And now, an update on my fantasy football teams:
They're middling right now. On the auction side (the one I run as commissioner), I went big, laying $80 of my $200 bankroll on David Johnson, which, as you may know, went down to injury and is likely done for the year. I also spent $15 on the now-IR'd Greg Olsen, so that's 47.5% of my imaginary money that went up in smoke.
Nevertheless, even though I am at 4-5 right now, I still have a fighting chance of maintaining my sixth-place spot and thus getting into the Championship Bracket of my league playoffs. That included surviving my match-up this week. I was, like, 3.3 points ahead of my opponent going into the Monday night game, and I was afraid my Matt Prater wasn't going to withstand his Ameer Abdullah. But Prater outpointed Abdullah, 12-9.7, so I was able to eke out a 5.6-point win. Just need to hold and grind my to victory.
The other league, the one that drafts instead of auctions, is sort of different. That league, which I participate in but don't run, is a little more cutthroat because the commissioner decided not to put an embargo on players on the waiver wire while games are going on. That means that whenever some schlub gets on the field because the guy ahead of him is out for the rest of the game and has a monster day, a guy from this league can just go to the list and pick him up, probably even before the game is over. I don't care about fantasy football that much, so I usually am late to getting all the prized pick-ups.
Nevertheless there are four games left. And in a 12-team league, where it cleaves in two for the playoffs, I am in ninth place but only one game behind five teams tied for fourth. I'm 4-5 there too, but I've won three in a row.
That third win was a nail-biter, maybe as close a game as I've ever had in my fantasy football career. In fact, I still don't exactly know how I pulled off the win, because in the middle of the Lions-Packers game, I was down by five points or so. Worst of all, I was done; all my starters had already played, while my opponent had both Theo Riddick and the Green Bay defense.
My parents were driving me batty, so even though I didn't want to spend money on Monday, I went to Caffetto just to get the hell away from them. I was listening to the MNF game on SiriusXM; at the same time I brought up the matchup of both of my teams on Yahoo! Sports. And my heart sank when I looked at my draft league, because the lead I barely got after the Sunday games turned into a, oh, four- or five-point deficit.
On this matchup page, Yahoo! gives a probability bar, the chances throughout the course of a gameday that a fantasy football team will beat the other. As it stood late in the MNF game, even though the gap was small, I had only a 5% chance to win my fantasy game. I doubted that Riddick could run up more points late in the game, even if the Lions were winning and thus would be more likely to run the ball to run out the clock. It was the Packers' D that still could have impacted my final score. Detroit, when I joined in listening the game, put up 27 points on Green Bay. That translates to a 0 when it comes to "Points Allowed," which is but one of the things that goes into the Packers' D score for the league. The Lions were lining up for a Field Goal; I checked the points list for our league. An opponent reaching 30 points means that D/STs actually get dinged one point. So a kick by Matt Prater means that my fantasy foe would lose only one point, so the deficit would become either four or three points. In other words, no difference, and I would suffer a very close loss.
But then, the weirdest thing. Prater nails the FG ... and all of a sudden I'm leading the game by, like, 1.16 points. That was a swing of five or six points. How did that happen with just a kick? I still don't get it. But I saw that I went from having a 5% chance of winning the game to either a 72% or 73% chance of winning. And then Green Bay stalls and the Lions run out the clock with Riddick riding the pine, and I win outright. So even though I don't know how I did it, I churned out a pair of very close victories. Nice work if you can get it!
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