Through 16 weeks of two fantasy football leagues we never once watched a fantasy football show on television or the computer. And we ended up in the championship in both leagues. (We lost the Play for Pride Championship two weeks ago, 108-94. In the ultimate irony, it was our much ballyhooed 2nd round draft pick Ryan Mathews who cost us the game. Mathews had done nothing all season, except suck and get injured. We picked up his backup, Michael Tolbert, who had a nice season for us. However, in week 16 during the championship he got ... wait for it ... minus two points. Mathews ended up with 13. Get rid of Tolbert's -2 and add Mathews' 13, and we win the championship 109-108. Needless to say, Ryan Mathews will NEVER play on another fantasy team of ours again. EVER.) Anyway, back to last week's Play for Pay Championship. As we have bitched and moaned about for a month, the ESPN format calls for a two week semifinal and a two week championship. As such, unlike almost every other league, the ESPN one plays in week 17 of the NFL schedule. That would be the week 17 where the playoff teams rest their starters, and the stars of the horrible teams come up with reasons not to play.
After the opening round of the championship, we were ahead 87-71. Our three concerns heading into the final day were Tom Brady, Matt Forte and Anquan Boldin. We knew Brady was playing, but had no idea how long. Our guess was one, maybe two quarters tops. Then some idiot in the Boston Globe said he was most likely done after a single series. That, coupled with the fact Sam Bradford and the Rams were battling the mediocre Seahawks for a playoff spot, convinced us to play Bradford. The Bears had about a one percent chance to get the top seed in the NFC, so we assumed Forte would get a few early touches and then call it a day. And that posed a HUGE problem for us, as our only other running backs were the aforementioned Mike Tolbert, who was out with an injury, and Darren McFadden, who had a bad toe. As for Boldin -- we'd simply had enough of his crap this season. He was our third round pick in the draft. Going into the final game his production for the year was: 11, 3, 32, 6, ZERO, 12, 15, 2, 11, ZERO, 2, 17, 4, ZERO, 1. In his last six games, discounting his 17 point outburst, he was averaging 1.4 points (1.4!). The alternative was Percy Harvin, who gets hurt a ton, and has to play with somebody by the name of Joe Webb.
So we first needed confirmation on the Brady-Forte-McFadden issues. We checked out espn.com and noticed they had a fantasy show on TV at 11:30. When the time came, we sat in front of the television with The Playmaker. The host was Erik Kuselias, whom we love. (And not because of his alleged sexual pickup lines to ESPN co-eds.) His sidekicks were Tim Hasselbeck and some guy whose name we never saw. About 30 minutes into the show they went to some blonde hottie who said McFadden was inactive. We then ran to the computer and queued up our roster. And there we stayed for the next 90 minutes. The Playmaker turned up the TV so we could hear it in our home office. And every time they talked about wide receivers or running backs he would come in and conference with us. In hour-and-a-half leading up to kickoff, we made no fewer than seven transactions.
1. Good-bye Tolbert, hello Packer wide receiver James Jones! Jones was one of the top free agent flankers. Green Bay was fighting for the playoffs and Aaron Rodgers torched the Giants last week, including one TD to Jones.
2. Good-bye Nate Washington, hello pot smoker Ricki Williams! Ricki has done little this year, but he was HUGE for us last season. More importantly, he figured to get at least 10 points playing against the Patriot scrubs in the rain.
3. Good-bye Louis Murphy, hello Michigan Man Jason Avant! Murphy did nothing for us after we picked him up on waivers at mid-season. (There's a reason why 99 percent of the guys on the waiver wire are there.) Avant figured to get a ton of PT as the Eagles rested DeSean Jackson and Jeremy Maclin.
4. Good-bye Anthony Armstrong, hello Jerome Harrison! We don't even remember when we picked up Armstrong from the waiver wire. We seem to remember doing so when the playoffs began just to "intimidate" the three other playoff owners. Not even Andy Reid would be dumb enough to let Shady McCoy play in a meaningless game. We figured Big Red would let Harrison touch the ball 20 times and get the crap beat out of him.
5. Good-bye Ricky Williams and hello Joe McKnight! Wait a minute. Rather, wait a second, because that's about how long Williams lasted on our roster. We were not even thinking about Joe McKnight -- why would we?!? His name did not even pop up on the first page of free agent running backs. But Our Guy Erik Kuselias brought his name up early on the ESPN fantasy show. He said Shonn Greene was not playing and that L.T., too, was not playing. We quickly called his name up on espn.com, convinced that our opponent had probably beat us to the punch. Alas, he had not. So we double clicked. Quickly.
6. Good-bye Darren McFadden, hello ... wait for it ... Ricky Williams (yet again)! No sooner had we added McKnight when we got word that McFadden was officially inactive. So we exhaled and reached out for Ricky. Again.
7. Good-bye Davone Bess, hello Chris Ivory! This was a tough one, as we thought long and hard about putting Bess in our starting lineup. (He burned the Patriots the first time around this season.) But Our Guy Kuselias was really pushing this guy hard. In fact, he said of the three big running back waiver names of Joe McKnight, Jerome Harrison and Chris Ivory, he would rank Ivory as number one. Prior to that, we had never even heard of Chris Ivory. But In Kuselias We Trust.
