Fantasy football non-lessons learned in 2008

I just lost Week 15 which means I’m out of the Championship game and will be playing for third place. I sort of choked because I made a bunch of lineup tweaks and started these guys:

• QB Shaun Hill [10 FP]
• WR Davone Bess [2 FP]
• K John Carney [6 FP]

When I should have stuck with my usual crew of:

• QB Matt Cassel [31 FP]
• WR Bernard Berrian [10 FP]
• K Rob Bironas [14 FP]

Those moves cost me a shot to win it all. The problem is that I had very logical reasons for making these decisions. For example:

Matt Cassel had put up -2 FP against the Steelers, barely had a decent 19-FP game with a last minute TD against the miserable Seahawks, missed practice time grieving over the loss of his father, and was about to face a Raiders team ranked in the top ten against the pass. Meanwhile, Shaun Hill had two TDs in 4 of his 5 previous games and was facing a Miami D ranking in the bottom half of the NFL against the pass. What happens? Cassel throws a career high 4 TDs while Hill is shut out of the endzone.

The problem is that you can look over the stats, make decisions that seem logical, and then have everything blow up in your face. You want to play the matchups, but most of the time they don’t mean shit. You want to listen to the experts, but they’re right barely 50% of the time. You want to apply some sort of reasoning to the whole process, but there is so much randomness that it doesn’t seem to matter.

So what is the lesson here? There is no lesson. Wanna see the top draft picks of the newbie owner who is going to the Championship game? Here are his first five rounds:

1. Eli Manning
2. Willis McGahee
3. Marvin Harrison
4. Vince Young
5. Fred Taylor

If you can go to the playoffs after a draft like that, what the hell is the point of playing at all?

I guess I shouldn’t complain so much. After all, I made the playoffs and had the potential to play for the whole ball of wax. The season was so much more enjoyable with the tools and gameflow that CBSSports provides as opposed to the garbage that Yahoo puts out there. I mean even consider a “premium” league for 2009 to get a little more customization.

The Shambling Corpses will rise again!