear to be back to normal with the hosting site. I get the warning page noted above on my phone but not on my desktop computer. but at least the pages are still there. The issue this a.m. must have been some temporary snafu.
A bottle of white..a bottle of red...
Her other grandfather taught her to wrinkle up her nose like this. She thinks it's a riot. 😆
I'm not sure I've ever seen this before...seven, count 'em, SEVEN teams at 5-3. And nobody is any better than that. It's absolute raging mediocrity. The good news is that almost everyone reading this is still in the fight. The bad news is that your team sucks just like the next guy's. Oh, and did I mention that two teams are at 4-4? That means that 9 of 12 of us are at the top or within a game of being at the top of a division. It's like we've played for eight weeks and nobody has left the starting blocks.
If I get some free time this week I'll try to find out if we've ever had a situation like this before. I f'ing doubt it.
Random stuff being random... the Strawmenn and Flyers combined for 284 points this week. That's good for a tie for the sixth-highest game ever. I thought we had a chance to approach the record (306) with Joe Burrow going Monday night but he had a middling game (not that it mattered to Padilla!)... So, do you think scoring is down this season? You'd be correct. Check out this comparison of our weekly scoring through eight weeks of 2021 and 2022:
Over 500 fewer points this year league-wide. I thought that maybe there were fewer early byes last year. Nope, byes started with Week 6 as they did this year. And there had been 12 teams on bye through Week 8 while there have been 10 teams with a week off so far in 2022. So there has been one moreNFL game this year. I have no idea what's behind this downward screwing trend and it'll be interesting to see if it continues. And did you notice? The top four teams so far this year were the bottom four last year through the same number of weeks! And they are in perfectly inverted order. It's a damn harmonic convergence of points (or something).
And btw...that's a really nice Chris Stapleton song at the top of the post. It popped up when I was searching for John Lennon's song of almost the same name and I spun it and liked it.
Look! It's Wario! LOL My baby girl wasn't too thrilled with her cap but I finally convinced her to keep it on for her Halloween fun.
For the full effect here is the family group...Mario, Luigi, and Wario. I have no idea what that means.
.jpg)
.jpg)
