Letters From Little Rock

Tomorrow’s the big day. Well, not really. Tomorrow is the day our fantasy football league at work is going to hold its draft. I wound up with the first pick which, almost inevitably, is going to be Peyton Manning. I have some doubts about the kind of season the Colts are going to have. I think that they may very well have a better season with less offensive production, but I’m probably in the minority there. The common wisdom is that they have a poor defense, but that is just plain nuts. In the playoffs last year I thin they showed that they have possibly the best secondary outside of New England and Philadelphia. The linebackers are solid and the line was not nearly as bad as people claim. Part of there problem is that they find themselves on the field so much since so many of the Colt’s offensive drives end in sudden touchdowns. I don’t see anyway Peyton equals his production from last year, but I keep asking myself, “how big could the drop off be?” I just can’t see him not being one of the top two or three fantasy players even if his numbers are a little down this year. I am one of those eccentrics who feels that Eli will probably win a Super bowl before Peyton gets there.

The one drawback to picking first in our league is that they have developed a method of minimizing the impact of draft position. Basically you pick 1-8 and then turn around and pick the second round 8-, and so forth and so on. I am pretty excited about the talent that will be there when I pick 16 and 17, but after that it’s a long way to go before I get my fourth and fifth players. Maybe first wasn’t such a great place to land after all.

I read an article today decrying the proliferation of fantasy leagues. Basically the argument seemed to be that it takes the emphasis off of winning and losing and puts it on the individual’s stats. There was more to it than that but that seemed to be the gist of it. I think the fellow missed the mark pretty badly. The fantasy league I’m in has very little to do with devaluing the game. No, it has a lot to do with wandering around at work and dogging out my opponents in a friendly way. That’s really the only reason I play. That and I enjoy the strategy of playing the match-ups. And maybe if I’m lucky I’ll win five bucks off of my boss.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 at 4:35 am and is filed under NFL, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.