News:

Apologies for the late and abbreviated newsletter.

It’s not necessarily reflected in the standings yet but I think I noted a fairly clear split down the middle of our league in Week 10, with about half our teams north of 120 points and the other half south. On the surface, scoring decent points doesn’t seem like it should be that hard. You just need a line-up where everyone in the offense scores in the 15+ range and then your DEF and K chip in 10-ish each for a solid 130 to 150 each week. Of course that’s not how it generally works and the better line-ups are better due to the presence of a “home run hitter” (or two). This week it was the Daks, CeeDees and Herberts providing that element. When you have a player in your line-up providing two or three “15 point weeks” by themselves, there’s not much your average opponent can do to answer except with a big hitter of their own.

Random Thought of the Week:

The RedZone has this little segment they call “the witching hour” – where losses become wins and wins become losses. I don’t really get it because that’s really just a dramatic way of referring to the end of most NFL games that are remotely close.

A more relevant form of gut check might be the time of year when you are strongly encouraged to lose your patience with big name players or offenses and put your faith in the ones that have actually been scoring points recently.

The lateness of the newsletter this week allows me to include the Thursday night game, so between last week and last night, is it time to acknowledge that there’s something wrong with the Bills and Bengals? A lot of big name fantasy talent on those teams obviously but those offenses look really broken right now. You can add teams like New England, Tennessee and Indy too. We can debate questions like whether or not Henry is done or how much Mac Jones sucks but in fantasy terms, the bigger picture is that NFL teams scoring 6 to 10 points in a game are a fantasy desert even for their players that don’t suck. It doesn’t matter who gets the biggest piece of the pie when the pie is a butter tart…

Shark Move of the Week:

I’m giving the award to Brandon this week – not so much for the high score or great sit / start decisions but more for the fact that his overall roster is strong enough that individual line-up “mistakes” might not even matter that much. I talked about it last week. We have years or stretches of weeks where we look at our teams and realize our line-up decisions aren’t going to help. However sometimes we have decent teams where if we get the line-up choices entirely right, we can win. Then we have teams like BK’s this week where you incorrectly start JT instead of Walker or Gibson and it doesn’t end up mattering.

Guppy Move of the Week:

I’m sharing this one with Dan. How do two league champs with a total of five Plastic Helmets of Excellence manage to have a combined total of TEN players on bye in the same frikkin’ week?! Not our finest moment…

Smacktalk Award of the Week:

It was a fairly quiet week and if your weekend was anything like mine, that might explain it. At least the Piper was able to carve a bit of time out of his retirement to plug his fantasy football seminars. I am very much looking forward to those.

Welcome to Fantasy Football Hell Award of the Week:

Desean Watson is done for the year, further depleting an already depleted NFL QB talent pool. At the risk of being Captain Obvious, there are clearly less than 32 people who are good enough to be NFL QBs right now and teams are doing a pretty poor job of protecting the ones who are trying to be. Joe Burrow now has a wrist injury to go with the calf injury he had earlier in the season. The Riddler is probably going back in for Atlanta with Heinicke’s injury but it doesn’t matter that much because neither of them throws the ball to Pitts or London anyway. Derek Carr has a bad shoulder – or a bruised ego (not sure which).

Speaking of Carr, I think Ceilidh is a fitting recipient of the award this week when she managed to have one of those really good scoring weeks we all want yet ran into a slightly better scoring week by Jay. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that if Carr finishes that game, she likely wins. In fact, it would be much more of a stretch to say that if Carr finishes that game, the Saints win. Much much more…