Woot! I expected to get creamed this week with two of my heavy hitters on bye (Moreno and Megatron). Almost makes up for scoring a bunch of points but losing to mediocre lineup in the He Hate Me league because Carson Palmer threw 5 fracking touchdowns.
That said, it’s a shame about Leon Washington; he’s a hell of a football player.
Not that you having traded for him in HHM has anything to do with it. 
That doesn’t help, no (though I also have Thomas Jones in that league, so there’s a bit of an upside for me there, too).
About that trade I’m mostly pissed off that Anthony Gonzales got hurt. If he and Wayne are both healthy, Dallas Clark is used mostly as a regular Tight End and puts up good but not necessarily great numbers. As soon as Gonzales got hurt, though, I knew I’d lost the trade, because now Clark is basically Manning’s #2 WR.
I’m not so sure- the Colts were splitting out Clark as a wideout and moving Wayne or Anthony to the slot even when Gonz was healthy last year. Considering that Pierre Garcon and Austin Collie have combined for 65 targets, I can’t imagine that Gonzalez would be cutting into Clark’s production much.
The idea of Wayne, Clark, Gonzalez, Garcon and Collie lined up 5-wide has to be terrifying.
Well, the odds of my Eagles-DeSean-Cooley combo platter putting up 100 points to give me high score of the week were low… but by god, they’re trying. Could there be a better dynasty league pick than DeSean Jackson?
Got him at the end of the 5th round, and he’ll be 5ish points out of first in scoring at the position.
On the other hand I got Steve Smith in the 12th…
Trade I forgot to announce:
Fightin Quakers gives up
Miles Austin
Josh Freeman
Buffalo
RetroVertigo gives up
Kurt Warer
Nate Davis
San Francisco
Seems a bit stacked, especially in a dynasty context, but Quakers needs a QB desperately and has a chance to win this year so it makes enough sense.
Yeah, I was considering making a “buy high” offer for Austin, and felt like I missed the boat a little when I saw that all it took was Warner. Of course, I don’t have a good backup QB to trade, so I guess it’s a moot point.
ETA: Oh, and since it’s my job around here to pimp FO, they had Austin rated #1 on this season’s prospects list (players taken in the 3rd Round or later who are still on their rookie contracts and are not starting regularly).
In the thread discussing the creation of this league, I suggested that every year we realign the divsions to group people together based on their previous finish. The playoff teams (seeds 1-4) would be one division, the middling teams (5-8) would be another, and the bottom teams (9-12) would have their own division.
This provides a parity - you play twice a year people who finished with a similar record to you last year, and because each division winner gets a playoff spot, then at least one person out of the bottom 4 teams is will get a playoff spot. Since there’s not really any real meaning behind our current division structure, this seems like a slam dunk to me and other people liked the idea. I just thought maybe we should decide for sure now that’s how we’re going to do things before we get too deep into the season.
The other issue I wanted to address is the idea that we should give the first overall pick in the draft to the winner of the consolation bowl. Some people wanted to prevent a team from tanking to get the first pick, and they wanted it to be a reward for winning something. I don’t mind the idea and I think it has merit, but for the sake of parity I’m not sure we want to award the #1 pick to someone in the 5-8 seed bracket, which is what the consolation bowl (as run by yahoo) is. I was thinking maybe we could apply that idea to a consolation bowl amongst the lowest 4 seeds. We would have to do it manually by adding up scores, but that doesn’t take much effort. That way only seeds 9 through 12 would be in the running, but the player who eventually got the #1 overall pick would have to win something to get it. What do you think?
I loved this idea when it was first proposed and I still love it. I definitely think we should do this.
I don’t like that division realignment idea at all, unless only the teams in the “top” division are eligibile to win a championship. What you’d be doing, in effect, is creating a European-sport-style promotion/relegation system.
Instead, why not just move one team per division to try and get each division’s overall win-loss record about even? That way the guy with the second strongest team isn’t permanently contending for the wild card, etc.
It seems like you don’t want a promotion/relegation system, but then what you propose (only top division can win, teams moved up or down 1 at a time) would be exactly that.
We already have a division system - the purpose is to foster an even greater sense of rivalry because you’re competing with a specific set of people for a playoff spot rather than the league in general. It’s just that our current divisions are more or less arbitrary - having nothing else to base them on, we shoehorned them based loosely on geography.
This instead would group them by the place of their finish. Teams with similar records would get grouped together because that’s why they’d be seeded close together in the first place. There’d still be plenty of inter-division play - as we have it set up, you play your entire division twice and everyone else once - so half your games are still interdivision.
Why would the second strongest team only have a shot at the wild card? Why couldn’t they take the whole division?
And if they did miss the playoffs in this scenario, wouldn’t they then be the team to beat in the middle division the next year?
Assuming status quo, the strongest team will win again- and the other two division winners (and wild card) effectively get penalized for doing well.
That’s an awful big assumption though isn’t it? Why would the strongest team be the strongest team every year? Injury, old age, and bad drafting could knock any team down a peg.
And presumably, the other two division winners and wild card team would all have good teams as well.
If we’re not assuming that the team strength stays roughly the same, why do we need to realign the divisions at all?
I think you probably think too strongly of the status quo. Even though we’ll maintain almost the same rosters from year to year, fantasy changes a great deal from year to year. Teams that drafted more for the long haul will bloom, teams stacked to win now will decline. Players will come out of nowhere and stars will unexpectedly fade into obscurity.
I understand your point though and it is a valid concern. Why should the guys in the top division have a harder go at the playoffs than the bottom one? Well - they’re equipped for it. Close division races in every division will make the league more interesting and fun. A bottom tier team having a shot at the playoffs even without a huge turnaround will stimulate interest from people with lower quality rosters.
I’m not dismissing your concerns - they’re valid - it’s just that it also exists to some degree in the current system too. I got stuck in a division with your super successful ass, so by the same logic I’m going to be competing indefinitely for a wildcard and in this case us getting grouped together was arbitrary rather than based on performance.
I have no problem with realigning the divisions, for the record; I mean, I wouldn’t want to have to compete with me ;).
I just don’t think sticking all the best teams in the same division is any fairer than leaving a 1-win team and a 12-win team together.
Maybe we could just go to a non-divisional format like standard Yahoo! leagues, so people always have someone to fight with for position… or just rearrange the leagues at random again- alphabetical order or something.
I vote that I get put in a division by myself. My god I suck at fantasy football.
Yep, I gave up too much, especially given what Austin did this week. But I’m fairly deep and young at WR, so that part doesn’t bug me. Warner was a big part of the deal, but I really like both Nate Davis and the SF defense long-term. The part that pisses me off is that I didn’t need to give up Josh Freeman. I should have kept him or traded him to RNATB. C’est la vie.
I really, really don’t like the idea of realigning every year. I think a far-better parity-creating mechanism would be to reduce the number of keepers. Non-qualifiers keep up to 20, qualifiers keep 18, champion keeps 17, or somesuch.
And to add: we need to decide this ASAP. I have up to 20 guys I might want to keep. If I can’t do that, I’d like to trade some future value for present.