Working out the Kinks (Salary Cap Stud)

Looking back, I can see that this season in fantasy football was about just what the title of this post says – Working out the Kinks.  Or better yet, scrubbing off the rust.  After setting out the last two years of Fantasy Football to better enjoy the game as a whole, I returned this year and did not perform at nearly the same level I was used to in the past.  Now, some of that may be that the only league I played in was a keeper league in which I inherited a roster that didn’t have a lot of appeal to me from somebody else that exited the league.  Some of it may have been caused by some slight micromanaging on my part.  And some of it may have been that I just didn’t trust my gut on players I drafted long enough after some of them got off to a very disappointing start while I kept my faith in my early running back picks and did not see that faith rewarded.

All in all, I think by the end of the year, I had a much better team put together and as it turns out in this particular league, I played well enough to beat just under half of the playoff teams on any given week, but only well enough to beat perhaps one of the consolation ladder teams on any given week. Consolation Teams averaged about 10 points more per game than playoff teams in this league and some of the playoff teams laid some really stinky eggs.  My final two consolation playoff opponents outscored the league champions Semifinal and Championship Round opponents by 80 points – that’s 40 points per game more that my opponents on the bottom rung of the consolation ladder were posting than teams that were in the Semifinals and the Championship game. And having sold off a few important pieces of my team to rebuild for next year, there was just no way for me to compete with that.  However, I am much happier with the picks and potential keepers that I traded for than I would be had I managed to avoid finishing in last place in the consolation playoffs.

Meanwhile, since Week 12, I’ve been playing the Floating Salary Cap game on ESPN and have been very good at it thus far.  In just 5 weeks, I’ve amassed 662 points with my salary cap squad (that’s 132.4 points / week) and almost 30 points per week above the average player.

Here are a few tips for any fellow Salary Cap Players out there.

1) Don’t buy in on any Chiefs this week against San Diego – Even though the Chiefs had one of their biggest offensive games of the season against San Diego in Week 12, this game is meaningless to the Chiefs.  Neither a win or a loss can effect their playoff positioning and starters and backups will both be worked into the mix in that game.  I don’t think you can trust their defense in a meaningless game and if you’ve been riding Jamaal Charles for the last few weeks, it is time to cash out on him and get somebody that is going to be seeing a full workload because Knile Davis is likely to see many more carries than Charles this week.  Davis might be a good cheap option if you want to go that route.  Same situation with Chase Daniel and Alex Smith, though I wouldn’t advocate picking up Daniel at all.  The only Chief that it seems safe to play this week would be Ryan Succop.

2) In Foles we trust – Nick Foles has been the #2 quarterback in all of fantasy football since Week 9 and he’s still a cheaper buy that Tony Romo, Matt Stafford, Andy Dalton and a whole slew of other quarterbacks who have disappointed lately, including Robert Griffin III who has been benched for the last two weeks.  He is a must play.

3) Green Akers? – David Akers has been one of the most disappointing kickers of late.  Thusly, he is the cheapest kicker available.  However, he gets to kick indoors this week at the Metrodome against a lousy Vikings defense.  And while the Lions have nothing to play for and might just phone this game in, kickers can’t afford to phone it in or they get replaced at the drop of the hat, so look for Akers to be sharp with whatever opportunities he gets and this late in the season, having your kicker not be effected by the weather because he’s playing in a dome is a big plus.  So, if you can use the money to drop your kicker’s price to pick up Akers to get an upgrade you are confident in at another position, then you should strongly consider making that move this week.

Draft Recap – 2013 Let the Wookie Win

Coming in, I was set up really well at Running Back with Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens and Stevan Ridley of the New England Patriots, but with the way RBs ran off the boards with the rest of the keeper selections, I couldn’t let Maurice Jones-Drew of the Jacksonville Jaguars pass me by with my 3rd round pick because despite all of the injuries last year, there seem to be very little doubts that he’s all set and ready to reclaim his elite status, so in a league where you can start 3 running backs – why wouldn’t you take him in the third round if by some miracle he was still there?  So, I did.

Following that, I was really hoping people would be passing on Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals in the early rounds and I might be able to snag him with the 2nd pick of the 4th round, but he was taken one pick ahead of me and I went with option B – Randall Cobb of the Green Bay Packers, who if you watch the show Firefly from which my team draws it’s name, you can’t really have a Heroes of Canton team without a man called Jayne, or barring that the best player in the NFL who shares Jayne’s last name – Cobb.

After that, I was thinking that I might be able to get a good quarterback in the 5th round, but I wasn’t really expecting any of the ones I would take that early to get back to me (Colin Kaepernick of the San Fransisco 49ers, Robert Griffin III of the Washington Redskins, or Andrew Luck of the Indianapolis Colts for example).  Instead,  I selected a second wide reciever, DeSean Jackson of the Philadelphia Eagles with the next to last pick of the fifth round.

