Max drafted Big Perv. He got a slap-bet win out of it, but it cratered his team for weeks. BP didn’t play well, he missed games, and then when he finally seemed to be breaking out, suddenly he was out for the season. Picking the Perv was always bad process just from a human standpoint, but picking him in the third round also cost Max a probably solid starter: Andrews, Dak, Deebo, and James Cook were all third-rounders. (So were Ridley, Higgins, and Dameon Pierce—ignore that!)
Max won his trades. His trade with Evan was a win-win. Evan got the better player, Max got two starters, everyone ate. He robbed Kennedy and me blind. Adam Thielen turned into dust, and Keenan Allen and Justin Herbert both appear to be done for the year. (Even if Allen is not done, he’s playing with Easton Stick, so my hopes are minimal.)
Max came thiiiis close to making the playoffs, and in doing so, he guaranteed himself a top-four pick and protection from last place. Excellent second full season, arguably the first season where he actually understood how this league functions. Well done.
Shelby made a maginificent run. After starting out 0-4, Shelby scored 176 FP in Week 5, made an aggressive trade to get back into the mix, didn’t end up needing that QB at all when Dak caught fire, and in the end, she’s 7-7, tied for the final playoff spot, losing on points and forcing me to consider petitioning for a head-to-head tiebreaker because she was 2-0 against Max and Oliver this year. While she has to settle for the 8-seed, she at least guarantees she won’t finish last again. At the beginning of the year, a repeat looked very likely. She wasn’t just winless; she was last in points. She eventually beat Corey and me, which has to feel great. I don’t want to push the silver lining angle too hard; I just really enjoyed the fight. Making an aggressive trade at 1-4 and then actually getting up into the 6-seed near the end of the season, it was cool! It is the only undeniably good thing about football: you get rewarded for outworking other people. Shelby scoops up an extra 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, has an electric November, and she avoids last place. In my mind, there are only a maximum of two teams that did better than Shelby this season: whoever wins it all, and Oliver.
Oliver atom-bombed his season well in advance, but—oh man, I’m not going to get into the whole metaphor for Horizon: Zero Dawn but basically he did a Horizon: Zero Dawn, either the Gaia angle or the Hades, take your pick. Essentially, by investing in the Chiefs’ offense and being willing to sell any of them at any time, he was able to build around a high-floor QB-RB stack and forced to be aggressive in finding their replacements for next year. He drafted Kyler Murray and held him all year, meaning he played without a functional IR slot for, what, ten weeks? He chased young players just hoping for a good late keeper, and he ended up with Kyren Williams doing a pretty solid CMC impression. Despite a coin-flip chance of making the playoffs, Oliver traded a 2nd, 5th, and 7th in next year’s draft. So he redeems himself while adamantly insisting he's learned nothing.
I somehow learned even less. Despite years of arguing against trading 1sts, despite lambasting Oliver for dumping too many picks for players during last year’s chase, I somehow decided to get insanely aggressive this season, scorch my near-future, and trade my first five picks in next year’s draft for pure luxuries, some of which aren’t working out at all. Like at all. I didn’t trade a pick for Keenan Allen, but he’s mixed up in this, and he’s already burned me. It’s starting to look like I could have just stuck with DeAndre Hopkins because Stefon Diggs is doing his classic December disappearing act while Hopkins is, like, genuinely excited to be playing with Will Levis. Kamara is back to being the dude, while Jahmyr Gibbs is firmly back in his gamescript dependent timeshare. TJ Watt and Myles Garrett are breaking down. I benched Lamar for his best game of the season…
Friends, I am here to remind you: don’t trade 1sts. Don’t trade for more players than you can use. Know who your starters are and start them unless they are unstartable. Do as I say, not as I do. You can’t buy a championship. You can only luck into it after a solid draft and a persistent waiver grind. Maybe you buy one player at a position of need at the deadline. First, you get a better price. Second, you don’t end up with waste.
