My current lineup.
I haven't mentioned it much this season but I am still doing fantasy football. I did one post on it after the draft and then just ignored it for the rest of the season. Why? Because my team was winning every week and I didn't want to jinx it. My team did very well ending the season with a 12-1 record (which would have been a perfect season if I had made a better roster choice in my one loss) and was 1st in the league, not surprisingly. I secured the bye week and had a decent chance of repeating a 2nd championship in a row.
Now though? Unless my kicker has a massive game tonight, my post-season is over in embarrassing fashion. My opponent has zero players left but has scored 108.9 points, which normally would be among the lowest in the league, if it weren't for my teams collapse (no offense to my opponent). The best I can do now is a 3rd place finish, which is a huge disappointment for a team that was doing so well. And I am pissed at the NFL for it.
So what happened? Injuries are a huge part of it. I had lost Marshawn Lynch and Emmanuel Sanders, both of which would have been every week starters on any other team. That wouldn't have killed me but I also lost Chris Thompson for most of the season and when he finally came back, the Redskins had changed so much as a team, he was no longer relevant.
More than any other player though, losing Melvin Gordon to injury killed my chances. When he was healthy he was getting me 20 to 30 points a game and not having him this week probably killed my chances. Having to rely on Jeff Wilson Jr., an undrafted rookie on a bad 49ers team was not the way to go.
I blame the NFL for part of this and for my terrible performance this week in general. Why? Because of Thursday night football. Though there is no guarantee that Gordon would have played if he had three more days to rest, it certainly didn't help things. Plus my other skill players that remained, Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce, were playing in that game and, as expected, both did way below of their usual numbers and I think the timing of the game had a lot to do with it.
I just think Thursday night football is a bad idea all around, and not just from the perspective of a fantasy football player. There is a huge concern with player health and the wear and tear they go through due to Thursday night football. Plus it's an inferior product as it doesn't allow teams to plan and players to rest, so the games tend to be pretty terrible.
People have asked me why I haven't been watching football for the past two years. I always tell them politics was a major reason, which is true, but I also just hate the way the league is run. Thursday night football is a huge example of that but it's far from the only one.
The elephant in the room is, of course, Kareem Hunt. When that whole disaster happened I had almost decided to write up a post about it since it not only effected my fantasy football team, it was a political story as well. For those of you that somehow don't know, Hunt was recorded in a fight with a woman and the footage was posted on TMZ. Hunt is now out of the league and with it my hopes of decent ending to what had been my best season ever.
I was completely disgusted with how the NFL handled that situation. I think they tried to play it cute with Hunt and it came back to bite everyone in the ass. And it was because they tried to split the middle and tried to appease all factions and it ended up horribly for everyone. My feel of the situation is that the NFL knew Hunt had screwed up and screwed up badly, but understood that he was an electric player and brought fans to the game, and kept fantasy football players paying attention. The NFL also knew that if the footage came out they would have all the social justice warriors all up in arms. So they tried to bury the story until it came out and they panicked.
What would have been a better solution? Anything other than what they did. If Hunt was going to be kicked out of the league (for all intents and purposes) than it should have happened right away after it occurred, not almost at the end of the season. I know I would have drafted my team differently if Hunt had been punished back then. I probably would have gone Melvin Gordon with my first pick and Christian Mcaffrey with my 2nd and I would have won this week, assuming my opponent and rest of my roster played out the same way.
Of course the other thing they could have done is just get rid of their polices on personal conduct. In any other profession if someone gets into a confrontation but doesn't get charged for it, they rarely lose their jobs. All the NFL has to do is say, we care about putting forward the best product we can and if that means that we keep people on after they do something stupid then so be it. Either of these solutions would have been acceptable to me, but the NFL decided to split the middle so that pretty much everyone is mad with them now. That is a common trend with them and it's a major reason why I don't watch the games anymore, even if I still play fantasy football.
Losing Hunt was absolutely critical. It was after the trade deadline when the news broke so I couldn't make a deal and there wasn't anything on waivers other than Jeff Wilson Jr., who stunk on Sunday. Handcuffing wasn't an option either as I didn't draft Spencer Ware and he was on someone else's roster. It was the worst possible time to have it happen and there wasn't much of anything I could have done to fix it. I could have recovered from just losing Melvin Gordon since Chris Carson is a decent RB2, but losing both my starting RB's that had carried my team for the whole season? Not something you can recover from unless your team gets lucky.
And of course, Hunt helped my other KC players do better as well. Though Hill and Kelce were hampered by Thursday night football, they were also hampered by the fact that their team didn't have their bellcow RB. The whole season I was worried that an injury to Patrick Mahomes would cripple my team, but it turned out that it was Hunt instead.
All that being said, I did make some mistakes as well. Starting Big Ben over Rivers was a mistake but I wasn't going to risk a Thursday night performance for my starting QB. I also should have started the Titans over the Ravens D/ST. Had I not done those things, there would be a better chance that Will Lutz could have saved my season. I also could have traded away some of my depth for a better RB2. I knew I was getting thin at RB but I didn't get better backups until it was too late. I also left some points on the bench, but I am less upset about that since it made little sense to play my other players, like Tyler Locket and Dion Lewis.
So do I keep playing fantasy football? I don't see any reason to stop. At this point it's way more about having something to do with my buddies than actually trying to win. That being said, I sincerely hope that Vince McMahon's XFL is successful and that the NFL goes out of business. I would love to watch football again with a league that isn't constantly making terrible decisions. I know the XFL doesn't have the best pedigree but at this point it's not possible to fail more than the NFL has. They had already lost me as a fan because of their stupid anthem kneeling crap, bad games and other terrible choices, but now they had to go ahead and murder my fantasy football season.
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