We begin with a reminder of last season’s championship.
Our Champion Corey’s best score of the whole season was 183, posted Week 1, giving him a melee win to start off his championship season. Runner-up Cameron scored 200+ four times in the first six weeks, including a record 250 points, posted Week 6. One of those 200+ weeks was against Corey early in the year (211-177, with 177 being Corey’s second-highest output).
The matchup was perfect: Mahomes vs. Allen… oh man, I assumed there was going to be more to it. Just look at Corey’s offensive starters:
QB Allen
RB Burkhead
WR Tyreek
WR Mooney
TE Pitts
FX Dare Ogunbowale
FX Gronk
I wish I could say Cameron’s were better:
QB Mahomes
RB RoJo
WR Kupp
WR Ant. Brown
TE Everett
FX Lamb
FX Jaret Patterson
Cameron mustered his lowest output of the year at just 121 points, compared to his league-high per-week average of 166. Corey won with a respectable 140.6, eerily close to his per-week average of 140.8.
A couple notes: Mahomes and Allen each scored 28 points and so cancelled each other out. Corey started two Texans RBs, and they combined for 21 points! He started two TEs, and they combined for 24 points! Tyreek was his lowest scorer on offense. Cameron had many low scorers on offense, partially due to Antonio Brown ejecting himself from the league halfway through the game. The rookie Patterson kept Cam alive with 21. But the Cam that won out was Cam Jordan, who had 3.5 sacks on his way to a 25-point week in Corey’s IDP FLEX spot.
Have we given proper due to the new rule deciding the championship game?! Corey had Myles Garrett. If not for the IDP FLEX, Cam Jordan doesn’t crack this lineup, and Corey doesn’t win this game.
Cameron is currently bleeding out wherever he’s reading this. I think I got three knife-twists in that intro.
I’m always happy with a new league champion. It affirms my work in trying to make a fantasy format where everyone has a chance at the chip. Who among us hasn’t been a legitimate contender heading into the playoffs? For some reason Cameron consistently wrecks face every year, but other than that, it’s competitive, and it’s variable.
Now, without transition, I’m going to lay out the league power rankings using some statistical data but then also just kind of rambling in order to meet some kind of word count. Is it better to go year-by-year, stat-by-stat, team-by-team? What satisfies? What unifies? What drives competition and respect and adds to potential banter? How do we do the perfect everything always and never compromise and also publish the note in stride and not cave under the pressure, pressure of perfection, the standard I’ve set that the notes be issued every week at exactly the same length, crisply edited with flawless command of language throughout…
Here is the league-average weekly score since I started keeping track:
2015: 111 FP
2016: 113 FP
2017: 120 FP
2018: 129 FP
2019: 143 FP
2020: 144 FP
2021: 143 FP
Here are the champ rules since 2015:
After 2015 (Sean): champ gets 1-2 turn pick
After 2016 (Evan): IDP expansion (DL-LB-DB)
After 2017 (Kennedy): keepers
After 2018 (Cameron): point per first down
After 2019 (Doak): convert one RB to FX
After 2020 (Spencer): convert DST to DX
After 2021 (Corey): still waiting on that one…
Somewhere in there I was also able to shoehorn some extra rules. Sean’s rule was expanded to create the pick ladder, which decides our entire draft order. Evan’s rule led to years of defensive scoring reform. Kennedy’s keeper rule forced us to draft away from ESPN. That draft was the first time we all drafted together, including Max taking over for Tim halfway through (foreshadowing?). Cameron’s rule helped us make the move to sleeper, as ESPN didn’t support point-per-first. We improved kicker scoring to reward fractional points for yardage in the ones place. We did that stupid shit with the playoffs last year that subsequently fucked up our league history page forever—sorry, Corey; the only way to recognize your championship on that page is to delete the entire 2021 season. Okay, I’m 99% to blame for the last one. I should have known selecting “no playoffs” in the league settings would have repercussions. Anyway…
Since scoring has stabilized in the last three seasons, those are the seasons I’ll use for the power rankings.
First place is a goddamn tie. Any guesses?