Coleman went all-in on Brock Purdy and was greatly rewarded. His team was headed fucking nowhere when he traded away Justin Herbert for Kittle and a 6th while also shipping off Bijan for a 2nd. Coleman cannonballed into last place and stayed there for at least six weeks. It looked like he would just hibernate. But somehow, he had an awesome finish to the season. His hometown Niners started blasting through people again, and Coleman ended the regular season defeating the first-place team and following it up with a melee win, going from 12th to 10th in the process. Laugh at 10th place if you want, but it’s better than 12th, and while Coleman was leaping two teams, he was adding another two 2nds and a 5th, so he goes into next year’s draft with all of his orginial picks, plus three extra 2nds, an extra 5th, and an extra 6th. PLUS he’s the hottest team in the pick ladder, so he could have all that AND the first overall pick. Even with Deebo, Olave, and Kittle, Coleman is still starting OBJ, Rashee Rice, and Jake Ferguson. There’s a name-value difference (and Deebo had that crazy 40-pointer), but those are three legitimate starters. If Coleman gets the first pick, I think we need to come together as a league to trade Shelby a couple more 2nds and let them Obi-Wan and Anakin this thing on the lava planet.
Corey and Brian have each lost five straight, so they don’t get indvidual paragraphs. The bright side is that they play each other this week, so only one of them will play in the last-place game next week. Brian started the year with an extra 1st. Corey had an insane year. You would think the team that kept Joe Burrow and drafted Aaron Rodgers would have had a terrible start to the season, especially when their only starting RB was Najee Harris and they spent high picks on Kyle Pitts and Terry McLaurin. Oh, throw in the 89 FP he scored in Week 1 to finish 12th in the melee. But Corey then won three straight, but don’t assume that this happened because his team turned it around. He averaged 130 points per week for that heater, which to be fair, is up from the 126 per week he averaged across the whole season. Four of Corey’s six wins were against teams that missed the playoffs, and none of his wins came against a team that finished above .500. Terrible season. And yet he’s three spots ahead of Brian in the standings. Because while Corey’s team was predictably bad, Brian was getting smacked sideways every week by a different significant injury, to the point that he’s started I think five or six Panthers so far? Remember when Brian drafted five extra players and could have just held them all through Week 1 but instead decided to drop them all right before the games started, one of them being Brian Robinson, who went on to be a top-10 RB rest of season? As someone who makes a shit-ton of moves throughout the year, I can tell you there’s no coming back from dropping the wrong guy. Nab all the Chuba you want, Billy Beane. These past three weeks with Chuba (outscoring Robinson every week) weren’t enough to make up for the first eleven you’d gotten from Robinson (outscoring Chuba—by a lot—all but one week).
Evan has had probably the least impressive season by a team that finished the regular season in first? And what makes sense for some reason is that Evan will jus keep rolling softly over our bodies, leaving us alive enough to contemplate our death but still too crushed to cry for help. He made that Breece Hall trade and sat back and watched the wins roll in. What incentive would he have to trade picks? He makes the playoffs every year, makes the championship game half the time, probably figures he can just try again next year if this one doesn’t work out. Unlike Oliver or Sean or me, Evan isn’t sitting on his final season of star QB, staring into the sunset as the syringe depresses and a warm wave rushes inside of us, whispering as a tear runs down, I guess this is goodbye. God, I’m so jealous. Not of Evan’s team, which is mid, as are all of our teams, but of Evan’s confidence to just ride it out. What a stud. Trailing me by 100 points and just tortoising my hare all the while.
Dammit.
Spencer’s season was so stupid and funny and sad and weird, and there’s really no reason it should have gone this way. He drafted a good team, and nobody lived up to expectations and the way they failed was unpredictable and strange and unncecessary (except for the Aaron Rodgers injury that tanked GW’s season, which Rodgers totally deserved). I think Spencer will concentrate on the Aaron Jones part, where a great player tried to play through a nagging injury literally all season without going on IR or ever really overcoming it, basically exactly what the Rams tried to avoid when they IR’d Cooper Kupp before the season started (and even that had sketchy results). Aaron Jones’ season is the worst thing that can happen to a fantasy manager: first, he has a history of being elite and playing through injuries, then he is doing limited practices being called a gametime decision every week, so you’re benching Thursday guys and early window guys hoping for him, and then he’s ruled out, OR he actually plays and plays poorly or leaves early with injury and you’re fucked either way.
