Here I go, writing about fantasy football again. I’m doing it. I’m pretty nervous to do it because I haven’t done it in months, but here I go. I gave it up for a while because football didn’t matter as much as other things and also because I was hyper nervous of jinxing my winning streak. We’ll never know now whether Lamar’s regular season was susceptible to a jinx. We’ll always know that I won once when he was my quarterback and that there was a cosmic significance to it because of just how in on him I was. Despite never having heard of him before he started for Louisville and despite never watching him play at Louisville, and I mean [i]never[/i]—I wasn’t even in America for his last two college seasons—I found in him something I hadn’t had since Michael Vick, and it’s not really a race thing as much as it is a speed thing. I wasn’t rooting for this guy to succeed so that he could avenge the marginalized black QBs before him; I was rooting for him because he was our only shot to see things we’ve literally never seen before.
I don’t know why you watch sports. I don’t know if you know why you watch sports. But I watch sports to be amazed by the physical world. A boring game is one where nobody does anything I haven’t seen before. An exciting game is one where the blazing fast quarterback has everyone guessing what he’ll do for the entire game. This is what makes Lamar’s loss to the Titans unmemorable: a rainy football game doesn’t offer us anything new, especially since we had that sopping mud game between the 49ers and Skins early in the season. What, the balls wet, hard to throw? Seen it.
Can we petition the NFL to build retractable domes for every team? I’ll watch a high school or college game in the wind and rain and mud—I mean, I could accomplish the same thing re-watching [i]All the Right Moves[/i] (classic)—but professional football, my sweet Lamar? I need him bone dry and ready to fly.
Look, I’m not delusional enough to think this is good writing or that Lamar could possibly repeat as fantasy cheat-code next season. (Disclaimer: for the sake of simplicity, I’m pretending the world is normal.) But I do think that Lamar in dry, temperate weather can deliver good sports, i.e. things we’ve never seen before, or at least things we see rarely, like defenders running into each other at full speed as the ball carrier slips by and actually gains speed on his way to the endzone.
Oliver has requested that I recap last season, or at least the end of the season. Without checking Sleeper, I know that Cameron lost to me in the finals. I think Tim made the playoffs; I remember there being some scam where Oliver could end up with the first two picks of the second round. Kennedy was in, like, last place, right, which is why he sold his team for picks—which, by the way, there’s no shame in, seeing as I sold my picks for a team, which, now that I think about it, is how it actually works. Hmm.
Evan traded away a first-round pick for Josh Jacobs, without even a second-year option. I say I traded away my picks for a team, but I still have a 1st. My best player is going to be better than Evan’s best player, and that’s only assuming Lamar isn’t my best player and that he isn’t better than all of your best players, except Mahomes. I feel compelled to give so, so much credit to Spencer for seeing something in Mahomes so early on, and I feel so, so bad that he’s 0-2 in his Mahomes years, with this kind of being the last chance he has to get Mahomes without spending a first-round pick.
On the topic of draft capital, Evan’s isn’t the worst. Neither Tim nor I have second-round picks because Oliver has them both. So let’s not mince words: Oliver has the best collection of picks our league has even seen, including the first overall pick, three second-round picks, and the first pick in the third round; that’s five picks in the top 25. While securing those picks, Oliver was swapping out his lowest picks. As a result, his final pick is at the end of the eleventh round. Oliver is going to draft his entire team before I make my seventh pick. If he keeps two starters and drafts only starters with his initial picks, he will have filled out his starting lineup by the end of the sixth round. I am on the fence about whether or not this means Oliver’s team will be good. Oliver’s set of picks is more valuable than any of ours. His team will ostensibly be of higher value, which means upon leaving the draft, he will have the best team, and his worst player will technically be better than most of our entire benches. This will make the opportunity cost of cutting any of them prohibitively high during the preseason, possibly even into the regular season. Maybe this is good. Maybe he will be forced to be patient and end up with a harvest as we roll into fall. I don’t know. Maybe he’s able to take to heart the wisdom that once the draft is over, you stop viewing your players in terms of draft capital. Maybe this unlocks his potential as a fantasy manager. I don’t know.
I imagine Oliver will spend the month leading up to our draft trying to move up further. I don’t think he will try to pick his whole team in the first nine rounds or anything, rather I think he will try to turn his mid-round picks into high-round picks by taking on some garbage picks. Like, okay, to be transparent, I would offer Oliver my third-rounder to get a fifth and sixth. I don’t know if it’s a good deal; I’d have to look into it.
Actually I’m intrigued to see what kind of team I can build with ten picks in the final five rounds (including five picks in the final two rounds). One thing is for sure: I won’t show loyalty to nunna them sumbitches. You think the Commish won’t cut a bitch? I’m ready to set new records for free agent transactions. I’m going back to my old ways now that my grace period has reset. I’ve got five years before I have to care again. I might even trade out of the first round to get some picks in 2021.