We should all know one of them. Cameron has vexed us ever since he came aboard. In six seasons, he’s led the league in scoring three times and he’s played in the championship three times. In 2017, he led the league in scoring and missed the playoffs. In 2018, he led the league in scoring and won it all. Last year, he didn’t just lead the league in scoring. He averaged 13 more points per game than the next team—that’s a record.
Part of Cameron’s success is weird windfalls. Because of the way we implemented keepers, Cameron went into the 2018 draft with Tyreek Hill and Alvin Kamara, and he got to keep Kamara for another year after that. Cameron leads the league in first-round picks acquired—all from Shelby and me. It is not a coincidence that Cameron’s best two seasons (2018 and 2021) were also the seasons in which he had two first-round picks. I’m just saying: if we based these power rankings on just 2019 and 2020, Cameron would drop from first to sixth.
Still, you’ve gotta take him seriously. Sixth is playoffs. Cameron also has no scruples. His best teams historically have some combination of Zeke, Kamara, Kareem Hunt, Tyreek, OBJ… this is the guy who drafted Derrius Guice. Cameron should be the odds-on favorite to draft/add Deshaun Watson this year. Okay, maybe not the odds-on favorite. But he’s on a short list of people I assume are okay playing Watson in fantasy football. It’s just a game. They’re just numbers on a screen to this lizard-brained scumbag. (This is the part where we all hawk loogies and let loose as one in Cameron’s direction.) Lick it up, you sleeze.
Second place is more surprising, mostly because you have to be able to access memories of a fever dream. Did anyone know that Kennedy led MORTYDOME in scoring in 2020? Did you know that his weekly average that season was 174 points, which is the MORTYDOME record by a whopping eight points per game (second-best: Cameron’s 166 in 2021)? Kennedy’s scored at or above league average in four of the past five years. The exception was in 2019, when he finished 11th in scoring and 11th in the standings. I don’t remember much about the league as a whole that season; I was too busy WINNINGGG, DUHHH!
It's hard to say what happened that year, but it started with Kennedy scoring 150 in the melee and losing. He scored 150 again the next week and lost again, too. When that happens at the start of your year, things tend to get away from you. Kennedy dropped Darius Leonard for injury reasons and so missed out on a top-3 LB the rest of the way. His first pick was Davante Adams, who missed time with injury and finished 30th in WR scoring. His coveted keeper Juju missed time with injury and finished 60th in WR scoring. He had a respectable roster: Matt Ryan was QB10; Josh Jacobs, David Montgomery, and Chris Carson scored well, as did the WR combo of Tyler Boyd, DJ Chark, and Courtland Sutton, but Kennedy couldn’t seem to get the right mix from week to week. It was a brutal season, but in the final game of the year, the decider between 11th and last place, Kennedy dropped 183 points. In doing so, he laid the foundation for…
2020: the 174 ppg season that took him all the way to the championship game. He lost that game, lost it pretty bad, honestly: Spencer didn’t even start a DB, which is actually fucking wild for a championship game, but I believe Spencer had a contingency plan to play a SNF/MNF DB; he simply secured the win by the time the main Sunday slate was over. Spencer had four WRs combine for 88 points in that game. There’s not much you can do against that. Kennedy got rocked, but he had a championship team. Had he started his best lineup, he’d only have lost by four points, which includes a combined -0.5 he got from Robbie Gould and the Saints defense. 2021 was another season in which Kennedy fielded a good team, leaning on the Bengals’ passing attack for the latter half of the season. In Weeks 16 and 17, our semifinals and finals weeks, Kennedy scored 223 points and 197 points. The only problem was that he lost in Week 15 and wasn’t playing in the proper playoffs. Coming into 2022, Kennedy keeps Ja’Marr Chase and has every opportunity to draft Joe Burrow again without even having to spend big to do it. The Chase pick was a stroke of brilliance and another reminder not to sleep on Sleepy Gary.
The only other team averaging more than 150 points per week the last three seasons is yours truly, and I’m stoked I don’t have to do any fake modesty crap about it. I try hard, and I feel fucking validated right now. The best part is that it’s all propped up by Lamar and my belief in him. He’s special. He made my 2019 team special. That 2019 team scored 162 points per week, which was a record at the time. Another record of mine: transactions. According to sleeper, I have made 314 transactions in the last three years. I’m the only person averaging 100 per year. I wish I could say I’d actually made 100 per year, but I only made 99 in 2019. To put even 99 transactions in perspective, just know we have four teams that haven’t made 99 transacations total over the last three years.