So in a little over an hour, we had completely reshaped the roster of the team that got us to the championship in our 12 team league. It now looked like this:
QB: Tom Brady, Sam Bradford
RB: Michael Turner, Matt Forte, Jerome Harrison, Ricky Williams, Chris Ivory
WR: Mario Manningham, James Jones, Anquan Boldin, Percy Harvin, Jason Avant
TE: Vernon Davis
K: Nate Kaeding
Defense: Jets
With the decision of Bradford over Brady, (and knowing we were going with Davis, Kaeding and the Jets) our decisions revolved around running back and wide receiver. Michael Turner was a given at one running back, but we were convinced not even Lovie Smith would be dumb enough to risk using Forte. We weren't willing to gamble on Ricky, so that left us with Jerome Harrison versus
Mario Manningham was a given at wide receiver. He was our 14th round pick(!) back in September, but he had seven games with double digit points, including the last two weeks. Then we looked at the underwhelming receivers on our roster: Anquan Boldin, Percy Harvin, Jason Avant and James Jones. Boldin sucks. Harvin was playing with Joe Webb against a pretty good Detroit defense. The ESPN guys said Avant was a good guy to go with. We kept thinking that he is average at best, plus he had the misfortune of playing with Kevin Kolb. We went with Jones because he was playing with Aaron Rodgers. With no other real options at receiver, we decided to flex Joe McKnight as our third running back.
So at 12:56, just four minutes before rosters locked, we had our lineup. Bradford at quarterback. Ivory, Turner and McKnight at running back. Manningham and Jones at wide receiver, with Davis at tight tend. Kaeding was our kicker, the Jets were the defense. We were up against the top rated team from the regular season (we were second). Their big names were Peyton Manning, Arian Foster, Vincent Jackson and David Akers.
At 1 PM, The Playmaker turned on the Patriots game and we watched Tom Brady, our Tom Brady, lead the Pats down the field and throw a touchdown pass. At that point, the two of us got pissed. We moved to the living room, built a fire and watched the Oklahoma-UConn Fiesta Bowl on the HD DVR. We would not watch another second of NFL action the entire rest of the day. Too damn nervous. Unbeknownst to The Playmaker, however, we would check the computer for fantasy updates every 20 minutes or so. We jumped out to an early lead, as we had three guys playing early and they had only two. Still, the projection had us losing. Michael Turner was plugging away, posting solid numbers. However, there was a major problem in New Orleans. Chris Ivory had 7 carries for 33 yards in the first quarter, but then seemed to get stuck. Nearly an hour later his numbers had not changed. (We would later learn he got injured. He finished with a woeful 3 points. Jerome Harrison, our second choice to replace Forte, would have earned us 10 points.)
And then there was Joe McKnight. Joe "Effing" McKnight! Our prediction was so spot-on. Buddy's-Son-Rex indeed was intent on running the kid into the ground until he passed out. By the end of the game he had toted the rock 32 times for 158 yards against the Bills. He brought home 16 fantasy points. Sixteen points from a kid who had not been on anyone's fantasy roster the entire season. The entire season! And he was added to ours less than an hour before the championship.
Joe "Effing" McKnight!
But he wasn't the only one helping the J-E-T-S. Their defense was knocking the sheeet out of the hapless Bills. They gave up just one TD. They came up with FOUR interceptions, THREE sacks, TWO fumble recoveries and scored ONE touchdown. All that turned into a whopping 25 fantasy points for us.
On to the 4:15 PM games. The other guy had all seven of his remaining players playing. We countered with five. Predictably, our lead shrank and shrank. Eventually we were behind. Vernon Davis scored for us. James Jones did jack sheeeeet and ended up with ZERO points. Worst of all, coaching dolt Lovie Smith was playing Matt Forte the entire game. (He would end up with 15 fantasy points -- remember his replacement, Ivory, gave us 3.) We were down by 20+ points. And weren't confident that Bradford could make up the difference on the road at Seattle in the Sunday night game. We knew we were done.
And then things got crazy. We watched OU another 30 minutes and came back to the computer. Mario Manningham had come up LARGE (yet again) and scored a TD on his way to 16 wonderful points. And Nate Kaeding was nailing field goals like he was playing for a new contract. He nailed 4 of them and threw in 3 extra points, to give us 17 points. (Repeat: A kicker got 17 points!). We got the lead back, but worried as the every dangerous Vincent Jackson was on the other squad. Potentially worse, it looked like the Colts and Titans were headed to overtime. We envisioned a Peyton Manning to Blair White overtime-winning-score. Whoever the hell Blair White is, he was playing against us along with Manning.
Away from the computer we went.
When we came back, we noted (with joy) that Adam Vinatieri had won the game for the Colts in the final seconds. (Manning ended up with 18 points; White had 5.)
As the last of the 4:15 games finished, we were cumulatively ahead by 9 points. Unless Bradford threw something like 6 picks and fumbled 4 times, we were all set. And while he did not play well (zero TDs and 1 pick), he did get us 5 points.
Week 16 Us 87 Them 71
Week 17 Us 106 Them 109
Final score: The Sons of Mike Schmidt 193 Them 180
Hello, $400!
Thank you, Erik Kuselias.
And thank you, Joe "Effing" McKnight.
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