Fantasy Football Rookie (Week 1)

As I mentioned on Tuesday, this is my first year participating in fantasy football. I thought it would be fun to write about.

(Just a note . . . since Pat does his Bears recaps after the weekend, I thought it would be best to post these before the weekend, just to space them out. This also makes sense in that this is about my decision-making in setting up my team as much as it is the results. I may come back and edit the post later with my numbers, or I may include that in next week's post, or I may just ignore them altogether . . . really, I'm not expecting to do well.)


Tuesday Night - 

The draft! I really didn't know what I was doing. I made sure I had at least one backup for every position, and mostly tried to pick players I was familiar with, even if they weren't the top player on the board at the time. Beyond that, I didn't have much of a strategy.

Once it was over, I was looking at the stats on my roster, and it seemed like a couple of my "backups" were actually looking better than my "starters." I made one swap right off the bat, but after checking to make sure none of my potential starters were playing in Thursday night's opening game (I do have Joe Flacco as a backup quarterback and the Ravens as my backup defense/special teams, but I chose them as true backups, for bye weeks or sudden injuries), I decided I had plenty of time to tweak my starting roster.


Wednesday Morning - 

Looking at some NFL analysts' predictions, the swap I made last night was . . . well, not to say it was wrong, but definitely not as obvious a decision as the Yahoo! numbers indicated. So I switched back. And then, after more hemming and hawing and reading and trying to figure out which experts I should listen to, I decided that, at least for Week 1, I'm going to leave my starters as I drafted them. Smart or not, these are the choices I made, so let's see how they do for me.

Thinking along the same lines, I'm quickly realizing that it would be easy for me to get sucked into all the nitty gritty of running a fantasy team, listening to the chatter, trying to make trades and search the undrafted players each week, looking for hidden gems based on who has the most promising matchups . . . but, no.

This is my team. This is who I have to work with. Maybe later in the season, once some of the bye weeks are over, I'll look at who's available and maybe drop some of my backups to sign a couple new players, MAYBE! But for now . . . if I don't just limit myself to what I already have, I'll drive myself crazy.

(On another note, how did I end up with FOUR players from the Lions on my team?! I HATE the Lions! Now, I don't have an issue with any of the guys I drafted specifically, and two of them are new to the team this year anyway. But still, it just feels wrong.)


Thursday Night - 

Football is finally back! "Game's starting now..." *da-dum, da-dum*


(Best radio commercial ever.)


Friday Morning - 

And Joe Flacco completely blew away his projected points, and the projected points of both my starting quarterbacks . . . and he's not one of the players I was even considering when I was looking at the numbers earlier this week. Clearly my fantasy football career is off to a fantastic start.