Fantasy football 2016

I've taken a QB pretty high in most drafts, but I try not to have the same one more than twice. If that guy gets injured, you're likely in trouble.

 

I wouldn't, unless Rawls is out.

 

Not thrilled with the Rawls news, since my reserve choices are either Forsett or Bilal Powell. Sounds like Rawls is still going to play, so I'll still start him.

 

Missed out on the QBs I wanted in both my leagues, but the position is relatively deep, so I don't think I'm going to get killed there. Both are 12-teamers with a flex.

League 1 (drafting fourth):
QB: Andy Dalton, Matt Ryan (ugh)
WR: Julio Jones, Cooks, G. Tate, Sterling Shepard, Wheaton
RB: Freeman, Ryan Mathews, Duke Johnson, Yeldon, Powell
TE: Reed
K: Tucker
DEF: KC

Yahoo graded it as an A+ draft, for whatever that's worth. If Dalton can stay healthy and play well, I like my chances. The studs all went off the board pretty early and given the QB depth, I didn't want to use a fourth rounder on one. But I missed out on some of the middle of the road guys like Bortles, Manning or Tyrod Taylor, who all went off the board earlier than I expected. Once that happened, I tried to keep taking solid WR/RBs and went for a QB late. Same story in my other league, so I reached and took Manning and Taylor a little earlier than I would have liked:
I drafted sixth, IMO, the second-worst spot in the draft, behind the seventh slot:

QB: Manning, Taylor
WR: Watkins, Decker, Hurns, V. Jackson, Sammie Coates, Eli Rogers
RB: CJ Anderson, Bell, Langford, Yeldon
TE: Gronkowski
K: Catanzaro
DEF: PITT

Yahoo grade was B+

 

In years past, I've often wound up drafting players on multiple teams, my thinking being that if I like him for one league, why wouldn't I take him in another. This year, I consciously tried to avoid doing that and have two very different teams. Hopefully it increases my odds of winning at least one league.

 

The league I run had our draft on Sunday. I drafted 6th of 8. Here's what I ended up with:

QB -- Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck, Matthew Stafford.
RB -- Mark Ingram, Matt Forte, Matt Jones, Gio Bernard, Isaiah Crowell.
WR/TE -- A.J. Green, Rob Gronkowski, Doug Baldwin, Golden Tate, Jordan Matthews, Travis Kelce.
D/ST -- Cardinals, Jets.
PK -- Justin Tucker, Sebastian Janikowski.

On paper, looks fairly stout, but with only 8 teams in the league, everybody's team looks pretty good.

BTW, we play total points, no head-to-head, no waiver wire.

 

So bench points count? If so, having Wilaon and Luck makes sense. If not, trade one of those for a receiver.

 

No, bench points do not count. Having Luck is insurance against injury/poor performance, and for matchups. I'm thinking of Stafford as the trade bait. We'll see how things go and see what I end up needing. Right now, I'm OK with A.J. & Gronk as my 1-2 WRs. I will say this. In 1993, I drafted Mark Rypien & Neil O'Donnell as my QBs (this was the season after the Skins won the SB). Then, in like the 16th or 17th round (aka garbage time), I picked up Bobby Hebert, just for a third warm body. He'd gone to Atlanta to back up Chris Miller that year and they were throwing it all over the lot with Andre Rison as the lead receiver. I figured why not. Turns out Rypien & O'Donnell got hurt (big surprise, right?) and of course Miller went down (gee, ya think?), so Hebert got plugged in as the trigger man in a high-octane offense. I ended up having to play Hebert the last half of the season, and he racked up points out the wazoo. He won the league for me that year.

 

Did the Ravens re-sign Forsett? He got cut last week.

 

'92 was the year after the Skins won the SB. The year before was the first time I played fantasy football. I drafted Rypien as insurance for Marino. I ended up riding Rypien (and Gary Clark, Andre Reed and Anthony Miller) to a title, although I did use Marino in the final game. I kept Rypien the next season, but he was never even close to the '91 guy again.

 

Yes.

 

I always loved riding the QB-WR connections.
My old work league gave bonus points based on TD length (10-39 yards was 9 points, and anything over 40 was 12, plus you got double if a RB caught a touchdown pass). In 1998 I drafted Randy Moss in the sixth round and picked up Randall Cunningham as a free agent in Week 4. The '98 Vikings got rolling a couple of weeks later, and I was making plans for my winnings by November. Watching them destroy the Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day was a treat. Cunningham had 359 yards and four TDs -- three of them to Moss and all four of them over 50 yards. I was up something like 100-0 by the end of the day and wound up setting my league's weekly points record.

A few years later I wound up with, essentially, the entire 2002 Raiders offense. That was the year Rich Gannon threw for 4,700 yards and won the MVP. I had him, Charlie Garner, Jerry Rice and Tim Brown. I might have even picked up Zack Crockett as a free agent at one point. Made it all the way to the league's Super Bowl, and then they played Kansas City on a Saturday in a monsoon in Oakland. It was like the entire team pulled a Barrett Robbins on me. Those four put up a total of about 25 points and I never had a chance.