Yawn: A fantasy update

Your author is hard-pressed to think of something that can cause an immediate loss of interest quite like hearing about someone's fantasy team. Having friends and co-workers recite their rosters with no real purpose other than to gloat about conquering leagues you're not involved in seems quite banal and pointless, no? 

That said, the author knows full well that you the dear reader probably also couldn't give two shits about whatever fantasy team he's gone and created after so many years of taking that road less traveled where non-participation seemed cooler. Now the author has multiple fantasy teams, and while he tries mightily not to bring those into the other posts here on BMC that you might actually read, every once in a while, if for no other purpose than to help him remember who he had on such teams in a given year, he likes to keep a recorded entry of how he's done.

This is one of those times. Your non-interest in the remainder of this post is understood.

One of the more enjoyable things so far about the fantasy football season is knowing more of the participants than I was familiar with in many of the past leagues I've participated in. This coming weekend, for instance, will present me with two matchups I'm looking forward to on a personal level.

I'll start over in the "Tumblr league" on NFL.com (all screengrabs can be enlarged by clicking on them, BTW), where I suffered my first defeat last weekend, but hold the No. 4 spot—which would be good enough to make the playoffs. This coming weekend I'll be playing the No. 9 team, which is owned by a girl I've gotten to know over the past two years and was supposedly pretty good at this stuff. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to hopefully clobbering her and then publicly mentioning it over on my own Tumblr. Better yet—seeing as we have six teams tied with 2-1 records—is that those top two teams play each other this weekend and the No. 3 and No. 5 I'm sandwiched in between also square off. Before I get too far ahead of myself though, maybe we should look back at how I got to the 2-1 record that I'm at.

As I've said before, one of the things that I'm really doing differently this year is making changes to my roster. And in the Tumblr league, moves made have to wait until Thursday morning to clear waivers. This was a little frustrating at first, but I've actually now been coming to like how I tinker with the waiver priority immediately at a weekend's conclusion all the way up to Wednesday night and seeing who got added (left) and dropped (right) in the morning. As you can tell, my initial problems were with finding a solid backup quarterback (seeing as Joe Flacco hasn't really been the package of QB dynamite some had hyped him to be), but that's been effectively resolved this weekend (and probably just for this weekend) with the addition of Oakland's Bruce Gradkowski as the Raiders prepare to host a Houston Texans team with a miserable pass defense.

My latest dilemma is with finding a reliable backup tight end, but hopefully Visanthe Shiancoe gets back on track after the Vikings take this week off and I don't need to keep toying with somebody to replace him. Because the league allows for so many receivers on the roster (you could play up to five), I also find that being a position that gets toggled a lot. And since, conversely, you can only play a maximum of three running backs and I've now got five on my roster that I like, at least that's set.

Anyway, after winning my opening week matchup, I faced off in Week Two (left) with one of the supposed "teams to beat" (I've got the other one of those teams this week). While Joe Flacco basically took a dump on my stat sheet, I was fortunate that Tom Brady also had one of his rare underwhelming performances. Actually, Winston there had a number of guys who failed to live up to their projected totals.

The story of Week Three (right) for me was having a number of high performers for my team on my bench. I ended up losing by a little more than 20 points, although I had a bench that outscored my opponents by a little more than 60. I guess that's bound to happen to everybody—and will almost certainly happen to me again sometime later this year (although hopefully not in the playoffs).

Also, Chad Ochocinco is in my doghouse now for less-than-stellar outings both of these past two weeks after a fairly strong opening week performance. Hopefully he's able to put some numbers on the board against the Browns this coming weekend.

Now over in the Yahoo league that the bro-in-law runs, I really only know he and my sister—although a number of participants there appear to be the same group that probably enjoyed kicking my ass last year when I was playing this for the first time. I'm putting up a bit more of a challenge this year, obviously, seeing as I've already won two-thirds of the amount of games I won all of last season after just three weeks. We've got two teams that are still undefeated, but my 2-1 record is the highest-scoring among that group, so I'm holding on to the No. 3 spot right now.

There's been transactions galore for me over in that league too, but the difference with the Yahoo league is that most moves don't have to wait to clear waivers (unless you're trying to add somebody who just got dropped by another team). Also, there's a dozen teams in the Yahoo league as opposed to 10 in the Tumblr one, so the selection's a bit more limited. Because my starting QB is Phillip Rivers, I have not spent any time worrying about finding a backup QB. However, because two of my three starting wide receivers are Arizona Cardinals, you'll notice that I've spent a lot of time trying to find a solid fill-in for those spots. As a matter of fact, that position's made up nearly all of my transactions.

Of course, there's one less active roster spot in the Yahoo league than there is in the Tumblr league, so whereas I've got a WR/TE and a WR/RB to fill for Tumblr, my final roster spot for each week in the Yahoo league is a WR/TE/RB wild card that allows for a little more flexibility.

Now as for the results so far, I followed up my opening week win with a loss to one of those still-undefeated teams in Week Two (left). I'm going to pin most of the blame for that one on Steve Breaston (which I guess means I'm really blaming Derek Anderson—and, in a way, Kurt Warner, for retiring and dancing and probably talking about Jesus), so I've since dropped him. But like I said, that loss came to a team with Tom Brady and Adrian Peterson, so I wont beat myself up too much about it.

I rebounded quite nicely last weekend (right) though by being the highest-scoring team in the league and thus, destroying an opponent that only had two players exceed projections while all others on his squad underperformed. Conversely, I only had two guys deliver less than what was expected, while the rest of the team were just totally tits for me.

And actually, the blowout was so convincing, I got this prestigious honor for the week:

Oh, and the fantasy baseball league is down to the final three games of the regular season, so barring a meltdown of colossally epic proportions, I'm getting ready to accept another trophy for victory there in the near future:

I'll have final thoughts on that league and how I effectively slaughtered 11 other people that I can only assume forgot about the league or just simply stopped participating—presumably because they were looking forward to fantasy football.