(Holy shit: sleeper keeps track of how many messages we send in the chat! I led the league there with 592 messages. Cameron was a distant second with 380. Corey was last with 17.)
I make a lot of transactions because I’m fucking crazy. But I score points and win games, which is the point of all the transactions, so…
I am both a threat and not. Aside from my championship year, I tend to finish within one game of .500. I take risks on good players and bad players. I have very little conviction long-term, except for believing Lamar is pure light encased in a human body, and that Mike Evans is a HOF WR, and that RBs don’t matter, and that Justin Tucker is worth a 7th Round pick, and that Matthew Stafford is a sex symbol, and that Jameis Winston will win a Super Bowl with the Bucs, and that...
Coleman is fourth in scoring, and it’s because the scoring numbers I’m using come from the regular season. Coleman is one of the scariest teams you can face in first half of the regular season. His downfall is that he’s our all-time stubbornest mover at just 59 transactions in the past three years. Last year, Tim/Max combined for 13 transactions, including a solid month where there was zero activity for that team. Coleman finished last season with 12 transactions. Obviously there’s some middle ground in how many moves you have to make to stay competitive all year long. Our champion Corey had just 25 transactions.
Coleman’s drafts are beautiful, but they’re also grotesque. They’re captivating. Three years in a row, he’s taken IDPs in the 6th and 7th rounds. And that’s not far off from what he did the fours years ago, taking three IDPs and a kicker in Rounds 7, 8, 9, 10. The last four years, his QBs have been Deshaun Watson, Deshaun Watson, Russell Wilson, Russell Wilson. He doesn’t fuck around with this shit. His late keepers the last three years: Tyler Lockett, Terry McLaurin, Brandon Aiyuk. (The Aiyuk one might not impress you, but going into last year’s draft, he was expected to be a top-24 WR, on-average drafted a full round ahead of Deebo Samuel.) This year it will be Rashod Bateman. My guess for next year: George Pickens.
Further evidence of Coleman’s draft and coast pattern: when you look at each team’s best season, Coleman’s is the worst. Coleman’s best finish was 6th place. He made the playoffs twice, losing in the first round both times. He made it to the final game of the pick ladder twice, though he lost both of those contests. Maybe his drafts are so good because he’s always picking in the top five?
The next five teams are clustered pretty tightly, but I’ll stay true to the numbers and talk about them in the order they’re listed.
Brian has made the playoffs with a bye week more than any of us could dream of. In seven years, he’s done it five times. He’s won two playoff games, each one combining with a bye week to get him all the way to the championship. He’s lost championships to Evan and Cameron. Brian won this league once, way back when. Those were the before times. Anything before 2015 existed outside of Mortydome. So while Brian feels to me like a good fantasy football player, I can’t argue with the data that suggests he’s middle of the pack. He’s a bum. He's 33, and he’s washed up. Get him a cribbage set.
But one of Brian’s favorite pastimes is playing devil’s advocate, so let’s indulge. Brian has… um… had… injuries? Err, uh, fifth place is still playoffs? My heart’s not in it. Push through. Brian was one of four teams last year to get a playoff bye. That means he finished in the top third, which you should note, is higher than the middle. He had a five-game winning streak. Coming of a 2-11 regular season in 2020, that’s huge! Good for you, Brian! Chin up there, scout!
But no honestly, don’t worry about this dude. He makes nearly as many transactions as me and doesn’t score nearly as many points. He’s a square. He’s potatoes au gratin. Nobody under 20 has ever heard of him. A bum! Case in point: last year, his keepers were Jonathan Taylor and Antonio Gibson, and he had an extra second-round pick. After the first two rounds, he had five RBs and nothing else. NO! Bad Brian! Drafting players with intentions to trade them is bad process. It’s not entirely without potential, but you were always heading into Week 1 with two of your top five players on the bench.