But the funniest thing was Spencer going all in on Jags except for the consistently good ones. The Bills picks worked out, though. Still, Spencer appears headed to the last-place game.
Kennedy invented Bobby Time, and for that we should be grateful. He brought back defense and pounding the fucking rock. He almost rode a rookie QB to the championship, but listen: the first year of this league, Joe Flacco was a god (a lesser deity, like a god of flightless birds or something). He once changed team two weeks in a row so that he could face the same team three weeks in a row, beating that team each time. He’s a Mortydome legend from the days before Mortydome. He’s our Curly Lambeau. If Kennedy wins, we put Flacco’s name on the winner’s trophy.
Cameron’s success has come from four players: Some Trash Asshole, TJ Hockenson, Brandon Aubrey, and Maxx Crosby. A WR, TE, K, and DL. This is what Mortydome is about, and it’s total bullshit. It spits in the face of my preseason assertion that the championship team is the one with the best QB. Cameron just doesn’t have a QB, at least not one that he wants. If he hadn’t gotten the price he wanted for a replacement, or if something better had hit the waiver wire, Goff would be on the bench. So far this reason, I can say Cameron had a fun season, made some amazing finds, the most impressive being the rookie kicker who hit back-to-back 60-yarders in a game. But the sideshow ends now.
Sean outdid Oliver, and nobody is talking about it. He came into the draft without his 1st, 3rd, or 4th. Granted he had Jalen Hurts, but that’s it. His late keeper was Alexander Mattison, and he drafted two Cardinals at the 5-6 turn. I’ll never get over it. But the turning point of his season was right after he griped about our free agency rules, when he added the best two players available in one round of weekly waivers, and one of them (Puka) is maybe the best rookie WR ever? So while I don’t believe in Sean’s effort to repeat, his team’s been magic, literal magic, like it makes no sense that none of us picked up Brian Robinson and it makes no sense that Sean has gotten like 80 FP from the tush push this season. Oh my god, and Sean’s next best pickup, the best midseason free agent TE of all time, Trey McBride, ANOTHER FUCKING CARDINAL. And it doesn’t matter. He just strolls into the playoffs with TJ Edwards scoring 15 FP per game. So I guess Sean is winning it all again and we’ll just live in our own version of The Man in the High Castle until we band together to save ourselves.
Four of six playoff teams took a loss, the team in last place scored the most points, and the final win was decided by less than half a point. Amazing. The best way to close a regular season. No notes.
(Cards on the table, I didn’t start writing until this morning and had to cut corners somewhere. No, I will not be revisiting my decision to bench Lamar Jackson. Mostly because it didn’t cost me anything so I can pretend it never happened. Worst I’ve ever felt watching Lamar shred a defense, for sure.)
Evan, Shelby, Max, and I will enjoy our bye weeks, except for the part where we watch the Bucs game without the distraction because there is no worse experience than watching the Bucs play in Green Bay in December.
10 K-Bop vs 11 JAGs
Both of these teams won in the melee, but it was probably in their best interest to lose so they could play Corey. I don’t know if it matters who Coleman is matched up with this week. He’s trouncing all of them. He’s coming off a 180-point week, he has an MVP candidate at QB, the RB leading the league in TDs, and he has the IDP luck.
Spencer’s Jags are playing Baltimore, who looked bad against McVay, but also McVay looked really, really good. The Jags simply don’t have that bag to pull from. So more responsibility falls on the other half of Spencer’s team, the Bills, who have a bad matchup against Dallas. Eh, kind of. Spencer has the offensive players who match up with Dallas’ weakest defensive players. But his Buffalo IDPs are exactly the ones the Cowboys will try to work away from. Overall, probably another 130 or so for Spencer. While I believe in Coleman’s players, I don’t believe so much in his matchups this week. So I’m ignoring the matchups and focusing on how sneaky good all of his players are.
