BIFL - State of Your Team Address C

The regular season is over, and with it come the end of the State of Your Team Addresses. Hopefully, later this week we'll see some Week 13 write-ups penned by the victors. Until then...

Vatican Dragons (6-7)

In the Draft...

...Andre left me puzzled. And not for the first time. With the opportunity to keep Steven Jackson in the 1st, 'Dre instead hung onto only Beanie Wells in the 6th, and focused his early draft on receiver and quarterback talent. He did, in fact, do very well for himself at those positions, ending up with a strong pair of receivers, Reggie Wayne (1st) and DeSean Jackson (2nd), and en elite quarterback in Philip Rivers (3rd). For a couple years now, the pre-season magazines and fantasy columnists have been emphasizing the death of the running back and the rise of the receiver. Andre obviously embraced that strategy, but would it work? He'd need to get at least something out of the RB position, and gave himself plenty of opportunities, whether it be Wells, Ronnie Brown (4th), Matt Forte (5th), or Tim Hightower (10th). One of those guys would have to work out, right?

In the Market...

Well, it sort of worked out. The best of those RBs turned out to be Matt Forte, who ended the season respectably just outside the top ten fantasy backs. Joining him in the backfield as of late September was BenJarvus Green-Ellis ($35), who's been equally respectable, especially lately. Fellow waiver wire grabs Davone Bess ($5) and Matt Cassel ($0) have also been solid late-season additions. So with a starting core of Rivers, Forte/Green-Ellis, and Wayne/Jackson/Bess, and a strong back-up QB in Cassel, how did this team miss the playoffs? Read on...

Recently...

In the past three weeks, the Vatican Dragons have had scores of 128, 70, and 118. Guess which one of those was a victory? If you guessed the Week 12 70-pointer against the HotCocks, then you're a) correct and b) way too aware of my set-up formula in writing these things. The point is, it's hard to justify Andre not being in the playoffs. He just came up against some insane opponents at a crucial time in the season. In Week 11, he played Your Stepdad, and despite 27 points from Philip Rivers, 18 from Reggie Wayne, 30 combined from the rushing crew, and 12 each from Marcedes Lewis and Justin Tuck(!), he still lost by 16 points. That sucks.

Week 12 was the lone victory mentioned earlier, and there isn't much good to say about it other than that it was a win. Forte (15) and Green-Ellis (17) made double-figures, but they were the only Dragons to do so. Then again, who needs points when you're playing a HotCocks squad that puts up only 63 of them.

In Week 13, Dre was playing for his playoff life, and had a legitimate shot. A loss by the HotCocks and a win by the Dragons would have given them equal records, and a decent point total would have given the Pope's chosen the tiebreaker. Decent point total? Check. HotCocks loss? Check. Dragons win? Shoulda been, but wasn't to be. Reggie Wayne (31) did everything he could to oust his former employer from the post-season. Green-Ellis (19) and Forte (15) brought it just as they had the previous two weeks. But 118 points, which will win you most BIFL games week in and week out, wasn't enough to top Spencer, who posted 129 and earned the victory to claim the Eastern Conference crown.

Moving Forward...

Andre has typically been a hard guy to predict when it comes to keepers. Depending on positioning, I wouldn't be shocked to see any of his top three picks from this year (Wayne-1, Jackson-2, or Rivers-3) kept. Forte has certainly out-played 5th-round status, and could make sense as well. Considering how good Rivers has been this year, I'd think Rivers-Forte would be the best option, leaving the first two rounds open to grab receivers and running back depth. But where most of us would zig, Andre tends to zag, so who knows what will become of the Vatican Dragons in the year to come?

