brickbacon and I are officially in a horse race as he gives me my first loss. Normally I would be happy with 5-1 halfway through the season, but 13th place is only 2 games back, so it’s still anyone’s game. Especially since I’m about to head into a rough stretch of bye weeks.
In other news, Carolina has reminded me why I usually don’t spend a lot for defense.
Trade. Up By Three gives up Brock Osweiler for Fourth and Nineteen’s Tannehill.
Jay Ajayi on the trading block.
I’d like to get two solid starters or I’ll put him with another guy for an all-star.
I’ll give you Antonio Brown for him and a WR2.
I have been shafted by my matchups this year. I seem to get quite a few people on the one week where they put up a big score.
For a while, i was looking at my own team and assuming that it just wasn’t that good. But after 8 weeks, i’m 4th in total scoring. Actually, for all intents and purposes, equal third, because the guy ahead of me is beating me by 1/100th of a point.
But i am also first, by a considerable margin, in points against. In a league where the average total points per team is 810 (or about 101 points per game), i’ve had 928 points scored against me (about 116 points per game). My closest rival in points against is about 60 points behind me in that category.
It ain’t right, i tell ya! 
If it makes you feel any better, Overly Sentimental is first in points yet has a losing record.
Not sure what you’re looking at, but neither of those things is true.
Ugh I must’ve cycled through 6 garbage WRs in the last 2 weeks
Quinton Patton
Josh Huff
Justin Hunter
Andre Roberts
Corey brown
Dontrelle Inman (probably the best of the batch)
The trade deadline is one setting yahoo doesn’t retain from year to year when you renew the league. Our rule has been to extend the trade deadline as long as yahoo allows, which is 2 weeks from now. I forgot to make that setting in the beginning of the year, so I am now. The earlier trade deadline is mostly to protect against shenanigans in yahoo public leagues - since no one is going to be doing anything funky I see no reason why we shouldn’t extend it out further.
I feel like I ask this every year but I can never remember: the playoffs are the four division winners and then the next four by record regardless of division, right?
Usually yes, but not this year. We decided not to do divisions, but I was too late to adjust the setting, so what we did instead was just to not give division winners a playoff seed, making divisions meaningless. The top 8 seeds will go to the playoffs.
Cool.
If you haven’t been following the Browns DST, they’re having a truly awful season. They’re on pace for -31.00 points. For reference, the worst team the past couple seasons has finished with around +30.00 points.
They had their forth best game of the season last week, and they scored zero.
As of this moment, the “division leaders” would all make the playoffs.
One thing i’ve noticed over the past few weeks is that it’s quite common to have a game where two of the highest scoring players play against one another, meaning that some poor bastard who has a really good week still loses because he plays against one of the only teams that scored more points.
In Week 9, for example, i beat the Rough and Tumblrs, and yet the Rough and Tumblrs had the third highest score of the week. They had a 17/19 chance of playing a lower-scoring team that week, but happened to match up against one of the two teams who scored more points.
Similarly in Week 10, Rough and Tumblrs beat Exploding Pancakes, and Exploding Pancakes had the third-highest score of the week. Matched up against almost anyone else, the Exploding Pancakes would have won, but instead had to take a loss despite scoring over 125 points.
Then, at the other end of the scale, you sometimes see people winning games with scores of 70 or 75, because they luck out and get matched against someone with an even lower score.
I’m no expert on probability. I wonder if this sort of thing is a likely outcome when you have 20 teams, or if these situations are surprising and unusual.
With 10 games a week we have 140 matches until we hit the playoffs, so it’s not unexpected at all to have things like the 2nd highest team facing the highest. It’s just the nature of head to head matchups. It perverts the overall system a bit by adding another random element that can screw someone (compared to just doing a points league), but people just aren’t engaged enough week to week unless you’re playing head to head, so it’s a necesary evil.
One thing I’ve seen in other leagues to get around the “luck” element while still keeping people engaged, is to give the final playoff spot to the team remaining with the most points scored, regardless of record.
I’m a huge fan of that. In fact, we should institute it immediately in all leagues. <Cough>all-pro!</cough>
That’s a really good idea.
Well, I somehow manage to hang onto the #1 spot and clinch a playoff spot, but with no A.J Green I’m in some trouble.
We are trying this in a league I run for the first time this year. My only issue with it is the commissioner can’t just select who goes to the playoffs at which seed, so I will have to manually monkey with game results. It isn’t a big deal, but it just feels wrong
I do this in another league I run on Y!, and as of last year at least, there’s no way to alter the playoff teams. So I wrote a bracket out with pencil and paper, put it on a photo share site, and posted the link. A little annoying, but I also sort of like making brackets.