couldn't stop laughing when I read this, so true on so many levels and glad someone is finally talking about what a crapshoot FF has become and involves little strategy.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story...=simmons/061006
By Bill Simmons
Page 2
While glancing at available free agents in my West Coast fantasy league this week, I noticed David Carr's name at the top of the point list. Any time you see Carr leading a category of anything other than "most sacks" or "most times a QB looked like he might cry on the sidelines," it's a little jarring. But since we have 10 teams and 18 rosters spots apiece, you wouldn't call it incredible or anything.
Well, until I noticed Carr had 78 points. Seventy-eight points through four weeks? Seems a little high, right? It's not as though we have a goofy scoring system or anything; we count four points for every passing TD, six for every TD run/catch, one for every 10 rushing/receiving yards and one for every 20 passing yards. If you're getting 20 points a week from your QB, that's pretty good. Intrigued, I clicked on another button that listed the highest point-getters in our league (roster players and free agents). Here was the top five:
1. Donovan McNabb, 115 pts
2. Peyton Manning, 89 pts
3. Charlie Frye, 84 pts
4. Rex Grossman, 81 pts
5. David Carr, 78 pts
Look at those last three guys! Are you kidding me? The list became more and more amazing as I scrolled down. Jon Kitna was eighth. Chad Pennington was 10th. Brian Westbrook and Frank Gore were the only non-QBs in the top 20. The Bears' defense had as many points as LaDainian Tomlinson. I could go on and on.
And granted, bye weeks have screwed up some of the rankings. But we could be headed toward the weirdest fantasy football season ever. Consider these 10 realities after four weeks:
1. Three backs (LDT, LJ and Alexander) cracked the 300-point mark in 2005 … and nobody's on pace for 300 this year. I'm not even sure you could call it an aberration that will rectify itself over the course of the season. Other than Tomlinson, is there a back that makes you feel, "Wow, I'm totally set with this guy"? Didn't think so. Plus, only 12 points separate the No. 11 RB (Willis McGahee at 46) from the No. 26 RB (Tiki Barber at 34). It's a swollen middle class, with a tiny upper class and a humongous lower class. And it's really not that fun.
(Note: I blame the platoons. If we drafted team running games like we draft team defenses, it wouldn't be so much of a crapshoot every year and we wouldn't have to slave over the waiver wire dregs every week. Running back platoons are slowly ruining fantasy football. We need to accept this and embrace it. When multiple teams are putting in bids for Vernand Morency, things have gone too far.)
2. The tight end position has become as useful as a sideline reporter or an appendix. Nobody has more than 34 points total. Ridiculous. Which reminds me, we're about two weeks from me making the first "Where are they holding the funeral for Antonio Gates' fantasy career?" joke. Just warning you now.
3. The QB position (always dismissed as overrated for fantasy purposes) is making a major comeback: Five QBs are averaging 20-plus points this season (McNabb, Frye, Grossman and the Mannings) and three others (Carr, Pennington and Leftwich) are damn close, and we haven't even mentioned the old standbys (Brady, Palmer, Delhomme and Bulger) yet. If you aren't getting big points from your QB spot, I guarantee you aren't doing well in your league right now. By the way, zero QBs averaged 20 points a game last season.
4. The Baltimore and Chicago defenses are well ahead of every other fantasy D right now, which isn't surprising because two or three stand out every year. But when you consider that Chicago's sked includes three more NFC North games, Losman/Gradkowski/Alex Smith/Culpepper at home, Matt Leinart's second start (on national TV, no less), at least six or seven cold-weather games and a mid-November Jets game scheduled for after Pennington's season-ending-injury-that-hasn't-happened-yet … I mean, we could be looking at a situation here where (A) the Bears' D doubles the fantasy points of every other defense except the Ravens', and (B) it could be a top-20 fantasy "entity" (for lack of a better word) after everything's said and done. In my league last season, the highest defense had 122 points. The Bears are on pace for 200 right now. Crazy.
(Which got me thinking: Imagine if we were playing fantasy back in the mid-'80s? Would the Chicago D have been a first-round pick? With all the crazy Web sites we have now, why couldn't someone start one where it's a fake "fantasy preview" of an upcoming season where the top 10 players/defenses are ranked at each position, using only the information from the previous few years and "projecting" how they might do. Come on, like you wouldn't click on a 1985 fake preview to see who made up the top 10? I refuse to believe it. You're lying.)
5. Four white receivers (Mike Furrey, Drew Bennett, Wes Welker and Matt Jones) have more fantasy points than Randy Moss. Actually, Furrey has nearly three times as many points as Moss: 34 to 13. That's why he has replaced Kurt Warner as the pride of the Arena Football League.
