NBD - Week 9 Review

Tuesday was Decision Day for America, and I think most of us - with the possible exceptions of Ms. PAC-Man Haller, log-cabin militiaman DeYoung, and maybe Derek and Papkin, whose politics are unknown to me - made what turned out to be the popular (not to mention correct) decision. But while most of America is content to cast their votes every few years, we here in NBD are forced to make much more difficult decisions every week. We scour the wire services, expert advice, and last-minute panicky voices in our heads to decide who to start and sit. Truthfully, most of us probably put more effort and thought into those decisions than we do into who we vote for. And yet, so often we are wrong. With that in mind, I've spent some time going back through the season and analyzing each owner's decisions over the course of this year.

There was a time when Yahoo(!) would tell you your Optimal Line-Up Score at the touch of a button, but they seem to have abandoned that, so I was left to my own devices to go back through each week of games and determine just how much you idiots could have scored if you had only played the right guys. After scouring the scoreboards for hours, I may have made a few mistakes here and there, but I believe I've more or less come to a solid calculation of just how many points each team could have scored every week if they'd played their top scorers. The one potential problem here is that with people picking up breakout players after the Thursday games, we sometimes end up with players on our end-of-week rosters who we did not actually have the option to play. Otherwise, though, I think the numbers are secure:

BaDoBuKiBro - Week 6 Review

I missed the Week 5 Review. Nobody seemed to notice. And yet I shall continue to chronicle the exploits of our young league, whether you bastards want me to or not! Here's Week 6:

NBD - Week 5 Review

The conversation rages on over in the Week 4 Review comments section. I've really enjoyed and appreciated everyone's opinions, whether I've 100% agreed with them or not. The link that Screen most recently posted is the most thorough and interesting thing I've read yet on the issue, and further muddies my thinking. I encourage you all to check it out. I hope Mr. Screen (and anyone else who hasn't commented yet) will weigh in with his own thoughts at some point. In light of our interest and excitement over the whole issue, I've chosen some proverbs to characterize each of Week 5's games. Enjoy.

NBD - Week 4 Review

I'm about to pontificate for a bit, so if you're not into that sort of thing, feel free to scroll down 'til you get to the game reviews. Still, I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about this:

I was watching 'Around the Horn' on Tuesday, and the long-debated issue came up of whether or not it's appropriate for the Washington football franchise to use the name 'Redskins.' Obviously, this is not the first any of us is hearing of this, and I'm sure I've had conversations with many of you before as to our thoughts on the name. Apparently, this latest round of debate was brought up by the decision (or defense of the decision) of the Kansas City Star not to use the name in its coverage of the team, presumably referring to them instead as simply Washington. Now, historically, I've been relatively agnostic about the whole issue, and half-heartedly defended the name based on a few arguments: 1) That choosing something as your mascot implies a pride and adoration in that mascot, so calling the team "Redskins" is a celebration of Native Americans, not an insult to them. 2) That the name "Redskin" does not seem any more inherently offensive than "White" or "Black," both of which are freely used to refer to ethnic groups (I feel like the brief era where some black people insisted on being called "African American" has passed; I don't know any black people who are offended by being called black), although admittedly the idea of having a team named the Minnesota Whites or Atlanta Blacks does seem a little odd, if not necessarily offensive.
But this latest discussion got me thinking again and investigating my logic, particularly because the argument made by the ombudsman of the Star reminded me of a decision I made myself about a decade ago to stop using the words "f*g" and "f*gg*t." Those were words I used often in high school and college, and if pressed on the bigotry of using them, I always pointed out that really my use of them had nothing to do with homosexuality, it was just kind of a synonym for "bad" or "weak" or "lame." But at some point I kind of decided that that was bullshit, and that it was a word that was used in a nasty way towards a group of people who I respected as humans, and so I just wasn't going to use it any more (or at least try not to - I'm not perfect and I may have even used it on this blog a time or two). Nowadays, I work really hard at educating my students not to use those words.
So is there a huge difference between the two? Well, maybe a little. "F*g" is never really used with a positive connotation (except for sometimes by actual gay folks in somewhat the same way black folks say "nigga"), while I believe that naming your sports team "Redskins" connotes pride and celebration of that name. All the same, they're two words that a group of people born a certain way find offensive. I don't say f*g, I don't say k*ke, I don't say n*gg*r, so should I not be saying r*dsk*n? Seems like I probably shouldn't. So I think I'm going to try not saying it or writing it for a while. I'm just going to go with Washington, or if it's really tortured to do that, maybe Skins (I think that's what I say most of the time anyways). A bigger question, of course, is if the franchise itself ever reached this conclusion, what would they become? While it's very difficult to think of the team by another name, it's even harder to think of them with a different logo or colors. So is there a way to keep the scheme of the franchise without the name? The actual, politically correct appellation we use for the people we're talking about is Native American or American Indian, but it's difficult to imagine ever calling a sports team that. But there could be a simpler solution:

BaDoBuKiBro - Week 4 Review

As you may recall from my post-draft post, I'm tracking the performance of all of our auctioned players this season based on Points Per Dollar. Though I'm not ready to publish the individual rankings yet, I did take some time this week, with roughly a third of the fantasy regular season under our belts, to calculate positional rankings. The formula is simple: total number of points contributed by drafted players at a position divided by total number of dollars spent on that position. A couple things to keep in mind:

1) This includes only players purchased during our auctioned draft, not ones that have since been acquired in the Free Agent Auction.

2) This includes only points that were actually contributed as part of the starting line-up, so even if you drafted, say Marques Colston, his 25.8 points this week didn't count towards your WR PPD if you started Lance Moore instead, you stupid fucking idiot.

