I made a fatal mistake in team selection. I decided this year I was gonna go small roster and ended up with only 19 spots. That wasn't my mistake, but who I chose at K was. I figured since I was going small roster and it's a risky practice, may as well take the take the 2 highest ranked $3 kickers with differing byes. I had done my research and considered Gano and Fairbairn the 2 with the best job security, but went with Blankenship and Seibert anyways.
A lesson learned and a mistake I will never make again. I still believe in rostering cheap kickers, but job security is the only factor I will care about.
You are pretty much describing what we are all feeling right now. You want to kick yourself for some of the decisions you ultimately made and are thinking about how much better off your team would be now if you had instead done some of the things you had contemplated before submitting your final lineup. I had a similar kicker dilemma. I learned from past mistakes NOT to even consider a kicker without job security. I had settled on 2 of my 3 PK and did not include Blankenship. I felt comfortable with Gano and Zeurlein, although a week earlier I had tagged Gano to watch closely after he apparently had a concussion or something similar with a week left in preseason. When a few days passed and he got the all-clear, I decided it would probably be ok to keep him. I never wavered on Zeurlein. My third kicker with a few days to go before live date was Cairo Santos. The problem with Santos is I could not get any information on him to determine if his job was safe. He didn't even show up with any detail in any of the team reports and wasn't even mentioned in most of them. I had considered Blankenship and he was rated much higher in terms of projected points, but in the back of my mind I had fears related to his injury last year and falling out of favor for a while, only to apparently secure his job again in the last few days of preseason this year. I looked at his projected stat total and compared it to Santos and my inability to get any reliable info on his job security. When they cut the kicker that was competing with Blankenship in the preseason a few days before the season start, I took a chance and swapped Santos for Blankenship. We all know the rest of the story. I am fortunate so far that I still have 2 kickers that are active, and Gano has been a pleasant surprise so far in his scoring. People often ask if it's a deal breaker if all 3 of your kickers do not have different bye weeks, and this year reinforces the answer as a definite yes.
My other woes relate to suddenly dealing with injuries to several players after largely avoiding the injury bug the first 3 weeks. Week 4 saw me without Zay Jones, who I've been patting myself on the back for selecting with his $5 cap, while he is either the leading receiver (or very close to it) in Jacksonville. This week he was limited at practice and early yesterday it was said that he was going to play, only to have an update around 5pm saying his playing this week is again in doubt.
LIke many others here, I was also without Amon-Ra St. Brown, who has been my top scoring WR through 3 weeks. It looks like he's likely out again this week, and next week is a bye. What scares me is I have front loaded byes in week 6 and 7, being without one of my two QB each week. The Carr-Cousins duo has not exactly set the world of fire through 4 weeks, with each of them having one week that sucked. I can't afford for the only one active to have a suck week in week 6 or 7.
Dotson has been worth his cap money in the first 4 weeks, adding to my score in 3 of the 4. But he got injured during the week 4 game and is out for probably both week 5 and 6 at least. This is not looking good.
I'm weak at TE and this is the fact that has bugged me since the start. I normally spend more at TE and get one or two studs, and a couple flyers, counting on at least one flex score from a TE each week... simply because statistically TEs produce more points per cap dollar, and it's sound strategy to spend more there. This week Hurst is questionable again but appears to be on the doubtful side of questoinable.
I feel like I've skated by on luck so far and I'm losing confidence that this will continue with injuries mounting. Balance that with the fact that there are some highly rostered stud RBs who are out either for the season or for the longer term, which may hold some other teams scores down enough for me to stay alive. There are also several under-performing (normally stud) TEs, who I avoided, that hopefully will play favorably into my chances.
What I miss from previous years are the weeks when I virtually knew I was safe after the 1pm games concluded, simply because of amassing a lot of points early with lots of players left to go. My average this year so far is only about 168, whereas last year it was 183 through 4 weeks, with a high week of 231.
Perhaps the only good thing about this weeks Thursday night game is it
did not establish a cut line.
Hopefully we can all survive the fog and preserve our slim chances to make it to the finals.
