News:

After the dizzying heights of Week 3, Week 4 brought an almost predictable fall to earth. Scoring was down, we lost an undefeated team and a winless team and now the Bell curve of our league standings is rounding into a more familiar shape. BK and AOB lead the way, putting up solid scores while Mort and Jay are still looking to get off the schneid.

As an NFL fan, I think the two big stories for me were the Bills-Phins game and the Seattle-NYG game. One of those games was a highly entertaining display of offensive and defensive prowess and the other was a bit like that skier crashing at the beginning of ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

Just when Miami was looking unstoppable on offense, they came into Buffalo and ran into a bit of a distraction – in the form of not really being able to play any sort of viable defense. Buffalo can. Holding an average NFL team to 20 points is a pretty solid performance. Holding Miami to 20 is quite a bit better than that.

Monday was fun for us Seahawks fans until it started to get a bit awkward. I enjoyed watching the Legion of Boom stomp on Denver in the SB a few years back because you were seeing an elite defensive performance. This wasn’t that. Monday night was about the Giants being a depleted and not very good football team and still underperforming against a Seattle team whose entire o-line consisted of backups. Joking about Daniel Jones’ salary would be the easy laugh here but honestly, 5 or 6 of us might have protected him about as well as his o-line did Monday night. It was just ugly…

Random Thought of the Week:

I’ve decided that Thursday Night Football can be the greatest thing in the world or the worst. This week I made a last-minute substitution, which almost always backfires but this time it didn’t. My Thursday players put up a decent 17-18 points each and I got to head into the weekend thinking positively. Alternatively, if I had been the piper and fired up my Aaron Jones to the tune of 2.40 points, I probably wouldn’t think Thursday nights were all that great.

Don’t get me wrong, I prefer PPR scoring but for people that don’t like PPR scoring, Alvin Kamara was the poster boy for their argument this week. Nothing wrong (football wise) with 11 carries for 51 yards but 13 receptions for 33 yards?!? The fantasy results and football results aren’t really lining up very well there…

Shark Move of the Week:

Honourable mention this week to Pimp Neilly for starting CJ Stroud. Granted Pitt is a bit of a mess but the Horns look like a not terrible football team and they have some nice offensive / fantasy players there. Regardless it was a big part of his victory (the other big part being Ceilidh’s line-up doing its best NY Giants impression).

Second honourable mention goes to the piper, who is proving that fantasy good and NFL good are not always the same thing. Fantasy wise, he successfully streams the powerhouse tandem of Fields and Mayfield, making the better choice again this week. Is anyone buying this Baker Mayfield thing? He is turning back into a pumpkin before Halloween right?

This week however I’m doing something I generally don’t do. I’m giving it to myself. It has nothing to do with high score of the week and everything to do with the elusive optimum line-up. I didn’t have a lot of points on the bench but I didn’t leave any there and sometimes that’s the best you can do.

Guppy Move of the Week:

Guppy awards are fun when you can legitimately identify a decision that looked pretty sketchy before the games were actually played but those are getting hard to find with this group. So… congrats to us I guess?

Smacktalk Award of the Week:

I’m liking the uptick in participation so far this year and I’m wondering if it has anything to do with Yahoo upping their chat game a little bit this year? Honestly I would love to set us up on Discord (or similar) but I’m pretty sure no one would use it so we’ll stick with what we have. At least the mobile app and the web browser chats are integrated and it’s not that long ago they weren’t.

Anyway, I’m still trying to figure out how Neil not picking up Puka Nacua equates to “letting him go” and being the worst move in history. On the bright side, AOB got us remembering Supertramp at least (what the hell is a supertramp anyway??).

The other possibility I just thought of was that maybe Neil was being sarcastic when he called the Claymores a “giant” with 73 points? If so, it kinda went over my head but nice burn there. Sarcasm or not, the real takeaway is that being better than the Claymores this week is like a restaurant being awarded “Best Sushi in Utah”…

Runners up aside, in the end an award must be given and given it shall… for a horrid pun / dad joke combo platter by the piper (aka the “urban moth”). I do love me a dad joke.

Welcome to Fantasy Football Hell Award of the Week:

If you showed a final score of 117.57 to 117.37 to someone who didn’t play fantasy football, they would see a close contest but they would have no idea just how close that is in terms of the underlying football plays that comprise 0.20 points. It’s two frickin’ yards people! Two more yards on a carry or a pass. It’s way less than a reception and way, way less than an interception.

The other maddening (see what I did there?) thing about it is that someone who doesn’t know much about fantasy football might assume a result that close is extremely rare and honestly, it really isn’t as rare as you might think. I bet we might have one of these almost every year, sometimes more than one. It’s all part of the self flagellation that is fantasy football.