Your Stepdad (8-5)
Thanks to the mid-summer machinations of Bruce Bardey, Ray Tarasovic, and Ken Shoaf, DDS, Dekker ended up in the coveted "three-keeper" position of having two later-round keepers and the top pick in the draft. Of course, the last time Dekker was in that position, he used the keeper anyway on Deuce McAllister, totally ignoring the fact that he could have just drafted him anyway. Thus was born the "Extremely Bitter" pseudonym that has finally, happily been put to rest. So could Dekker find some way to make himself extremely bitter again? Well, he certainly did his best. With two running backs already secured in Ray Rice (4th) and Jamaal Charles (10th), it was a bit of a surprise that Your Stepdad selected another ballcarrier, Maurice Jones-Drew, in the first round. Eventually it came out that a deal had been worked out mere minutes before the draft, and MJD was being shipped to the Pet Monkey for keeper wideout Randy Moss. Well that makes sense, right?  A top running back for a top wide receiver? The only way I can imagine that going wrong is if the receiver became such a cancer to his team that he got himself traded, then dropped from his new team, then picked up by a team that didn't manage to make use of him in any way. But I can't imagine anything like that happening, and I'm sure Dekker can't either. Or at least he couldn't three months ago.
The rest of the Stepdad draft consisted of more early failures balanced by late successes. Matt Schaub (2nd) hasn't been awful, but he's been far from the elite QB a lot of us expected. Steve Smith 1.0 (3rd) has faltered in a second straight season of receiving passes from brain-eating zombies. But Jahvid Best (5th) has been good when not hampered by injuries; Dez Bryant (7th) has probably been the most successful offensive rookie (though like Best, he is now afflicted); and Terrell Owens (8th) was improbably effective in his move to Cincinnati.  Despite his dumb mistakes, Dekker always seems to find a way.

In the Market...
Part of finding that way is making impactful moves on the waiver wire, and Dekker had a few this year. Mike Tolbert has had several strong weeks this year, though Dekker enjoyed only one of them, since he added him for $18 on September 24th and dropped him again a week later. More long-term benefits have been gained from the acquisition of Ryan Torain ($6) and, more recently, Steve Johnson ($18). On a personal level, my least favorite Stepdad pick-up came on November 3rd. My hatred for Dallas Clark is well-documented, so my schadenfraude boner was at full mast when he went down for the season. His replacement? Jacob Tamme, who Dekker acquired for $12 and then promptly used to beat me in Week 9.

Recently...
I had not realized until just now how hot Your Stepdad was over the second half of the season. Dekker strung together six straight wins between Week 7 and Week 12, never scoring less than 94 points and often scoring quite a bit more. Week 11 was the apex of that run, representing the Stepdad's highest scoring output of the season. It was needed, too, as his opponent, the Vatican Dragons, came to play. But even their strong day could not overcome the 69 combined points put forth by Ben Roethlisberger and Steve Johnson. Those two must have been really sucking each other's dicks after such a victory (see what I did there? with the 69 thing?). Rice (18), Owens (13), and Charles (11) also contributed to this valuable victory.
Week 12 brought another win, this time over Spring Naught-Naught rival Pet Monkey, 95 - 84. This time, the Stepdads were led by Jamaal Charles (24), who appears once again to be stepping up just in time for the fantasy playoff run. Jacob Tamme and Ray Rice (12) also chipped in on this one, and while the rest of the team was rather ordinary, it generally doesn't take anything extraordinary to take out the Monkey.
That brought Dekker to Week 13 at 8-4, with a legitimate shot at the Western Conference Championship and a first round bye. All he had to do was put up a strong enough point total to overtake the Argonauts, and secure an easy win over the worst team in the league, the Iron Chef of Pounding Poon. The result can not have brought a lot of confidence to a team entering the playoffs. The Iron Chef took it, 85 - 79. Matt Schaub (19) and Jamaal Charles (17) were pretty strong, but the rest of the team played as if they were already thinking about the post-season, overlooking their Week 13 opponents. Now, instead of a first-round playoff bye, the Stepdad will be meeting the HotCocks, a team that has historically had their number in the playoffs.

Moving Forward...
The Week 13 loss may have caused some concern for a team that was looking so good previously. Did the Stepdads blow their wad in that 6-game win streak, or are they primed to pick up where they left off after Week 12? The answer will rely heavily on whether Charles can have a stretch run similar to last year's and whether Johnson can stop blaming God for dropped passes and start putting up 30-point days again.
Looking to 2011, there are some good options here for Dekker. With the 3-round drop, Ray Rice becomes a stretch as a 1st-round keep, but Jamaal Charles still looks great in the 7th. If Jahvid Best (5th) can stay healthy, he's potentially the kind of rookie keeper you can build a 2-3 year run around, and the same could be said for Dez Bryant (7th). Just like when he found your mom and her lucrative alimony settlement, the future looks bright for Your Stepdad.