It's The Circle, The Circle Of Liiiiiife...

Count me as one of those kids who was a sneaker addict growing up. I never had enough disposable income to really go crazy (my parents would buy me 1 pair of sneakers a year whether I really needed them or not, and I would usually save up enough to buy another pair a year on my own), but I made the most with what I had. Weeks’ worth of research (and by “research” I mean pouring over Eastbay catalogues) would go into my decision, and I would keep my shoes in pristine condition. New sneakers rarely got scuffs because I would reserve them for playing ball indoors, but in the event that they did get a blemish they got the royal treatment: bleach, toothpaste, whatever it took to keep them looking new. Eventually though, I would get a new pair and “demote” 1 of my other pairs. I kept such care of my sneakers that they would last for years, but I still had a natural progression which kept me from stockpiling dozens of shoes at once. I usually kept my 2 newest pairs in my office at school. These were my indoor balling shoes. I would keep anywhere from 2 to 4 pairs in my room at home, which were kind of my all-purpose shoes: street shoes, shoes to wear to class, shoes to ball outdoors, etc. Finally, I kept a singular pair of sneakers (my oldest pair at the time) in the garage at home for mowing the lawn and yard work. This pair was usually on its last legs, covered in grass stains and cement, and starting to get a little bit mousey. When I would get that new fresh pair, the lawn-mowing pair would get thrown out, the oldest pair of all-purpose sneakers would become the lawn-mowing pair, and all the way down the line.

That's just beautiful...

The problem is that in the few years since I have moved away from home, this naturally occurring system of checks and balances has disappeared. I don’t have a lawn anymore, and I only play basketball once a week as opposed to 4 or 5 times a week. Also, I used to wear sneakers to class and work 9 out of every 10 days when I was in college. Now that I’m a participant in the daily rat race, I spend the majority of my time wearing dress shoes. So, my sneakers are seeing less wear and tear over every stage of their life cycle. All of that means that I should be buying sneakers less and less often, right? Wrong…I am a sneaker addict after all.

My demand for sneakers may have gone way down over the past 3 or 4 years, but my means for buying them have gone up. While I’m not exactly making bank at my current job, I’m making much more than my $10 an hour college job, and Krissy and I don’t have any kids or a house or anything expensive to pay for yet. And I will say that the frequency at which I buy myself new basketball shoes has gone way down lately. I probably only get 1 pair of new basketball shoes a year now (and my most recent pair was a gift from Krissy…when you’re a sneaker addict trying to quit the habit, it doesn’t help if your wife is an even bigger sneaker addict than you), and seeing as how I don’t play nearly as often as I used to I could probably get away with buying them even less often than that, but I can’t help it being the sneaker addict that I am. However, I used to only buy basketball sneakers because their sole purpose once they came out of the box was to play basketball in them. The purposes of those shoes evolved over time into whatever I needed them to be, but that’s how they all started out. Now, I buy trainers for the gym (prior to that I hadn’t owned a low-top sneaker since elementary school) and sneakers specifically to wear out with a pair of jeans or something as well. So, where I was only acquiring 1 or 2 new pairs of sneakers a year before, it’s probably like 3 or 4 pairs of shoes now. The result of this is a glutton of sneakers everywhere around our apartment. It was time for some population control.

So, when I got rid of my old pair of Iverson’s (the original “The Question”) this morning, it was with a heavy heart. I had contemplated getting rid of them this past summer when I had begun to play ball outdoors with them (they had started to get worn and come unglued in certain spots), but they just weren’t quite worn out enough for me to toss out just yet. I figured eventually a day would come where I would get them so beat up and dirty from hiking in the woods or digging a car out of a mud hole or something random that I could justify it to myself. This past weekend gave me a reason (albeit a weak one) after my friend Mac borrowed them to play ball in after forgetting to bring a pair of shoes of his own. Mac's feet are a good size bigger than mine, and the parts of the toe that were already coming apart looked even more worse for wear afterwards. The shoes had definitely seen better days, but I couldn’t bring myself to simply throw them out, so I dropped them off in 1 of those clothing bins for homeless people. Crisis averted…the shoe circle of life goes on.