One thing Brian is good for: mistakes we can learn from. A list of don’ts we can take from Brian’s Mortydome career:
Don’t draft five starting RBs before taking another position.
Don’t draft at a wedding.
Don’t pin all your hopes on Jameis Winston.
Don’t be a complete and total bum.
Shelby is a surprise here, and like with Brian, a lot of that has to do with anchoring. Shelby’s first few years of motherhood coincided with the absolute worst scoring we’ve seen in Mortydome. I guess raising children is more important to some people than a chance at spending five months trying to win $300 of their friends’ money.
But if you also suspected Shelby’s team was more mediocre than middle-of-the-road, that’s because her average score over the past three seasons is propped up by a massive 162 ppg in 2020. It was 12 ppg behind top-scoring Kennedy that season, but it was also 12 ppg ahead of third-best scorer that years’ champ, Spencer. That Kyler Murray-Derrick Henry combo was absolute magic. Shelby had nine 150-point games in the regular season. She scored another 155 in her first-round playoff game, only her opponent scored 174. She scored 162 the following week to win 5th place. But before you go thinking what might’ve been, the team fell apart in Week 16. Kyler and Henry combined for 34 points that week, down from their average of 55. She would have had around 120 overall, not even in “what if” range of the 172 Spencer scored in the championship.
The worst part of that season was Shelby making a risky play for Kyler Murray’s top receiver. She traded her next year’s first for Hopkins, and it has hopefully taught all of us to never trade a first for anything. It’s only worth it if you win the championship, and no player has the power to win you a championship. It’s not like you can say, well, I traded a first for him, so his usage needs to go way up from her. I traded a first for him, so he’s not allowed to get hurt and his team’s not allowed to shit the bed. I like the aggressive nature of the move. I just don’t like how deep it puts you in the hole the next year. Shelby’s first pick in 2021 was Pick 17, followed by Pick 32. She drafted pretty well and had some luck early in the year, starting out 3-1. She proceeded to lose three in a row, then win one, then lose fucking seven games in a row. And I honestly believe it all ties back to not having her first. Maybe you think, oh one pick can’t mean that much. A lot of people lose an early pick to injury anyway. Yeah, I would assume those teams don’t win championships. But Cameron’s first pick was Derrick Henry. He missed the last eight weeks, and Cameron made the championship. Yeah, because Cameron only lost one of two first-rounders. Before losing Henry, Cameron scored 200 points in four separate weeks.
Shelby should bounce back this season. She has the power to have a high draft pick, she has better keepers than most, and she has the hunger that comes from almost winning it all, taking a leap of faith to get it, and then having to suffer the consequences of the fall.
Oh man, I almost forgot the best part. That same season Shelby was able to keep Henry and Kyler, she employed a draft strategy where she drafted Justin Tucker in the 5th and the Ravens D in the 8th. Maybe it was crazy, but I respected it and it lives in my head rent-free when I’m preparing for the draft. Last year, she spent a valuable pick on TJ Watt and it more than paid off. I mean, it was kind of worthless with how bad her team was, but in a world where she had a first-round pick, which could have meant another 15-20 points per game, she would have finished in the top five in scoring, not the bottom two.
Corey is in a tie with the next guy, but we have to give the champ as many nods as we can before the year begins and he’s just a dog in the yard with the rest of us. I suppose you could say Corey is consistent. He’s had the same team name since the AFL-NFL merger, and in the last three seasons, he has the lowest scoring range, with his average score in his worst season just seven points off his average score in his best season. Seven. The league average was 22.
But it’s not like he’s a vanilla drafter. He does some weird shit. Two years ago, he drafted TEs in the fifth and sixth round. Last year, he didn’t draft his first RB until the fifth round, and he waited until the 15th to draft his second RB. He left the draft with two RBs, Myles Gaskin and Marlon Mack. Gaskin scored fewer than 10 ppg, and Marlon Mack maybe didn’t play at all? Corey’s best RB week was in Week 3. Peyton Barber started one game for the Raiders, and he scored 26 points on Corey’s bench. Corey’s championship team was so weird. He was starting two TEs most of the year, granted they were quality TEs in Gronk and Pitts. He didn’t start two RBs in the same week until Week 10, when Myles Gaskin and Mark Ingram combined for 26 points. The next RB combo we saw from him was Gaskin and David Johnson. When the playoffs started, he ditched Gaskin and only started RBs from the Houston Texans. And I can’t emphasize this enough: he won the championship.
