Covid Fantasy Football Challenge Week 2

I was originally intending to post these scores two or three times a week, but this week was the end of our first marking period of Remote Learning, and I set a policy early on that I would accept any and all late work during that time, because I know that my students have various challenges, obligations and stresses going on in their lives. Of course, my generosity was rewarded with a flood of assignments being turned in on the last possible day (Tuesday), giving me just a few days to grade hundreds of assignments and preventing me from entering Lassard mode mid-week. I finally finished up all my grading yesterday morning, had a lovely time drinking cocktails in the (finally) spring weather last night, and was looking forward to writing up some fantasy scores today.

So I get to my computer, open up the old Chrome browser to get to bloggin', but first notice a flurry of new emails in my account. What could this be? I wondered. Perhaps my students have started a campaign to send me emails, thanking me for my tireless, diligent, and caring service during this difficult time? Nope, not quite. Turned out to be a firestorm of angry comments from a student of mine who I had accused of cheating--a month ago--after receiving a picture of the exact same work from her and another student. Not a re-writing, not even a tracing. Just the exact same diagram of a circle with relevant terminology written in. So I've spent the past hour of my precious Spring Sunday trading emails with her and the other student. Delightful!

Let's look at some goddamn fantasy scores from before these children were born.

It really feels like we should have been able to avoid numbers like 4.7, 3.9, and 0.7 in this little game, right? Or at least avoid having all three of them in the same week? It just goes to show that fantasy is an exercise in futility and frustration even when we supposedly know what to expect. Of course, even if '01 Priest Holmes, '06 Tony Gonzalez, and '16 Antonio Brown hadn't shit the bed, they might have had a hard time overcoming Pat Mahomes' monster performance. This was the game in which he truly announced his impending dominance, throwing for six touchdowns and completing 82% of his passes with no interceptions in only his third career start. I don't like this baseball-playing prancing pony at all, but even I will admit that he sure is awfully fucking good at playing quarterback. 

There was potential for drama in this game with two Texans enthusiasts playing each other and DeAndre Hopkins facing off against the older/younger version of himself. But Nuk chose to display the diplomacy and equanimity that forced Bill O'Brien to ship him off to Arizona, choosing to post virtually identical numbers for each Austinite. This also leads me to wonder if there are players whose arc over the course of the season tends to repeat itself year after year, to the point where we can say "oh yeah Ken Simonton always has a big Week 5 and sucks in Week 8" in the same way that we say a player often has big games against a a certain team or in a certain stadium/weather conditions. You'd think if that was the case one of the professional fantasy analysts would have discovered it by now, but maybe I'll be the first!  

Bonus Bizarre Factoid: Trey has had exactly 60.46 points scored against him in both weeks so far. Will the streak continue in Week 3?

Perhaps the most insidious part of decades of political and social oppression is that the subjugated community begins to internalize the devaluation of life and spirit that they've experienced to the degree that they turn on each other. That's why it's so troubling to see Dutch-on-Dutch crime like this. DeYoung showed no mercy to his brother from a Nethermother, who came limping into this game with a not-yet-starting '02 Clinton Portis, a past-his-prime '11 Chris Johnson, and a withered husk of a man in the form of '02 Kurt Warner.
DeYoung, on the other hand, rolled into this game with a roster composed entirely of guys who were first or second team All-Pro in each of their selected years. Those types of awards and honors don't always correlate 100% with fantasy success, but at least he knows he's getting these guys in years when they were likely to produce. By the way, if you're looking for a fun time (and I mean the kind of fun that I have, not the kind of fun that normal people have), look over the All-Pro lists from a given year and find the one or two names that you don't recognize. In 2003, when LaDainian Tomlinson was named to the 2nd All-Pro Team, he was joined there by Fred Beasley. Does anyone remember who the fuck Fred Beasley was? He was apparently even on the Redskins in a year when I was still a Redskins fan!