(Motivational note: One of the Raiders coaches needs to show Moss tape of some Furrey catches, then tell him, "I waived you in my fantasy league this week and picked this little white dude up." If that doesn't wake Moss up, I give up.)
6. I hate playing the "he's on pace" gimmick because we all know things even out over the course of a season. To some degree, anyway. But Rams kicker Jeff Wilkins is on pace for 60 field goals and 20 PATs right now, and if you've watched St. Louis' end zone struggles at all -- take it from someone who watches every Rams game now -- you know these final numbers are absolutely conceivable. Sixty field goals in one season! This number is actually in play!
7. Not only do rookies Laurence Maroney (52), Joe Addai (37) and Maurice Jones-Drew (30) have more points than Reggie Bush (29), but you wouldn't be able to trade him for any of those guys, and there's a decent chance Jerious Norwood and DeAngelo Williams could pass him in the next few weeks. You know the guy in your league who took him five rounds too early? You can officially start busting his balls.
(Question: Why hasn't anyone started calling Maurice Jones-Drew "Mo-Jo" yet? Or is that too easy?)
8. The top 12 in everyone's draft featured four potential lemons: LaMont Jordan (stuck in a fantasy quagmire in Oakland); Ronnie Brown (being slaughtered by the Culpeppocalypse); Cadillac Williams (has a first-rounder ever landed on a fantasy waiver wire when he's been healthy?); and Steve Smith (I still don't trust those hammies). And that's before we get to Bush, Chambers, Moss, T.O., Lewis, Droughns, Delhomme and everyone else.
9. There's no way to corroborate this, but we're probably on pace to break the record for "most cheap fantasy points at the end of already-decided games," highlighted by Marques Colston's spread-busting 86-yard TD in the final 90 seconds of the Carolina game (a mortal lock for the "Alcoa's Greatest Gambling Moments" 2006 wrap-up show on ESPN6).
10. Bernard Berrian, Donte' Stallworth, Greg Jennings, Jerricho Cotchery, Reggie Williams, Doug Gabriel, Colston, Furrey … I mean, why even spend the money on a fantasy magazine in August anymore? What's the point? These guys never even hint about emerging until the last two weeks of the exhibition season or unless they were suddenly traded somewhere else, right? Let's all agree to stop buying magazines. Waste of money.
Which brings me back to my original point: We're overthinking this whole fantasy football thing. It has evolved into a billion-dollar industry, a convoluted excuse to waste time and keep in touch with friends, one of those rare hobbies that balances competitiveness, male bonding and trash talking in the best ways possible. We kill ourselves trying to outsmart one another, and there isn't a single moment on Sundays and Mondays when we're not monitoring dozens of guys at once. But there are two hard-core realities that can't be ignored:
Reality A: There's either a 9-in-10 chance or an 11-in-12 chance that you're going to lose your league, depending how deep it is.
Reality B: Thanks to platoons, free-agent movement, injuries, unpredictable rookies, bad luck and everything else, fantasy football has turned into a freaking crapshoot.
Nowadays, anyone has a chance. Take my buddy Camp, the original commissioner of my East Coast League before he got married, had a couple of kids and stepped down. OK, we fired him for negligence. Now he's one of Those Guys in our league -- the guy who starts players during their bye weeks, waits four weeks to waive someone who's out for the year and offers crazy trades like "Wes Welker for Laurence Maroney." He's also one of the funniest owners (the master of inappropriate mom/sister jokes); he laughs at everyone else's jokes on the annual conference call; his team name is high comedy (a college joke I can't print), and his teams have the bizarre ability to remain annually competitive even though he's two to three guys short every week. The pluses always outweigh the minuses with Camper, even after you get bounced from the final playoff spot because he accidentally started a running back with a blown ACL against the guy who ended up beating you out.
Well, Camper's 2006 team includes Tomlinson, Eli Manning, Tatum Bell, Antonio Bryant, Stallworth and Anquan Boldin. Did we make fun of him for taking Bell, Bryant and Stallworth too early? Yes. Yes, we did. Does he even know who half these guys are? It's unclear.
But here's something I do know: His team whupped my team in Week 2.
