And so it’s come to this. One week to to rule them all, one week to sort them. One week to rank them all, and amidst the buffalo wings crown them! This is why we have a fantasy football league, gentlemen, for Sunday showdowns like the ones I am about to describe. We’ve got 12 squads, 1 playing for pride, 2 playing for passion, 7 playing for playoff lives, and 2 fighting for the title. Let’s get to it then, to the greatest week in KeeperLeague Your Pants On history in the league where we play…
…
…
To get paid. (May we one day get paid enough to marry this woman and sleep with thesetwo on the side…)
And we’ve arrived at Week 13 in the NFL, the final regular season week for most fantasy football leagues operating with a standard 3-week playoff without games on the final – and fluky – week of the real season. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to rock some new content on the Flow, and sadly for most of you not involved with the greatest fantasy league ever assembled – the KeeperLeague Your Pants On Georgetown University Showdown – our return post will be a final weekend preview from the most shockingly exciting regular season we have ever seen. Consider, with just one game to play only 1 of 12 teams is eliminated from playoff contention, and that team has been one of the hottest in the league over the past few weeks. We will post the standings here, and then delve into necessary scenarios plus matchup previews for this league where we play, to get paid… (all non-members probably want to stop reading here, though I will include a hot pic of this chick from Twilight as eye candy on the homepage):
Long week this week so we haven’t had a chance to update the picks. We’ll get the selections on record before the 1pm games kickoff (now), and then try to fill in the piece later in the day if we can.
Uhmm, this kid – suspended by his school for his radical new haircut – is welcome at dinner at my place whenever he wants. If he ever makes it to the NY area both he and his father are encouraged to join us at Phebe’s to watch the games. Especially his father:
Awesome
You should probably check out the video at that link above, its having trouble embedding into WordPress. You’ll see what I mean about his father…
In his MMQB this week Peter King shockingly dismisses Bill Belichick’s decision to go for it on 4th down late in last night’s game as “I’m-smarter-than-they-are-hubris.” The title of his article goes so far as saying: “No Matter Which Way You Dissect It, Bill Belichick Made the Wrong Call.” What is especially amusing here, is his colleague Joe Posnanski’s analysis of the way Peter King “chose to dissect it” – quoted from Joe’s excellent article here:
“Quick Update: I was reading my colleague Peter King’s take on the Belichick call, and I think this is telling. He had this sentence in there:
Let’s place the odds of Brady getting two yards at 60, 65 percent. The odds of Manning going 72 yards to score a touchdown in less than two minutes … that’s maybe 35 percent.
So, Peter was giving the Patriots about a 60-65 percent chance of winning the game if they went for it, and about 65 percent chance of winning if they punted. So that’s about even, right? Of course, it’s not even because the Colts did not have a 100 percent chance of winning if the Patriots failed on fourth down — not even close to 100 percent chance. As we have discussed, there was a reasonable chance that the Patriots could keep them out of the end zone. And there was also a chance that the Colts would score too quickly and the Patriots would have time to score themselves.
So even though Peter compared the Belichick move to Grady Little’s Pedro Martinez follies — “I hated the call … it smacked of I’m-smarter-than-they-are hubris” — his own math suggests the Patriots’ best chance to win the game was to go for it.”
This is just too priceless. Peter King has written an entire article on how dumb Belichick’s call was, and then using his own percentages created a scenario wherein Belichick made the statistically correct call. Thank you SO MUCH Joe Posnanski for pointing this out, literally made my day.
