Professional development (week 3)

Ronnie Brown had quite a fantasy day on Sunday.  His four rushing TDs and one passing TD were enough to comfortably make him the top scorer for the day.  The problem is, if you’re a fantasy owner and you knew what you were doing, you probably didn’t play him.  Since last season, the Miami Dolphins have precisely the same number of wins as the Patriots had losses: one.  That sounds like a good enough reason to send Ronnie to the pine.  Sometimes the wrong decision pays off, and this is something that anyone with a little interest in the recent boom of no-limit Texas Hold’em should understand.

Ronnie’s running-mate when he was going to college at Auburn, Cadillac Williams, didn’t have such a fantastic day on Sunday.  It’s looking like Williams won’t ever have another good fantasy day.  Injuries have turned his career into a one-and-done.  We all want to ignore guys like Cadillac, and his exclusion from consideration is a good example of the survivorship bias in sports.  Players who put up solid 1000 yard, 10 touchdown rookie seasons are very commonly projected to that number or higher for the following season.  Unfortunately, there are as many sophomore busts as improvements, so there isn’t much historical basis for making this extrapolation.

I made another small-sample-size mistake this week.  I benched T.J. Houshmanzadeh in favor of Bryant Johnson due to Housh’s complete lack of productivity over the first two weeks, and Bryant’s favorable match-up.  The Detroit defense was as soft as I expected it to be, but Johnson wasn’t involved in the early shellacking, and after that Mike Martz toned down his offense, effectively killing Johnson’s chance to make a meaningful impact on the box score.  That’s fantasy sports for you.  On the other hand, Housh was involved heavily in a downright fiesty effort by Cincinatti to get their first win of the season.  An overtime field goal ended that effort after Housh had outscored Johnson by 18 points.  Luckily, I was saved from my bonehead decision by the Cowboys offense and scaped a victory out.  Here’s to not learning my lesson!

Eagles-Boys (week 2)

Eagles-Cowboys on Monday was the most watched cable telecast in history.  Bill Simmons thinks it was because of its fantasy impact.  He’s always funny and often wrong, and I’m not inclined to agree with him here, even though it was true for me.  The game turned a close fantasy win into a run-away victory.  It also turned another owner’s blow-out loss into a slim victory.  Still, two people doesn’t make 18.6 million, and Americans love their Cowboys, and their Steelers and their Patriots, and it’s making me sick thinking about it, and probably slowly driving me insane.

The highlight of the night was DeSean Jackson’s celebration. Chad Johnson, T.O., Randy Moss, etc. get a lot of negative treatment from the media for their celebrations. I find them entertaining and I don’t see how it’s a bad influence on the kids, drives unwed mothers to drinking, or leads to the destruction of our society in some circuitous manner that only those brilliant enough to choose the profession of sports broadcaster understand. So I encourage you to take a gander at this hasty little move DeSean Jackson made at the goal line on Monday night.

I’d like to remind all the kids reading at home to actually get in the end-zone before you throw the ball away.  This wasn’t his first try at celebrating before he actually scored.  The guy’s got serious speed.  He ran the 40 at the combine in 4.35 seconds, which was the best among WRs. The only two players who had better times were Chris Johnson and Darren McFadden, both of whom have already made major impacts for their teams.  Maybe he overestimates how fast he’s traveling sometimes?