Why did he win? My overreactions heading into our draft this year: try to get the best quarterback, and if you’re going to completely flake on one position, make it RB. Maybe Corey saw Peyton Barber’s 26 on his bench in Week 3 and it clicked for him then. But let me lay it out real quick: RB dries up after eight rounds, and there are no sleepers. WR never dries up completely. If each of us drafts five WRs, that leaves a minimum four starters in free agency, and that’s disregarding however many teams’ base offenses use three WRs.
If I’m going to give Corey credit for winning it all, it comes from a certain amount of commitment, a lack of panic. Myles Gaskin was straight-up terrible on many occasions. But he also had multiple 20-point weeks. Corey got all the 20-point weeks because he ate all the dreadful weeks before them. That’s hard to do. And Corey does stuff like this every year. He makes decisions and stick with them, and by the end of the year, he ends up not embarrassing himself. That’s also hard to do. Imagine I told you would leave the draft this year with one RB that you got in the fifth round, and that your best RBs down the road would be 30 years old, play for the worst team in the league, or both. Your best RBs are going to be Mark Ingram and Rex Burkhead. How do you feel? Do you feel like a champion? Do you understand yet that anyone can win this league and no one can explain how that’s possible.
Spencer benefitted as much as Corey did from there only being one RB slot. He was the original 4-WR in our league. He didn’t do it on purpose. He even traded for Josh Jacobs that year, only (I believe) Jacobs got hurt before the championship and Spencer was forced to start the four WRs that combined for 88 points to deliver his most important victory.
Spencer’s had a weird run. He’s been a contender as often as he’s been a total fucking zero. Spencer has finished at the bottom of the regular standings twice since 2015. Shelby’s also done it twice, but one time she was tied with Coleman. Coleman’s tied for last twice, the other time with Oliver. Brian and Kennedy have each finished in last place alone, just like Spencer.
From 2017-19, Spencer won 11 regular season games. In the 2020 regular season, he won 10 games. Last year, he won two games. He is the first person in Mortydome history to lose 16 games in one season (including postseason, obvs).
Most seasons, Spencer is the person I’m least afraid to face. Because even Tim had that dumb luck going for him, where he’d start what you thought was a shit lineup and one of his IDPs would score 25 points. Spencer’s best when his options are limited. Otherwise he tends to squirm. If he’s not squirming, he’s thinking about squirming. He’s thinking about that one year where he had too many starting WRs and he benched the best one like six weeks in a row. So he's careful not to overload any position in the draft, so careful that he doesn’t end up with enough depth, and so even when he hits on a late-round QB, he loses 16 games in one year.
Okay, that’s not fair. I know it’s not fair. But it’s important to play mind games with some people. I’m one of them. Play mind games with me. Even if I know you’re playing mind games, I don’t know why you’re playing mind games. It’s not like we have control over any of these points. And yet, I will tilt, friends. I will tilt so hard I knock myself upright again.
Oliver goes into every season thinking about how if he loses enough games quickly enough, how he’ll make a killing selling his players for picks before the playoffs. That’s not necessarily why he never wins or even comes particularly close to winning, but it can’t possibly be helping. This is something that gets contestants in trouble on The Bachelor every year. There is inevitably one contestant who gets all meta about the season and starts conversations about mechanisms of the show that won’t happen for a few weeks. Somehow everyone else in the house knows to be like, “Woah, it is WAY too early to be talking about that. What makes you think you’ll even be there?” Etcetera. Literally every year. The bachelor(ette) inevitably hears about it and agrees this is an inappropriate way to think about things, and the meta contestant gets sent home, way earlier than whatever week they were talking about, just like everyone they talked to about it said they would. (The show is absolutely bad for everyone’s mental health, literally everyone on Earth is at least 1% more toxic because of the amount of bad faith The Bachelor is pumping out.)