In this week’s New York Review of Books, Michael Kimmelman writes a rueful, if not quite disparaging, piece on all of the new ballparks going up around the country. While the article itself is an interesting read for those who may be concerned, within the piece Kimmelman relates an anecdote about the early New York Metropolitans. The Mets, as many are aware, were an expansion franchise in 1962 and proceeded to set records of futility throughout their first seven seasons before coming out of absolutely nowhere to become the Miracle Mets of ‘69, a team that won the World Series. On opening day of 1969, however, the Mets squared off against a new expansion team, the Montreal Expos, and in apparent continuation of form lost the ball game. A lone Mets fan – who later became known as “The Sign Man” over at Shea – held up a placard that, after the opening day loss, read “Wait ‘Til Next Year.” To fans of most other franchises, though perhaps still not to followers of the Mets, this may seem a bit hasty of a dismissal considering 99.38% of the schedule had yet to be played, but to fanatics who had endured through 7 of the most awful seasons in professional sports history, the dismal outlook was hardly a stretch. For fans of the Cincinnati Bengals, then, it would not have been unheard of – after 18 of 19 losing seasons and one playoff game where their star player blew out his knee on his very first throw – for a “Wait ‘Til Next Year” attitude to have been adopted following their inexplicable last second collapse vs. Denver in Week 1. A funny thing has happened since then, though. The Bengals, perhaps following the ‘69 Mets before them, have gone 6-1, become one of the more mentally tough teams in the league, and this week find themselves in the most important football game of a weekend which also includes a Pats-Colts showdown. Football, like baseball, is a funny game. Without further ado, then, let’s turn to a quick look at this week’s ‘icks, the Ben-Gals in honor of the showdown in Pittsburgh:
Thanks, girls. And now to a week 10 in the league where they play…
Seriously, check this out courtesy of SI’s Hot Clicks today and the Big Lead. Basically, LeBron gets rejected on a dunk vs. Miami, then Wade takes it the other way and um…delivers over Anderson Varejao. Added bonus of Marv Albert doing the announcing:
From FO’s “Cover-3″ article this week, linked here:
It’s typical to think of teams with great passing games and previously ineffective power blocking as “finesse”, but any opponent harboring that assumption about the current Bengals is making a very big mistake. This is as much a power team as any AFC North bully could be, with its stacked lines and inside running, and the schematic variations tell the story of a line with great confidence and continuity. If the Bengals capitalize on their hot start down the stretch, the line will be a major factor — with or without Andre Smith.
I know Peter King would faint on the spot if he heard this, but dare I suggest that the NFL world is tiring of Colts-Pats? I’m going to be honest I’ve been tired of the matchup for a few years now, but just assumed given all of the media attention and general continued excellence of both franchises that the game still represented an unmatched rivalry in the league. It still might, but a poll I just saw over on ESPN.com has me thinking more than ever that the Pats-Colts NFL rivalry is starting to slide the way of the Yankees-Red Sox MLB rivalry circa about 3 years ago. You know, the point where ESPN and the major networks had bludgeoned the matchup into our heads with such incessant fervor that we reached our tipping point and the nation of MLB fans outside of Boston and New York grew loathe to even think about “the best rivalry in baseball.” At some point, I think, sports fans crave something new – even if it’s just for a several year interlude before getting back to the good stuff a la the Celtics-Lakers NBA rivalry – where we like to evaluate whether there are any newcomers to the elite rivalry party. Well, this week’s NFL entry is the rivalry between the Bengals and Steelers. Like Alabama-Auburn or Michigan-Ohio State, these teams and fans have always hated each other, but perhaps more along the lines of the former than the latter the rivalry has taken on more of a regional scope than that of the national glare – with 2005’s 3 game series being a notable exception – thanks in large part to the Bengals ineptitude. The Steelers have attempted – rather successfully I might add – to insert themselves into the self-fulfilling rivalry promotion triangle between the Pats, Colts and the networks over the past few years, going so far as to win a couple of Super Bowls and generally distinguish themselves as a better candidate for Team of the Decade than the Colts if not the Pats despite what King may believe. This wasn’t intended to be an extended post so I’ll get right to it, but despite the fact that Peter King dedicated 2 full pages to Pats-Colts this coming week in his review of LAST week’s games (and zero to Bengals-Steelers), today’s ESPN.com poll asked just shy of 32,000 people which matchup was more important this weekend: Pats-Colts or Bengals-Steelers. Granted, any answer here would not so much mark a definitive move away from Pats-Colts interest so much as an acknowledgment that it isn’t the only game, there are 28 other teams in the NFL, and, in fact, since the Pats and Colts aren’t even in the same division their regular season matchup is quite possibly nowhere near as big as it’s made out to be. Regardless, the answer – supported by more than 75% of the individual states as well – was 53% thought Bengals-Steelers to be the more important game. I will obviously try to watch Pats-Colts as well, but Amen to the recognition that there just might be another option out there.
As Joe Reedy reported on Monday, Mike Brown used his annual media appearance to make it very clear that the he feels that no longer feels any responsibility for working with the County to re-structure the financial mess the Stadium... […]
In my mind, only TO two narratives explain the signing and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The first, and most popular as far as I can tell, is this: Turns out Bryant's knee still remains a disaster and the... […]
Signing Owens could possibly mean that Bratkowski is going to open up the field with legitimate three and four receiver sets instead of the jumbo packages he was calling on last year. That seems like a better offensive gameplan to... […]