Anyways, here are the rankings/results:

WR
Bev         3.94
Souts 3.54
Bost         2.81
JDC         2.38
Dekker 2.37
Bardey 2.34
Hambone 2.07
Jong         2.05
Wilson 1.77
Cody 1.72
Casano 1.29
Sovic 1.19


TE
Casano 14.90
Bost         7.40
Bev         5.23
Hambone 4.76
Souts 4.73
Wilson 3.92
JDC         2.33
Cody 2.15
Bardey 1.47
Dekker 1.41
Jong         0.87
Sovic 0.73


RB
Souts 2.44
Hambone 1.81
Bardey 1.73
Cody 1.64
Bost         1.52
Sovic 1.49
Casano 1.43
Wilson 1.29
Dekker 1.10
JDC         1.10
Jong         1.03
Bev         0.56



QB
Jong         31.25
Bev         17.6
Wilson 8.66
Dekker 8.12
Casano 4.75
Sovic 3.25
JDC         2.66
Bardey 2.10
Bost         1.43
Hambone 1.32
Cody 1.05
Souts 0.84


K
Bardey 47.00
Wilson 41.00
Casano 32.00
Souts 31.00
Bost         30.00
JDC         27.00
Dekker 25.00
Hambone 21.00
Cody 18.00
Sovic 17.50
Bev         7.00
Jong         5.00



Def
JDC         65.00
Bardey 40.00
Dekker 36.00
Bost         35.00
Casano 26.00
Hambone 14.00
Souts 12.33
Jong         12.00
Cody 11.50
Wilson 10.00
Bev         9.00
Sovic 3.00


Basically, the kicker and defense ratings just answer the questions Did you spend a dollar on your kicker/defense? and Have you used the same kicker/defense for all four weeks? Those rankings are pretty insignificant, right?

BaDoBuKiBro - Week 3 Review

God damn, with this new every-week Thursday football, it makes it hard on a blogger to get the game reviews out in a timely fashion. Seems like as soon as Week 3 is over, Week 4 is beginning. I'm posting this before the first quarter of the Browns-Ravens game is over, and they're paused right now because Josh Cribbs just got cold-cocked, so I feel like these are still relatively fresh. Enjoy:

NBD - Week 3 Review

After months of acrimonious negotiations, two intractable parties finally came together this week to resolve their differences and come to an agreement for the good of the game. I am speaking, of course, of the agreement reached by the NFL and Time Warner Cable, which finally added the NFL Network and the Red Zone Channel to their line-up this week, thus allowing me to watch NFL coverage 24 hours a day. Today was Yom Kippur, and I had the day off. I watched a replay of the Lions-Titans game and an hour of Terrell Suggs being mic'd up for every game of the 2011 season. I don't even like Terrell Suggs. I also spent a good amount of time writing NBD's Week 3 Reviews. So there's a good chance I'll burn out on NFL football within the next 10 days. But until I do, here are the fruits of my obsession:

NBD - Week 2 Review

In the course of preparing this week's game reviews, I had occasion to look back through our league's history pages (you'll see more below). One of the most enjoyable parts of doing this "research" was seeing some of the bygone franchise names that I had long forgotten.  Inspired by that trip down memory lane, I've prepared a little quiz. Can you name the owners of the following NBD teams?

1) McGahee = the Christ (2004)
2) We Want Prenump (2005)
3) Fall Out Boys (2005)
4) Dock War (2006)
5) Fredo (2007)
6) Pat Magroin (2007)
7) Tri Steeg Area (2008)
8) Pubers and the 'Fro (2008)
9) Goin' Rogue Y'all! (2009)
10) The Death Panel (2009)
11) Sir Lucius Left Fut (2010)
12) This Team Here is Dead (2010)

Answers will appear in the Comments. Read on for more recent history: Week 2.

BaDoBuKiBro - Week 2 Review

"I said that to say this: If you wouldna did what you woulda did, 

we wouldna been where we woulda been to get what we got."

-Michael Johnson to Robert Geathers, Bengals sideline

For anyone watching halftime of the Monday Night Football game last night, these words of wisdom came floating down from heaven during ESPN's cavalcade of clips from mic'd players. Amazed by their sagacity, I rewound three times just to get the transcription exactly right. Like some sort of Zen koan, it may seem like a bunch of nonsense, but deep truth lies within Mr. Johnson's words. Read through this week's recaps, and the meaning should become clear.

NBD 2012 - Week 1 Review

The temperature has cooled, school is back in session, and Lassard has risen from the grave with a thirst for brains and human flesh. We're back in the high life again, boys, so let's take a look back at Week 1:

BaDoBuKiBro Draft Stats

Whereas there are roughly 10 straight hours of sports programming on TV tonight between the US Open and two Monday Night Football games; and...

Whereas my 21st Century attention span is incapable of simply sitting and enjoying said programming, but instead demands that I be doing something on my laptop at the same time; and...

Whereas the Draft Board still lives in my living room, and will probably take longer to throw out than the box of defective patio chair parts that has been here for the past year...

Therefore let it be known that it was pretty much inevitable that I would spend some time tonight entering our auction results into a spreadsheet, and using that to make some calculations.
I share these with you now:

NBD - Draft Stats & Review

Before I dive into the results of Week 1, I wanted to take a look back at the draft and delve into the numbers a little bit. With this being our first auction draft, most of us had some question marks as far as strategy and definitely some different approaches emerged during the auction. Some people focused most of their money on a few big expenditures, while others spread the wealth around to help create a more balanced team. I spent the first two sets of this evening's US Open final putting together a spreadsheet and have found identified some statistics that I thought might be interesting and useful in future auctions.

Everybody Sucks

There are worries and headaches associated with every fantasy player out there, even the supposed best of them. Read on and discover why you might as well just scratch them all off your cheat sheets and let me worry about them.