Fantasy Wootball: Does Anyone Else Feel a Draft?

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Football season is nigh, and that means it's time for the infinitely-more-annoying ritual of Fantasy Football season! If you're unaware, Fantasy Football is a thing invented for the purposes of giving football fans a reason to follow the minutiae of box scores and stat lines the way baseball fans might. You draft players, which can be on any NFL team, and play them on your own team to earn points from their stats. So if you have a great Quarterback who throws for 400 yards in a game, you'll earn points in your Fantasy team. If he wins the game on a last-second touchdown pass, but had three interceptions before that, you'll probably lose points.

It's a weird zone on the Venn Diagram of sports junkies and stats nerds...

I like to play, but not too seriously. There are people who live and die by these leagues, get into arguments or even fights over trades, player availability, and the like. I usually draft the guys whose names I recognize and shy away from accepting anyone's offer to trade players with me for fear of being swindled. So when my Dallas pal Fenster sent a generic invite to join a league he was creating for Woot folks, I happily joined in. After randomly clicking a few links on The Phrontistery to generate my team name (The Croceate Cockets. Look it up.), I posted a message asking when our draft would be. The commissioner responded with a helpful "sometime in the next 72 hours, so keep checking." Uh, okay, fine. I'd just have to check back on the webpage once a day.

Oops.

Several days passed before I remembered, "Oh crap. I have a Fantasy Football team!" I logged in to find the draft had already transpired. Luckily, I had set some pre-rankings ahead of time and had a decent draft position. My team looked relatively stacked considering I had forgotten it existed:

So now I'll periodically document my triumphs or failures throughout the season, while soliciting advice from you, the unwashed masses of the internet. My first matchup is already looking favorable:

And even though the season hasn't started, I'm already looking forward to playing our league's "not taking this seriously" person, who I guess is a huge fan of terrible football teams the Seahawks:

So what moves should I make? Who should I absolutely drop in a heartbeat? I'm not keen on making a bunch of moves before getting a chance to see them play a game. I'm sure I'll get some flak for my homer decision to pick up Lance Kendricks (I dropped Steve Smith of the Panthers, which I would normally say was a bad move but Steve Smith isn't going to have anybody throwing him the ball for at least three years), but I've been a fan since they drafted him and after seeing his performance in the preseason game, he's definitely going to be a part of the offense for St. Louis.

Let me know what you think in the comments below, and feel free to keep me posted on how YOUR team's doing.

 

 

 



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