Why couldn't they have just stayed like this forever?

Cue Elton John.

A Miserable End To A Miserable Season

It’s been a week or so since I last made a fantasy or any other update on here, but it wasn’t because I was hiding in the fetal position somewhere. I actually got to the acceptance stage fairly quickly, as I knew even if I made the playoffs my team was likely going nowhere. Either way, the odds were greatly in my favor to at least get in. If I won I was in. If I lost, I could still get in as long as Krissy lost and my brother Dan didn’t win his own matchup and outscore me by more than 50 points. From early on in the weekend, it didn’t look like I had a shot to win, but it looked like Krissy was out of it pretty early on in her matchup also. The only problem was that I had the perfect storm of a bad fantasy weekend, and Dan’s team put up a wopping 123 points. Matt Hasselbeck, who I picked up thinking that he would be a solid fill-in starter, left the game in the 1st half and got me 1 point. Plaxico Burress, in a game where the Jets beat the Chiefs by 4 touchdowns, put up 0 points. Mike Wallace, who had carried me at times earlier in the year, put up a pedestrian 7 points. DeMarco Murray broke his ankle in the 1st half and got me 2 points. CJ Spiller, in a blowout loss to San Diego, got me only 5 points. Jermichael Finley was held without a catch in Green Bay’s game. The only players that did anything for me were Roy Helu, who had his 3rd 100 yard rushing game in a row, and Seattle’s defense. My total output was my yearly worst by far: 53 points for the week, good enough to be outscored by Dan by 70! Adding insult to injury, I had 3 different receivers on my bench (Laurent Robinson, Julio Jones, and Nate Washington) who had at least 24 points apiece. Now, I would have never started all 3 of them because Mike Wallace is a must-start every week, but I could have conceivably started 2 of them over Burress and Spiller for example…especially Julio Jones, who I had consistently started (when he was healthy at least) all season despite having an up-and-down year. To put a positive spin on it though, this mercifully ended what was by all standards a pretty crappy fantasy season for me. Earlier in the year I complained about being unlucky, but my final record was 6-8, and in all honesty this was a 6-8 fantasy team (and all things considered I had to work pretty hard and get pretty lucky even to get to 6-8). Why was this team such a failure? Let’s run down the list…

1. Michael Vick…I have detailed this before, but prior to our league’s draft I heard ESPN fantasy guru Matthew Berry explain on a podcast why he would take Vick if he had the 1st pick in a draft this year. It went something like this…the Eagles have an explosive offense, and last year Vick put up numbers that would have made him a top 10 fantasy quarterback and a top 20 fantasy running back if you isolated his rushing stats (if you extrapolated those stats through a full 16 games). Vick came with risks: a lack of consistency over the years, the propensity to get injured, etc…but if he played up to his abilities and stayed on the field, it would essentially be like having an extra player in your starting lineup every week. I understood the riskiness, but I bought into the theory hook, line, and sinker, and when I found out I had the 1st pick in our draft this year, I didn’t hesitate in taking Vick. Unfortunately, Vick was inconsistent, got hurt early and often, and the Eagles were a bust in general this year. The theory works though…just ask Cam Newton owners this year. Cam went undrafted in our league though, but he is the overall 2nd rated fantasy player in the league right now behind Aaron Rodgers (by the way, while I had completely bought in to Vick, Rodgers was my 2nd choice). Vick’s current ranking is still a respectable 47th, but the pick killed me. I ended up dropping him with a week or 2 left in the regular season (during his most recent time missed due to injury). The result of this left me with a revolving door at quarterback this year including Josh Freeman, Tarvaris Jackson, Carson Palmer, and the aforementioned Hasselbeck. I did pick up Jay Cutler for a couple weeks, which was a good pickup except for the fact that he broke his finger, causing me to drop him shortly thereafter.