That's right, Camper's a contender this season. And when he waived Jake Plummer before Week 3 and picked up David Carr, it was destiny. Yup, Camper is going to win our league title; David Carr will help lead the way; and all of this makes sense because this is fantasy football and nothing makes sense anymore.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story...=simmons/061006
By Bill Simmons
Page 2
While glancing at available free agents in my West Coast fantasy league this week, I noticed David Carr's name at the top of the point list. Any time you see Carr leading a category of anything other than "most sacks" or "most times a QB looked like he might cry on the sidelines," it's a little jarring. But since we have 10 teams and 18 rosters spots apiece, you wouldn't call it incredible or anything.
Well, until I noticed Carr had 78 points. Seventy-eight points through four weeks? Seems a little high, right? It's not as though we have a goofy scoring system or anything; we count four points for every passing TD, six for every TD run/catch, one for every 10 rushing/receiving yards and one for every 20 passing yards. If you're getting 20 points a week from your QB, that's pretty good. Intrigued, I clicked on another button that listed the highest point-getters in our league (roster players and free agents). Here was the top five:
1. Donovan McNabb, 115 pts
2. Peyton Manning, 89 pts
3. Charlie Frye, 84 pts
4. Rex Grossman, 81 pts
5. David Carr, 78 pts
Look at those last three guys! Are you kidding me? The list became more and more amazing as I scrolled down. Jon Kitna was eighth. Chad Pennington was 10th. Brian Westbrook and Frank Gore were the only non-QBs in the top 20. The Bears' defense had as many points as LaDainian Tomlinson. I could go on and on.
And granted, bye weeks have screwed up some of the rankings. But we could be headed toward the weirdest fantasy football season ever. Consider these 10 realities after four weeks:
1. Three backs (LDT, LJ and Alexander) cracked the 300-point mark in 2005 … and nobody's on pace for 300 this year. I'm not even sure you could call it an aberration that will rectify itself over the course of the season. Other than Tomlinson, is there a back that makes you feel, "Wow, I'm totally set with this guy"? Didn't think so. Plus, only 12 points separate the No. 11 RB (Willis McGahee at 46) from the No. 26 RB (Tiki Barber at 34). It's a swollen middle class, with a tiny upper class and a humongous lower class. And it's really not that fun.
(Note: I blame the platoons. If we drafted team running games like we draft team defenses, it wouldn't be so much of a crapshoot every year and we wouldn't have to slave over the waiver wire dregs every week. Running back platoons are slowly ruining fantasy football. We need to accept this and embrace it. When multiple teams are putting in bids for Vernand Morency, things have gone too far.)
2. The tight end position has become as useful as a sideline reporter or an appendix. Nobody has more than 34 points total. Ridiculous. Which reminds me, we're about two weeks from me making the first "Where are they holding the funeral for Antonio Gates' fantasy career?" joke. Just warning you now.
3. The QB position (always dismissed as overrated for fantasy purposes) is making a major comeback: Five QBs are averaging 20-plus points this season (McNabb, Frye, Grossman and the Mannings) and three others (Carr, Pennington and Leftwich) are damn close, and we haven't even mentioned the old standbys (Brady, Palmer, Delhomme and Bulger) yet. If you aren't getting big points from your QB spot, I guarantee you aren't doing well in your league right now. By the way, zero QBs averaged 20 points a game last season.
4. The Baltimore and Chicago defenses are well ahead of every other fantasy D right now, which isn't surprising because two or three stand out every year. But when you consider that Chicago's sked includes three more NFC North games, Losman/Gradkowski/Alex Smith/Culpepper at home, Matt Leinart's second start (on national TV, no less), at least six or seven cold-weather games and a mid-November Jets game scheduled for after Pennington's season-ending-injury-that-hasn't-happened-yet … I mean, we could be looking at a situation here where (A) the Bears' D doubles the fantasy points of every other defense except the Ravens', and (B) it could be a top-20 fantasy "entity" (for lack of a better word) after everything's said and done. In my league last season, the highest defense had 122 points. The Bears are on pace for 200 right now. Crazy.
(Which got me thinking: Imagine if we were playing fantasy back in the mid-'80s? Would the Chicago D have been a first-round pick? With all the crazy Web sites we have now, why couldn't someone start one where it's a fake "fantasy preview" of an upcoming season where the top 10 players/defenses are ranked at each position, using only the information from the previous few years and "projecting" how they might do. Come on, like you wouldn't click on a 1985 fake preview to see who made up the top 10? I refuse to believe it. You're lying.)
5. Four white receivers (Mike Furrey, Drew Bennett, Wes Welker and Matt Jones) have more fantasy points than Randy Moss. Actually, Furrey has nearly three times as many points as Moss: 34 to 13. That's why he has replaced Kurt Warner as the pride of the Arena Football League.