Uh, so Spencer. Sucks? Sure. I’m getting toward the end of the note here. I’m publishing it today no matter what, and so not every person’s section gets to be good. I’m genuinely very sorry about it and wish I could rectify it. Be happy that you’ve won a championship recently. Some of us are closer to the end of our championship grace periods than the beginning.
Holy shit, I was past Spencer’s section altogether. LOL.
OLIVER sucks. Yes. That feels more appropriate. He thinks about the end in the beginning. Only he has a history of lacking the patience to get to the finish without tearing the car apart like he’s the Little Rascals—it’s them, right? The downhill race sequence where they start throwing parts away to gain speed? It happens in other things, too. Doug, maybe, did it too? Anyway, Oliver’s worst regrets happened in consecutive seasons. In 2019, he drafted Mark Andrews at the end of the draft but then dropped him either before Week 1 or right after. That worked out great for me. Then in 2020, he drafted Justin Jefferson in the 10th round, a move he’d been planning for at least a month. Then about three weeks in, he dropped Jefferson. I scooped him up, leading to my biggest regret, trading Justin Jefferson for Keenan Allen—actually I traded Jefferson and Chase Edmonds for Keenan Allen. The worst part was that I actually wanted Tyler Lockett. I was so pissed at Evan. (To be clear, not one bit of this was Evan’s fault.) Anyway, that’s how Evan’s entering his third straight year of Justin Jefferson. Good ol’ me and Oliver.
But these were the fires that birthed the Oliver we saw last season and will see this season. Aside from Cameron’s early explosion, Oliver was the favorite heading into the playoffs. He had the #1 seed and it didn’t feel fluky. He had the second-best QB, and he had a way better team around him than Corey had around Josh Allen.
Oliver was 12-1 going into the playoffs. Coming out of his bye week, he scored 98 points. His previous low was 131. Corey beat him scoring just 126. Oliver’s previously indomitable Brady-Evans stack hit a brick wall against the Saints that week. The Bucs scored zero points, and Brady-Evans combined for 5.7 FP, considerably lower than they’re average of 44. It’s honestly gut-wrenching. Oliver scored 193 points the following week, which would have torched me—I lost to Corey in the semis—and followed it up with 134 in Week 17, which might not sound like much, but championship lose Cameron only mustered 121. The 2021 playoffs will forever haunt me, not because Oliver lost, but because every time I look at any aspect of them, there is something to be disappointed about, something that probably would have squared away more cleanly in a standard format playoffs. I don’t mind doing crazy shit, but it bothers me to do it on accident.
So while I’m personally not afraid to face Oliver, I believe he’s turned a corner and has entered a little championship window here. I believe he’s looking at a rare opportunity to make the championship game finally, but another overreaction I’m having to last year is this: one’s regular season can go too well. Every player has a bad game, and you have to hope that somehow all those bad games happen in the regular season and in the same four or five weeks at that. Oliver has the best keepers, and that matters. Here are the eventual champion’s keepers since the rule started:
2018: Tyreek & Kamara
2019*: Kerryon Johnson & Damien Williams
2020: Mahomes & AJ Brown
2021: Josh Allen & Corey Davis
(*2019 is an outlier year. Lamar came out of nowhere, and I made so many trades. I had two first-round picks, ended up taking Mike Evans (Jameis’ 30-30 season) and Michael Thomas (the year he broke the recpetions record). During the season, I traded picks for DeAndre Hopkins, David Montgomery, JK Dobbins, Mark Ingram, Aaron Donald. I got Mark Andrews, Diontae Johnson, Darius Leonard, Jamal Adams, and Derwin James in free agency.)
So except for the outlier, these are pretty insane keepers. Corey Davis is whatever. If one of your keepers drops 500 points on the year, it covers for the other guy.
Anyway, Oliver’s keepers this season look like Joe Mixon and Allen Robinson. Each can finish top-10 at his position. Robinson maybe doesn’t feel that imposing yet, but there is precedent for the best offense in the league having two top-10 receivers. Mixon is the bell-cow back for a team that lost the Super Bowl on a handoff to his backup. He could end up RB1.
Even without the starts aligning perfectly, Oliver begins the year in better shape than anyone, and that advantage historically can’t be overestimated.
