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September 23, 2002
Severely Non-Kosher Pursuits
Another week, another spanking in the office fantasy football league. I'm 3-0 baby!
Ah... one of my new vices has got to be this fantasy football thing. To be honest, before 2000, I didn't really care about the NFL except for a mostly casual cheering for the New Orleans Saints, but back then they really sucked so it amounted to a lot of disappointment. Then again, I didn't really care, so it didn't really matter.
In 1999, there was enough critical mass in the office to start a fantasy football league and it was created with twelve teams. I didn't really participate that year, though I funded half of a team that was ultimately run by one of my colleagues. That team finished 5-9.
The first year I participated was in 2000. At the time of the draft, I was working in New Jersey, so I had to draft by conference call. I had no idea who the players were except for a few key names. I had printed out a draft cheat sheet from ESPN and worked off of it. I tried to draft Edgerrin James in the 7th round.
I managed to eke out a 7-5-1 record that got parlayed into a Superbowl appearance, where I lost to a guy that went 11-2 in the regular season. Hey, I was just happy to be in the Superbowl. The money wasn't bad either.
In 2001, the league grew to 20 teams, which was impossible to pull off in a single league, so they broke it up into two 10-team leagues. The top 10 teams from the previous year formed the A-league and the bottom four and the six new teams formed the B-league. They were largely independent, except for the knowledge that the Superbowl champion and runner up in the B-league would be promoted to the A-league, while the bottom two finishers in the A-league would go down. Made for some pretty fierce competition at the bottom of the A-league as the end of the season came around.
I was a year wiser and a little smarter. Maybe I tried to be too clever. At least I didn't try to draft Edgerrin James in the 7th round. I ended up with a decent, but well-balanced team. That got me the Superbowl title.
And now it's 2002. The league has grown again, to 26 teams, and the A-league is now 12 teams and the B-league 14. Instead of promoting just the Superbowl teams from the B-league, the entire final four was promoted, while the two cellar teams in the A-league still went down. This year, to make competition a little more interesting, the bottom four teams of the A-league will have their own playoff, where the winner will stay and the other three will get demoted. I wonder if they'll do the same in the B-league on the off chance that we may have enough teams for three leagues in 2003.
Tried to play it cool this year and got a little lucky in spots. I've scored over 100 points in each week so far, despite having players on bye, though we'll have to see how well I do when Ricky Williams is out Week 8. I'm feeling pretty positive about my team. Fortunately, except for the unfortunate story of Plaxico Burress, I haven't been hit as hard by the surprising slump of many of last year's stud players, like Shaun Alexander, Kurt Warner or Randy Moss.
Let's see if we can make it a repeat.
Posted by KinCross at September 23, 2002 10:23 PM