Pigskin and Hogwash

Beaten down by the football gods

Crushed! Beaten with a stick! Pummeled!

The Redskins? No. Well, yes, but that’s not who I was referring to. I was actually talking about one of my teams, my best team actually. We took it on the chin this week.

Heck, pick your cliché, it happened to us. Slapped around? Us. Taken out behind the woodshed? Us. Got their clock cleaned? Yup, us too. Frowned upon by the football gods? You guessed it.

We got smacked in the jaw and proceeded to play with a lack of poise so immense, we made Mark Brunell look like, well…Eli Manning.

Instant Segue #1: Speaking of Eli Manning, when your starting fantasy QB’s team wins 36-0, you expect a few points showered your way, but other than the touchdown pass to Shockey, Eli gave me only two points. Three of which were undone by his interception.

Speaking of Shockey, Instant Segue #2, he was on my opponent’s team.

I had a lot of players in this game. On the Giants sideline, I had Eli and Plaxico. This week, they were not exactly the dynamic duo they had been so far this season. They simply didn’t need to be. Thank goodness I was also playing Santana Moss and Chris Cooley. The preceding sentence was an example of sarcasm. Yikes. My starting QB, two wideouts and tight end combined for a measly 10 points.

Ten! Which is exactly six fewer than Tiki Barber got all by himself. Tiki, of course, was not on my team….he was on my opponent’s team.

Ten points! Which was also eight less than Jay Feely scored. Jay Feely…who was on my opponent’s team. Hold on, this needs to be mentioned again: Jay Feely outscored Santana Moss, Plaxico Burress, Chris Cooley and Eli Manning combined! Oh ye gods, why hast thou forsaken me?

Together we had seven players in this game, five Giants and two Skins. My four got 10 points, his three scored a whopping 43 points.

I was never really in the game.

Or was I? Aha! Lucky for me, he also had Kerry Collins and the Bears Defense. Oh wait, that was lucky for him, too. Okay, fine, it wasn’t lucky, it was good. But, boy oh boy, when it rains it pours. This week, this guy scored the most points scored by anyone this season, 105 total points!

He doubled me up. I scored 52. It was a beatdown of immense proportions. I’d like to blame it on the bye week but the only bye that affected me was the Colts defense didn’t play. And while they’ve been great so far, I don’t imagine they would have gotten four sacks, three interceptions and scored six defensive touchdowns to give me the victory.

Nothing to do but take our knocks and come out fighting next week. But these are the moments when I start to test the limits of the definition for the word “fantasy”. In my wee little brain I scream at my players, make them wear pads in practice all week long and threaten to bench some of them until they get their heads on straight. I even tried fining Domanick Davis when he wasn’t scoring touchdowns but all I got was a restraining order. And a signed picture, so I got that going for me. Which is nice.

But all that would just be overreacting, this was just one of those weeks when all the stars aligned against us. One of the big differences between fantasy football and fantasy baseball seems to be the fact that you can expect a baseball player to generally produce what they are expected over the course of a week. You have ups and downs, sure, but nothing like fantasy football. “Any given Sunday”, you know? It’s all or none on any given week for most positions. One bad matchup, one day where your QB crumbles, one opponent whose receivers get two touchdowns each and you’re done. And that’s not even mentioning the injuries.

That must be why we talk about the “football gods” but I don’t remember anyone talking about the baseball gods. Footballers are just sitting on the field waiting for some member of the pantheon to tap them on the shoulder for glory or defeat. Heck, even atheists talk about football gods.

So, just in case there are football gods, I offer up this prayer—let the team I have in that league with that jerk of a pompous commissioner win it all and I promise to pray at your altar every single Sunday. Well, every Sunday until the Super Bowl’s over. Then I gotta start preparing for the baseball draft.

---