Okay, but so what are picks worth anyway? I mean in 2020, how are we valuating these players? Do we still take RBs with the top picks? It seems like it hasn’t been working out for the people doing it. First five picks last year: Saquon, McCafe, Bell, David Johnson, and Gurley. McCafe was the second highest scorer in fantasy, but the other four RBs were basically worthless. Saquon may have scored 70 points across Weeks 15 &16, but his owners couldn’t make anything of it after he got hurt Week 3, missed Weeks 4-6, played like dog shit Weeks 10 & 12, and had his bye Week 11, good for seven weeks of nada, clogging the starting spot three times in the process. Bell, DJ, and Gurley were so bad that I don’t even need the stats. DJ and Gurley were traded and released, respectively, when we all know it should have been the other way around—I mean, technically the Rams should have kept Gurley since they only saved $2.5 million cutting him, but whatever—and Bell would have been cut traded by now except that his cap hit is lower than his dead money, meaning if the Jets cut him, they would lose $1.5 million in cap space.
Le’Veon Bell deserves his own paragraph for playing the game the right way and basically being blessed. He refused to play under the franchise tag, rode jet skis instead of playing football for a year, got paid $27 million guaranteed at signing the following summer, played fine considering his team was the worst, and now, possibly unrelated, no one is signing RBs to big money deals. Gurley and DJ were the most recent big deals, and they’re gone. Melvin Gordon was offered $10 million annually (probably three years) during his holdout last summer; now he’s accepted $8 million annually over two year (after allegedly turning down a higher offer—presumably maybe a million more from Buffalo, but you know, Buffalo…). RBs on the open market aren’t getting anywhere. Gurley ended up in Atlanta because he wanted to be in Atlanta (his hometown, sort of) and because he was already making $7.5 million from LA, so the $5 million Atlanta offered probably looked to Gurley like the equivalent of the roster bonus he was due a year from now in LA. By signing a one-year deal (instead of a standard three-year), Gurley hits the open market at age 28 instead of 30, since 30 year-old RBs might as well be dead if they’re not Frank Gore or Adrian Peterson. What’s funny is that a year ago, Gurley was laughably better than those two, and now he’s arguably worse. Gurley may have more skill, more speed, but the only thing any RB really needs in the modern NFL is durability. Coaches can clamor for pass-catching backs all they want, but if it’s a choice between a back who might hold up to punishment and a back who will hold up to punishment, the periphery is irrelevant. Either way, Le’Veon Bell might well be the last RB ever to get $10 million annually on the open market.
Sure, some prized RBs will soak up salary cap by re-signing with the team that drafted them, but teams that win Super Bowls will continue to do in the 21st century, which is not giving huge deals to RBs. The last SB champ to pay their RB prior to their SB win was the Seahawks, who are forever an anomaly since they hit on all their draft picks so like half their starters were on rookie deals at the time. And even still, Marshawn Lynch made exactly $10 million that season because he had a $6 million signing bonus on top of his $4 million salary. Before that, maybe you count the Steelers’ Jerome Bettis, who was making $3.5 million in total cash in 2005, but the most recent case of a normal team paying their RB lots of money and winning a Super Bowl (any guesses?): the Greatest Show on Turf. Yes, in good ol’ 1999 the Rams signed free agent RB Marshall Faulk for three years and $13 million, with $7 million up front in a signing bonus. Look, the cap has gone up a lot. In 1999, the $10 million the Rams paid Faulk accounted for nearly 18% of the salary cap. That’s QB money, and the Rams could afford QB money because rookie Kurt Warner was making just $750K that season. This is the game that NFL GMs are playing. You can’t pay the QB and the RB. You have to choose, and when you choose, you probably choose the dude who touches the ball every play and not the dude who touches the ball, at best, 40% of plays.
This is the brilliant thing about Teddy Bridgewater’s deal with Carolina. The potential out in his deal is synced to the end of McCaffrey’s fifth year. At that time, the team will be able to choose between the 30-yo QB and the 26-yo RB. The choice will likely be obvious, and the reason won’t be that McCaffrey is the best RB in the NFL. No. The Panthers just won’t be very good. They are rebuilding in 2020, and they would be wise to tank (though Jacksonville has kind of beat them to it) for Trevor Lawrence. Draft Trevor, have him learn the offense behind Bridgewater in 2021, then cut Bridgewater and re-sign McCaffrey to a four-year deal that ends at the same time as Lawrence’s fifth year. If McCaffrey is somehow the Tawm Friggin Brady of RBs, maybe Carolina gets him again on a team-friendly age-30 deal, something like four years, five-mil per, with the fourth year being a team option. Then they spend the real money re-upping Trev.