Then, in the sixth round I made a questionable choice, taking a fourth running back in a league where you can only start 3 running backs at a time.  However, I consider having a fourth running back with a starting job on lock down to be a great trade piece later in the season.  Perhaps once some of the teams who waited too long on Running Back will look at my 4 starters and decide that my fourth running back, who happens to be Deangelo Williams of the Carolina Panthers, is looking pretty good and they might want to trade for him after watching the teams with 2-3 solid running backs run roughshod over them in the first few weeks of the season.  By the way, Williams no longer has to sit behind backfield running mate Jonathan Stewart because Stewart is injured and out for the season.

In retrospect, I probably should have taken Matthew Stafford of the Detroit Lions or Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks over Williams to fill my quarterback position, but I thought at the time that with so many QBs already off the board via keepers that there were some other teams out there waiting back on quarterbacks and one of them might make it back to me.  But since I had no intention of drafting either of the next two QBs on most people’s boards – Tony Romo of the Dallas Cowboys and Michael Vick of the Philadelphia Eagles, I probably should have pulled the trigger on Wilson there instead of Williams.  We’ll see how this plays out over the season, but if Maurice jones-Drew winds up not being over his injury or if Bill Belichick goes back to thinking he can win a Super Bowl without a running back who goes for more than 600-700 yards in a season, I will wind up being very happy that I have Williams sitting on my bench and ready to step up.

Fast Forward to the next to last pick of the seventh round, and of course Stafford and Wilson are both off the board, but sitting there is Washington Redskins receiver, Pierre Garcon, who I very happily grabbed to go along with Cobb and Jackson.  I followed up three picks later with another receiver, who despite having to catch his passes from Blaine Gabbert, should expand on his breakout season last year and that’s Cecil Shorts III of the Jacksonville Jaguars.  And if MJD winds up returning to his elite status of old, he’s going to take a lot of heat off the skittish Gabbert and allow for an even bigger year for Mr. Shorts.

In the 9th round, I couldn’t afford to wait on a quarterback any longer, what with Romo and Vick going off the board, leaving no more buffer between the quarterbacks I couldn’t let get past me any longer and the out-of-towners on autopick who would take them out of my starting line-up and place them on their bench without even realizing it.  So, I grabbed Carson Palmer, of the Arizona Cardinals, who I look at this year like an older and only slightly less desirable alternative to Matt Stafford since those offenses figure to be among the most pass-happy in the league.   Not to mention the fact, that he now has Larry Fitzgerald to throw too, which gives him a far greater weapon than anything he had to work with in Oakland last season when he still managed to be fantasy-relevant.

In the 10th round, I played it safe and backed up Ray Rice by taking Ravens’ back-up running back Bernard Pierce, as he was nearing the top of the basic best available boards and would be autopicked before making it back to me 20-some picks later.  With 4 starers and a handcuff for the best one, my running backs were more than set for the season.

In the 11th, I figured that since I was the last one to take a quarterback and since some teams had in fact selected two quarterbacks before my one, I thought it would be prudent to grab a backup quarterback, something I might not normally do.  So, I grabbed Jay Cutler, thinking he could have a big year or at the very least provide a serviceable tag-in for Palmer on weeks where Palmer faces a tough defense.

After that, I played to get around the autopickers again, taking a defense higher than I normally would before the out-of-towners started grabbing back-up defenses.  I got the Broncos defense, which ended last season ranked number 2 at the position.  They’re an older squad for sure and have depreciated in value, but with 6 games against the other 3 struggling offenses in the AFC West (Kansas City, San Diego, and Oakland), I figure that’s 6 weeks of decently easy games for them, which translates into plenty of points for me and some of those divisional games will be coming in playoff weeks.

At this point, I still don’t have a starting tight end or a kicker, but a kicker picked before the last round is a wasted pick, so I took Fred Davis of the Washington Redskins as my starting tight end, figuring he could wind up being a break-out star at a weak position across the boards and if not, I can find a replacement off the waiver wire to tide me by.

Then, we reached the part of the draft where people start taking a flyer on random players that probably 10-out-of-12 team owners in the league probably weren’t even thinking about taking.  My 14th and 15th round flyers were both Wide Receivers since I figured my 5 running backs were stacked and there was a greater potential for letdown at receiver.  So, I took Dexter McCluster of the Kansas City Chiefs and Rod Streater of the Oakland Raiders.  McCluster is the kind of weapon Andy Reid can make great use of and Streater is a guy that has caught the attention of some experts while winning the number two receiver job in Oakland where he could become a favorite target for quarterback Terelle Pryor.  I also think that if anything happens to Jamaal Charles, given Knile Davis unproveness in the league, we might just see McCluster get a long hard look at the job.

I finished up with my kicker, Sebastian Janikowski, “The Jankster”, of the Oakland Raiders and my team will probably feature a variety of kickers over the season until I settle on one for the playoff push.

Here’s how my team lines up.

Quarterbacks – Carson Palmer, Jay Cutler

Running Backs – Ray Rice, Stevan Ridley, Maurice Jones-Drew, Deangelo Williams, Bernard Pierce

Wide Receivers – Randall Cobb, DeSean Jackson, Pierre Garcon, Cecil Shorts III, Dexter McCluster, Rod Streater

Tight Ends – Fred Davis

Defense / Special Teams – Denver Broncos

Kickers – Sebastian janikowski