(Motivational note: One of the Raiders coaches needs to show Moss tape of some Furrey catches, then tell him, "I waived you in my fantasy league this week and picked this little white dude up." If that doesn't wake Moss up, I give up.)
6. I hate playing the "he's on pace" gimmick because we all know things even out over the course of a season. To some degree, anyway. But Rams kicker Jeff Wilkins is on pace for 60 field goals and 20 PATs right now, and if you've watched St. Louis' end zone struggles at all -- take it from someone who watches every Rams game now -- you know these final numbers are absolutely conceivable. Sixty field goals in one season! This number is actually in play!
7. Not only do rookies Laurence Maroney (52), Joe Addai (37) and Maurice Jones-Drew (30) have more points than Reggie Bush (29), but you wouldn't be able to trade him for any of those guys, and there's a decent chance Jerious Norwood and DeAngelo Williams could pass him in the next few weeks. You know the guy in your league who took him five rounds too early? You can officially start busting his balls.
(Question: Why hasn't anyone started calling Maurice Jones-Drew "Mo-Jo" yet? Or is that too easy?)
8. The top 12 in everyone's draft featured four potential lemons: LaMont Jordan (stuck in a fantasy quagmire in Oakland); Ronnie Brown (being slaughtered by the Culpeppocalypse); Cadillac Williams (has a first-rounder ever landed on a fantasy waiver wire when he's been healthy?); and Steve Smith (I still don't trust those hammies). And that's before we get to Bush, Chambers, Moss, T.O., Lewis, Droughns, Delhomme and everyone else.
9. There's no way to corroborate this, but we're probably on pace to break the record for "most cheap fantasy points at the end of already-decided games," highlighted by Marques Colston's spread-busting 86-yard TD in the final 90 seconds of the Carolina game (a mortal lock for the "Alcoa's Greatest Gambling Moments" 2006 wrap-up show on ESPN6).
10. Bernard Berrian, Donte' Stallworth, Greg Jennings, Jerricho Cotchery, Reggie Williams, Doug Gabriel, Colston, Furrey … I mean, why even spend the money on a fantasy magazine in August anymore? What's the point? These guys never even hint about emerging until the last two weeks of the exhibition season or unless they were suddenly traded somewhere else, right? Let's all agree to stop buying magazines. Waste of money.
Which brings me back to my original point: We're overthinking this whole fantasy football thing. It has evolved into a billion-dollar industry, a convoluted excuse to waste time and keep in touch with friends, one of those rare hobbies that balances competitiveness, male bonding and trash talking in the best ways possible. We kill ourselves trying to outsmart one another, and there isn't a single moment on Sundays and Mondays when we're not monitoring dozens of guys at once. But there are two hard-core realities that can't be ignored:
Reality A: There's either a 9-in-10 chance or an 11-in-12 chance that you're going to lose your league, depending how deep it is.
Reality B: Thanks to platoons, free-agent movement, injuries, unpredictable rookies, bad luck and everything else, fantasy football has turned into a freaking crapshoot.
Nowadays, anyone has a chance. Take my buddy Camp, the original commissioner of my East Coast League before he got married, had a couple of kids and stepped down. OK, we fired him for negligence. Now he's one of Those Guys in our league -- the guy who starts players during their bye weeks, waits four weeks to waive someone who's out for the year and offers crazy trades like "Wes Welker for Laurence Maroney." He's also one of the funniest owners (the master of inappropriate mom/sister jokes); he laughs at everyone else's jokes on the annual conference call; his team name is high comedy (a college joke I can't print), and his teams have the bizarre ability to remain annually competitive even though he's two to three guys short every week. The pluses always outweigh the minuses with Camper, even after you get bounced from the final playoff spot because he accidentally started a running back with a blown ACL against the guy who ended up beating you out.
Well, Camper's 2006 team includes Tomlinson, Eli Manning, Tatum Bell, Antonio Bryant, Stallworth and Anquan Boldin. Did we make fun of him for taking Bell, Bryant and Stallworth too early? Yes. Yes, we did. Does he even know who half these guys are? It's unclear.
But here's something I do know: His team whupped my team in Week 2.
That's right, Camper's a contender this season. And when he waived Jake Plummer before Week 3 and picked up David Carr, it was destiny. Yup, Camper is going to win our league title; David Carr will help lead the way; and all of this makes sense because this is fantasy football and nothing makes sense anymore.
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![[scooter]](/data/avatars/m/22/22287.jpg?1659477690){kind=avatar}
I assure you I'm no bigot. Some of my best friends are black QB's. 
) during the preseason.