2. A bad draft in general…At season’s end I only had 5 of my original 14 picks still on my roster, and that’s generally not a good sign. I guess it could mean that you were really wheeling and dealing to try to make improvements. Also, it’s pretty common to have a lot of turnover with the guys at the back end of your draft, including kickers and defenses. However, it also probably means that you drafted crappy, and you have to replace a lot of the dead weight on your roster.

3. Injuries…One of my favorite “Dad” sayings is, “Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good.” Well, that is rarely more true than in fantasy football. Injuries are part of the game, and some guys (Vick for example) are more injury-prone than others. Still, most good fantasy teams (much like the real teams) are partially good because they managed to not catch the injury bug that year, but on my team injuries spread like a pandemic. Aside from Vick being in and out of the lineup, 2 of my best running backs going into the season were put on injured reserve during the course of the year with leg injuries. Felix Jones was my 2nd round pick, but I dropped him fairly early on in the year when he was out with a shoulder injury. His replacement, Murray, was my number 1 back by the end of the year, but even if I had made the postseason I would have been in big trouble, as Murray was placed on injured reserve after last week’s injury as well. Speaking of a little luck going a long way…

4. Sleeper picks (or lack thereof)…Most leagues aren’t won with the top picks in the draft. Sure, a superstar can have an unbelievable year, but it always seems to be the guy that is shrewd and lucky enough to get those players who have great years out of nowhere that end up winning. Last year when I won our league, I got Arian Foster, Matt Forte, and Fred Jackson in the middle rounds of the draft. I don’t even remember who I used my draft picks on for the 1st couple of rounds because it didn’t matter…those 3 picks basically won it for me right there. This year I tried to employ a similar strategy of grabbing a lot of “2nd tier” backs in the middle rounds with the hope that a couple of them would breakout from the pack. Hightower and Jackson were having solid and great years respectively before they got hurt, but the fact that neither James Starks or Ben Tate really ended up being sleepers for me hurt almost as much as those injuries. Starks has been fighting off injuries the 2nd half of the year, but even prior to that he hadn’t done enough to separate himself from Green Bay’s other backs in their multi-back system like I had hoped. I thought Tate was a smart pick given how Foster pulled the same hamstring like 3 times in the preseason, but while he’s having a great year for a backup running back, he’s still just that: a backup running back. I drafted 5 running backs in total, but none of them, for one reason or another, were one of my starting 3 running backs the last 2 weeks of the regular season.

5. Inconsistency at key spots…Wallace and Finley had been great at times for me this year, but they have been wildly inconsistent as well. Wallace’s decline has been more steady, as he started off the season on pace to break all kinds of single season receiving records. The combination of defenses paying more attention to him, the emergence of Pittsburgh’s other receivers, and the Steelers renewed commitment to the running game as we’ve crept into the winter months seem to be the cause of that. Finley has been more of an enigma, catching 3 touchdown passes 1 week, and disappearing from the offense completely the next. Blame the fact that the Packers have like 1,000 good skill position players for that. At this point, they have still been the 5th and 6th most productive fantasy players at each of their positions this year, but I would have traded a little more consistency for the couple of big weeks that they had.

6. No number 2 receiver…Percy Harvin was penciled in as my 2nd receiver at the start of the year, but when it quickly became apparent that Donovan McNabb couldn’t play anymore I traded him away. In retrospect, I should have held on to him a little bit longer, as he’s had a decent 2nd half of the season with Christian Ponder at the controls of the offense. Julio Jones has had 2 or 3 great weeks, but has had several other weeks where he hasn’t played due to injury or just hasn’t performed when he was on the field. I rode him for much of the year while he was healthy just hoping to catch lightning in a bottle, but as I mentioned before I stupidly sat him when I could have used his production the most this past week. Still, my number 2 receiver position was my biggest revolving door of all. It also may have proven another point when it comes to fantasy: having depth is nice, but sometimes too many choices can be a bad thing too.