Three teams left. What is steam? Steam has forsaken me. Why do I write entire notes in one sitting and get this worn out? Because otherwise I end up shelving them and never wanting to rehash them. So we push on.
Evan is similar to Corey in consistency, though the difference is that Evan used to dominate us. He made the playoffs every year and set the league scoring record a few times. He won the league in 2016 and made it back to the final game in 2017. Since then he’s been on-again, off-again with the playoffs. He made the semi-finals in 2020, narrowly losing to Kennedy before scoring 202 FP in Week 16, which would have been the most points ever scored in a championship game. As it stands, the record is 172, set by Spe in that same 2020 postseason.
I used to make fun of Evan for favoring white players, but obviously this is not a cool thing to do anymore, so I have to find a new angle. Linebackers who can’t run the 40 in under five seconds, something like that. Or maybe hint at Evan’s desire to run his fingers through Justin Herbert’s silky brown hair. I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.
But so you have to keep an eye on Evan. He’ll snipe you in the draft and scoop you in free agency. He is the only person in Mortydome with at least one 200-point week in each of the past three seasons. He’s a killer. He knows ball. He also plays favorites, so if you get a chance to snipe him in the draft, you will really enjoy his reaction. I think if you’re picking right before Evan in the mid-to-late second round, you draft Justin Herbert. We’ll all appreciate it.
Tim is somehow only second-to-last, despite giving up on fantasy football once the pandemic hit. Can’t blame him. He didn’t care about sports before the pandemic. Tim lives in Gainesville and spends a lot of his free time woodworking. An enterprise as capitalistic as the NFL and its subsidiaries doesn’t offer much appeal. What kept Tim out of last place was, one, our last-place team really stinking it up in 2019 and ’20, and, two, Tim averaged 152 FP in 2019.
I’m not going to eulogize Tim again. I just want to remind Max that the expectations for his team are low and yet even someone who didn’t even watch the games could third or fourth in scoring and make a run at the championship.
Sean is last, which is fucking weird and surprising. I must be really anchored to that 2014-16 era because I think of Sean as one of the scary ones. But in 2019 and ’20 he finished last in scoring, after finishing second in scoring in 2018. Last year, he returned to league-average. Sean was the one with the algorithm, the system that 3-D printed championship from old banana peels and half-drunk cans of beer. It worked, too. Sean won twice, I believe, and in a short period of time. I might be wrong. I really don’t have data or a working memory. I might have records in old notes somewhere, but friends, need I remind you we are still in the era of the poorly researched note? I actually don’t have any of the notes from 2013-15, if there were any. No idea why.
Anyway, Sean. Sean can do some stuff. I think he was better when he knew less. We’re all better when we’re looking at the big picture, when we don’t really know what’s a detail and what’s a smudge on the lens. Whew, I need to quit before I starting describing the scenery and the way the light plays on a blade of grass. Is this what sundowning feels like? Am I about to start talking about how hard times were during the war? Good god.
Which brings us to Max! He tried to tell us last year that he would really get into it this season. He’s totally fucked. He had a free year to figure out what the hell this year was, and I don’t think he even looked at the scoring settings. Then again, like I mentioned with the big picture thing, we kind of suck when we figure things out. We have to re-enter a place of not knowing. It’s like that belief we’re tarnishing the mind by making words for everything, that the world is actually easier to interact with if you don’t have to engage your language brain. Like, when sports coaches say, Don’t think, what they mean is don’t verbalize unless it’s to communicate with someone else. The best you’ll ever be at anything is when you look up from it after an hour and be like, what the hell was I doing for the past hour. Holy shit have we achieved the deadest of the dead ends in this note. My mind is mud, and I don’t want anything to do with words anymore.
Probably could’ve written less.
BUT look forward to more notes rolling out as we get ramped up here. I’m going to do one on new rule ideas (nothing to implement, just things to think about should you ever win this thing), another one on keepers, and probably a team summaries type thing, something where I can call some shots and feel like hot shit if I’m right on something.
If you made it down here, here’s a timeline of what we need to do before the draft:
1. Corey announces the new rule (soon-ish for the sake of hype?).
2. We pick draft slots (about a week before the draft).
3. We pick keepers (day of the draft).
Talk to you soon.