I invoked the name, so here we go. Tom Brady has signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on a fully guaranteed two-year deal that will pay $50 million and end in the spring of 2022 when Brady is hallway between 44 and 45 years old. Responsibly, my feelings about this will evolve over time. When it was a rumor that we even wanted him, I was like, no way, not happening, doesn’t matter, how much are we paying Jameis. When it was a rumor that we were all-in, I was like, no way, not happening, Pats will pay him, or he’ll pick literally any other team but ours, we’re nobodies, how much are we paying Jameis. When it happened, when it was reported that he had agreed to a deal and that he would be the quarterback of the Bucs for two seasons, the first thing I thought was, Oh no, the world is actually ending this time. Y2K and the Mayans and whatever didn’t mean anything; this is the real deal.
My coming of age as a sports fan can be brought back to one moment and one name: Bert Emanuel. Before that, I remember some stuff, sure, but that was the first time I remember going to school the next day and sharing feelings about sports. I remember the ensuing Super Bowl, at least the part where I badly wanted the stupid fucking Rams and their shit-eating supermarket QB to lose to the Titans, so much so that even though the Titans’ last play was a good two yards short of being a touchdown, I spent the entire next day criticizing officiating and talking about how if the camera can clearly show what happened, we should be using that to make the call (okay, no, I wasn’t able to articulate it, but these were the conversations we were having, even at that age, even if it was just repeating what we heard the adults say; in retrospect, I was probably just hearing older people say these things and agreeing with so much emotion that it tricked my brain into remembering some amount of agency).
It was the following season that the NFL implemented replay review or whatever it’s called, and if you don’t have time to check the archives on this site, I’ll remind you: I fucking hate instant replay for anything that isn’t an amazing feat in the physical world. I hate it. I hate waiting for officials to decide which inch-line the ball is on, how many feet are on the ground, how many seconds are on the clock, all of it. Do I feel better about it when my team benefits? Sure. But I come from the school of thought that the best version of sports is actually playing them, without officiating or even a clock. I don’t even care if we keep score, but I understand that this is abstract and that I am mostly alone. Hopefully, we can all agree that using instant replay to review fouls and penalties is trash. If anything, you can take the time during a natural commercial break (which I want fewer of, while we’re on it) to review questionable calls and retroactively award some arbitrary advantage in the opening of the next quarter or game. Doesn’t anybody else give a shit that we get eight minutes of live football and maybe thirty minutes of sideline shots and looks inside the huddle compared to a solid two hours of advertising, most of it from Coke, Doritos, and Amazon? Am I an old man shouting into the void on this one? I get that someone has to pay for all this stuff, but I also think, well, no they don’t because I would straight up watch practice instead of a real game if practice were offered without commercial interruption. Fuck!
But okay, so my sports-watching history is really just a subset of The Age of Instant Replay, and it fucks with me, but what fucks with me more is that the year that replay review was instituted was the same year that Tom Brady was drafted 199th overall to the New England Patriots. The year after, he won his first Super Bowl. The year after that, the Bucs won their first Super Bowl. Brady has one five since. The Bucs have appeared in zero. The Bucs actually had potential to be the Patriots of the NFC. Tony Dungy could have built this defense over and over again. All we needed was a consistent QB, and we would have gotten one eventually while maintaining defensive excellence in the same vein the Pats and probably Ravens and Steelers have under their current coaches. I know it sounds stupid. I know Gruden won us the Super Bowl or whatever and I wouldn’t trade it for anything etc etc. but really, I would trade that Super Bowl to keep Dungy and those first-round picks we gave up for Gruden. I think we would have won the Super Bowl anyway. Specifically, I think Jon Gruden would have lost to Bill Belichick in the AFC Championship in 2003 (the ’02 season) and Dungy and the boys would have confused the hell out of Brady and overwhelmed the Pats offense with all that athleticism. I think this. I don’t always think this, but some days I do. Today I do. With Bruce and Bowles, I think we have something like that. Bruce is too old to be part of a dynasty. I think he retires when Brady does, and I think it happens in two years. I think Bowles takes over as HC and we have the defensive dynasty we should have under Dungy, just twenty years later. Christ, I’ve been a legitimate Bucs fan for twenty years. How do we do it? Why do we do it?
Not for Tom Brady, but you know what, it doesn’t matter. He does the important thing: he protects the football. I have concerns, though, about whether he will continue to be the GOAT that we’ve come to know. The Brady we know is a man of routine, a man of consistent practice habits and simple, centering mantras. He is stable and, well, boring. Florida is not those things. Bruce Arians likes to let guys play loose and have fun. He talks and dresses as if the appropriation of jazz music were a person. Tom Brady has been in a cage for the past twenty years, and for the first time, the latch has been left open. He can choose to stay in the cage, but who would? Personally, I think this dude is weird in ways we haven’t yet gleaned. I think he moved to Florida to start having fun for the first time ever, and that one intentional change is surrounded by a bunch of unpredictable ones. Maybe risking it for the biscuit is his new idea of a good time. Maybe he throws a bunch of interceptions trying to have that good time. It’s not likely, but we don’t know. What we know is that there was once a QB under the thumb of Bill Belichick, and that QB won six of nine Super Bowls, and now that QB is free. What follows is as unpredictable as, well, Bucs football itself.