In the heyday of the Native Burke Dwellers league, in the late aughts and early teens, you could not even Sniff* a league title without having to go through one of these guys, and most likely you were going to lose. Four of the seven titles between 2007 and 2013 were claimed by either Joe or Kevin, and they haven't faded much in the years since, claiming second and third place in the most recent season. Truly they are the class of the league, and there's not a particularly close 3rd place**. So it's not surprising to see that they had a close and high-scoring face-off here in our historical league. What is surprising is that neither of them employs a single player from the years in which they won their championships. Instead, they've both leaned towards a more recent vintage, a decision which Kex may now regret. Surely one of the guys from his 2011 or 2013 championship squads would have served him better than 2017 Ezekiel Elliott, who put up a paltry 2.2 points this week (and by "this week" I of course mean mid-September of 2017).

*see what I did there, NBDers?

**cue Elliott head explosion

Screen was eager for me to share this image of the exciting new Burkeopoly game with all of the assembled anti-Burkeites here:

The timing of the game couldn't have been better, because Screen truly sent presumptive favorite Bardey to JAIL this week, locking up would-be world-beaters like '02 Tomlinson and '03 Moss, and claiming all the most valuable properties (Lamar Jackson Place, Adrian Peterson Avenue, and the Faulk & Fitzgerald Railroad) for himself in the meantime. Bardey failed to prepare himself for the CONTINGENCY that Gronk would be injured, and backed him up with a tight end from the era when even the best tight ends had relatively little fantasy impact.

 Andy also claims one of the highest-scoring players of the week in Lamar Jackson, a fact that allows me to point out a new feature here from the Commandant, giving you highlights of some of these historic performances over in the right-hand column there. Crack open a beer and a bag of chips and pretend you're watching live sports again with some of the best to ever play the game! (Unfortunately, you'll have to follow a link to YouTube to actually watch because the NFL is a bunch of nazis about their content, but you didn't want to watch these highlights on an inch-tall embedded screen anyway.)

The plague of wrong-year Michael Turner continues to afflict me, but luckily this week it was matched by the fact that 2001 Shaun Alexander has yet to unseat Ricky Watters as the lead back in Seattle. There isn't a whole lot else to say about this underwhelming matchup, other than the fact that I had the entire menu of players from the past 20 years at my disposal, and two-thirds of the ones I selected couldn't make it into double-digits this week. This may be the only game I win prior to the Week 4 transaction window, which cannot come soon enough as far as I'm concerned. Thank god I caught Christian McCaffrey in the worst week of his dominant 2019 campaign. He only had two rushing attempts so I'm guessing he sustained a minor injury during the game.

 

A lot of Elliott's team was drafted with me as his proxy, and a lot of my decisions were based on me asking "who should we give him?" to a Zoom chat of drunken idiots trying to be funny, which is how he ended up with Chad Ochocinco and DeSean Jackson. But I'll be damned if those two didn't drive him to victory this week! With the touchdown celebrations, the Dancing With the Stars appearances, the dead-eyed concussion videos ("How'd Bodden do, guys?"), and the fact that he changed his name to Ocho-fucking-cinco all looming in our memories, it can be easy to forget that Chad Johnson was a really good football player and one of the top receivers for most of the mid- to late-aughts. And whoever chose 2013 as the year for DeSean Jackson (Cody?) clearly knew what they were doing as that was his career year in terms of yards and touchdowns. In opposition, Souts' collection of fine-but-not-spectacular showings could not really compete with our jokey selections for E. In fact, Elliott could have had an even more dominant performance this week if he'd stuck to the jokes: after choosing for him, I gave him the option to start any of his later selections over the ones we had picked, and he went with '08 Manning over 2012 RGIII. But ol' Bobby Griffin scored 30 points in week 2 of 2012! Remember when we thought he was going to guide the Skins to a decade of dominance! Ha!

Here are your updated standings:

On to Week 3! Stay healthy and sane!