News:

Apologies for the late newsletter this week but commish has been busier than usual on other fronts. Every week in the NFL has it’s share of injuries and from a fantasy standpoint it’s hard to decide what is newsworthy and what isn’t. When your 9th round RB suffers a concussion, it’s noteworthy to the team but not necessarily life and death for the fantasy manager.

What stood out for me was the continuation of the Andy Dalton story. This was shades of Joe Flacco down the stretch last year and on the bizarre trivia front, he walked onto a dismal Panthers team and became the first QB in the NFL this year to throw for 300 yards and 3 TDs. This is a welcome dead cat bounce for anyone holding Panthers players but it’s not comforting news about the career trajectory of Bryce Young.

In Clan McDonald, the champ successfully side-stepped the Brown Dawgs to remain a perfect 3 – 0 and for the rest of us, the normal adjustments to the weekly power rankings were noted both up and down. We had a couple of troubling scores, enough so that people wondered aloud what records were being flirted with. Kudos to Dan for knowing where he could quickly find answers!

Random thought of the Week:

There’s a term used in fantasy – “stream” which tends to be used mostly in DEF and K conversations as a strategy where managers won’t get “married” to any particular player or team over the course of the season. They just roll with who looks good week to week. The reality is, streaming is starting to have more universal application. NFL teams are running committees, players are in and out of the blue tent. “Set and forget” players don’t really exist beyond the first two rounds of the draft. If you haven’t embraced the streaming mentality, give it some thought or your team may end up a steaming pile.

Shark Move of the Week:

In the interest of brevity, I’ll get right to it. Runner up goes to Ceilidh with another strong weekly score and some solid bench points to boot. The award however goes to Archie for capitalizing on the AJ Brown injury to start Dallas Goedert to the tune of 30 points. As a great a decision as this was, my point from earlier is that this might not be the play next week… or last week. Regardless, nicely done, Arch!

Guppy Move of the Week:

The low hanging fruit would be to eye up those scores in the 50’s and 60’s and point a mocking finger or two. That’s tempting but I’m more inclined to reflect on my own guppy-ness. Specifically I’m thinking about how there seems to have been a quiet “market correction” to scoring so far this year. The dual threat QBs were the first to be taken in our league (and probably still deserve to be) but the number of them closing out drives with rushing or passing TDs seems to be down. Right now we have four QBs averaging more than 21 fantasy points a game (and 21 points feels a bit disappointing). Ten QBs have passed for 300 yards this year and no one’s done it more than once. If 300 yards is a bigger deal now, it’s still only worth 13 points. Anyway, I don’t know what I’m learning from this but it’s strange to see the 3 – 0 NFL QBs averaging 16 fantasy points a week.

Smack Talk Award of the Week:

Solid work here this people! Grid did have to ask if we were flirting with a record, and technically we were. I think Neil’s absolute record is probably safe unless we extend our league from “friends and family” to “friends, family and pets” but it’s still possible to crack that bottom five with a sub 54 point week. This week proved once again, it’s not as hard as it looks.

The unclaimed record in our league I am most interested in is the battle to see who becomes the last manager to win a coveted Plastic Helmet of Excellence. There are only two contenders for that title at present…

Welcome to Fantasy Hell Award of the Week:

Did Jauan Jennings almost score more points than Mooglar’s team? Yes. Did BK have more points on his bench than in his starting line-up? Also yes. Did Neil discover his IR slots? No… no he did not.

On that note, we have a lot of red badges beside the statuses of a lot of our players right now. Jay had 37 points on his bench and 14 of them were the Bills’ DEF. I can’t easily go back and see statuses from last week (and they reset on Tuesday) but I can provide this dubious stat: On all our benches we had a combined twenty-eight zeros last week. How bad are the injuries? That bad.