Prediction: Coleman wins 150-130
9 Chasin vs 12 Infirmary
If Brian starts Bryce Young again, I’m going to be sad and probably a little mad. Young has been so terrible, and there’s really no hope he turns it around this year. Stash him for late-keeper potential, yes. But please try to win the #1 pick. Please start a QB that scores points. Start a QB who is fun to watch! Start Tommy DeVito for all I care. I mean, if you’re having fun starting Bryce Young, fine. But you’re not having fun, are you? Start a fun QB! And with Shaq Leonard doing fucking nothing last week, can we reunite IDPU in earnest? Jermaine Johnson is killing it.
Corey is starting Jake Browning, which isn’t the give-up slide it might appear. Browning was very good in college, and it seems like he knows what he’s doing. The issue is that he’s facing Minnesota, who basically alternate between zero-blitz and drop-8, meaning they are either forcing the QB to throw in under two seconds or forcing him to throw into tight windows. And since it’s Browning’s third game, I’m assuming this will fuck with him something major. I’m not suggesting Corey start Baker; I’m suggesting he race Brian to the waiver wire for something better (Sam Howell, people!).
If you need further evidence that Corey is cooked, look no further than starting WR Tyler Boyd, who has scored either 3.2 or 3.3 FP in four straight games. He’s also flexing Devin Singletary. It’s bad.
Brian is starting three legit RBs and two legit WRs plus has the IDP advantage (by a nose). So it’s looking like the Jerry might stay in the Ware house for 2024.
Prediction: Brian 132 – Corey 123
4 You Don’t Pay with Money vs. 5 Bobby Time
Both Cameron and Sean seem to think that they “should have” gotten the 2-seed over me because they had some bad luck, but nobody’s coping! Don’t put it in the note that anybody’s coping! You fools. Do you not realize that Allen and Diggs combining for 25 FP is also bad luck? And eating shit in Week 14 is a good thing if you know you’re going to survive to see Week 15. The only issue for Sean this week is that Kennedy also ate shit in Week 14. It was the worst Bobby Time output we’ve seen this year, specifically referring to the two LBs. Upon further review, it was basically Kennedy’s worst week, just .04 more than his worst week. This is bad news for Sean, for whom this was only his fourth worst week. Why? Why do I think about things this way? I don’t know. It just feels right. It just feels Kennedy has a good team that just hit rock bottom at 127 while Sean has a mediocre team that just failed to hit 130 for the fourth time this year (and failed to hit 133 for the sixth time, for what it’s worth). Then again, these teams are neck and neck, separated by five total points over the whole season, and Sean outscored Kennedy (by two) just last week.
Kennedy has been streaky this season. He opened with three wins, followed by a loss, a win, five losses, three wins, and then the melee loss. So Kennedy’s either winning out or losing out. Mathematics.
Sean has had a three-game winning streak and a two-game winning streak but has yet to lose in consecutive weeks.
So without digging into the actual games that never follow logic, it only seems appropriate to pick a winner based on the trends on my computer screen.
Prediction: Sean wins and wins again and again and we rename the league Seanydome or Seanball or The Seaning until he finally stops winning championships eight years from now.
3 teeny tiny tony vs 6 Tag-Man
I really wanted to “matchup” with Cameron in the melee because I think now is just a great time to face him. He’s not starting any intimdating players except for his MVP WR and his rookie kicker. And it’s even better this week, with the MVP WR hurt and a bunch of other players hurt, too. I want to say it’s over, but Oliver’s team is banged up, too. While Cameron is likely without Jacobs and Achane, Oliver is likely without Pacheco and Olave.
The X-factor matchup is Kyren Williams vs. Justin Jefferson/TJ Hockenson.
The cherry on top is Mahomes vs. Cam’s Pats and Goff vs. Oliver’s Broncos. Delicious rivalry juice dripping down the sides of this one.
And the guy we’ve all forgotten about, DeAndre Hopkins, probably leads Oliver’s team in points as he gets revenge on the Texans and I weep over a great draft pick that I gave a way for nothing.
Prediction: Oliver wins 142 – 139
(but I’d really prefer that he pulverize him, Tag-Man style)
That’s all. Like I said, tight writing window for this one. Will do better once Cameron is eliminated. Peace.