In the end, I have no one really to blame but myself. Sure, I was unlucky with injuries, but I outsmarted myself on several draft picks and moves during the season. I guess I can take solace in the fact that as bad as I drafted and as unlucky as I was with guys getting hurt, I was able to piece together at least a mediocre season. Free agent pickups like Helu, Murray, Robinson, and Burress literally kept my season afloat when I probably should’ve been eliminated weeks before. Hopefully for my next fantasy team I can combine that resourcefulness with a little better luck and drafting as well.

The Replacements

The last time I mentioned fantasy football on here was October 26th. A snapshot of that point in time had me at 2-5 overall and on a 2 game losing streak (good enough for 9th place in a 12 team league). Michael Vick had a bye week that particular week, and even when he was on the field he was playing like garbage. Fast forward 5 weeks later, and lamenting picking Vick as my #1 overall draft pick is the only thing that has remained the same. After not playing in the last 2 games and already being ruled-out of this Thursday’s game in Seattle, I decided to drop Vick from my roster. It’s a stunning turnabout for a guy that I thought could potentially win the league for me by myself. Looking back now, it was a horrendous pick. I could’ve gone with a safe choice at running back like Adrian Peterson or Arian Foster. Even though those guys have suffered through injuries during different parts of the year, they have both been solid. I could’ve gone with Aaron Rodgers, who was actually my 2nd choice. Even though running backs are generally safer picks, I felt that the top-tier QBs had the most potential for having ridiculous fantasy years. Even Rodgers would have been a safer pick than Vick though. I decided to gamble on Vick because while he had the biggest propensity to do exactly what he has done so far this year (namely, keep getting hurt and playing lousy for the most part), he also could have had the greatest season in fantasy football history if he played his best and stayed healthy. Unfortunately for me, he has done neither. Meanwhile, Rodgers is the top rated player in all of fantasy this year…while Vick is currently a free agent in our league along with the likes of QBs on IR like Matt Schaub and busts like Tavaris Jackson (I actually picked Jackson up for 1 week for an emergency start).

A familiar sight this season.

To top it off, my team has been devastated at RB. Tim Hightower had already been lost for the year with a torn ACL by my last fantasy post, but my only fantasy stud, Fred Jackson, has since been placed on IR with a broken leg also. If you factor in that I dropped Felix Jones several weeks back in favor of his backup, DeMarco Murray, when he was out a couple of weeks with a shoulder injury, only 2 of my top 7 picks are even still on my roster…and those 2 guys have been shaky at best for me lately. Mike Wallace’s pace has slowed dramatically since the beginning of the year when he looked like he might challenge the single season record books for receivers, and Jermichael Finley could have 3 TDs 1 game and then go weeks without sniffing the end zone again. In fact, if you look at my draft results the only players still on my roster that I originally drafted are Wallace, Finley, James Starks, Julio Jones, and Ben Tate. Jones has had a couple of big weeks, but seems to miss every other game with a bad hamstring. Tate and Starks have been good spot starters, but 1 is a backup to the best back in the league, and the other splits carries with Ryan Grant in a predominantly passing offense…not a good combination if consistent production is what you’re after.

Oh, Mike Wallace...wherever have you gone?

With all that info, you would probably guess that I went from 2-5 to 2-10 by now…and yet I’ve managed to win 4 out of 5 to move to 6-6 overall. Even stranger, there is a logjam in the middle of the league standings right now (5 teams at either 6-6 or 5-6-1), and with last week’s win I moved from 9th place all the way to 5th due to tiebreakers. How is this possible? Well, the 1st thing is that as bad as I drafted, I probably have been that good at picking free agents up. Murray, Plaxico Burress, and Laurent Robinson (who knew?) have all saved my ass in various weeks. The other (and more important factor) has been that I’ve been very lucky, which ironically is something I didn’t have in the beginning of the year at all. Back on October 26th, I had scored more points than almost every other team in the league, but had the most points scored against my team as well. I was in 1 of those stretches where if I had the 2nd highest point total of any team in a particular week, I just so happened to play the guy who had the most points that week. Since then, those numbers have kind of evened out, as I’m more in the middle of the pack in terms of total points scored and points scored against. Which means even though I had my share of 119-108 losses earlier in the year, I’ve had a few 77-67 matchups go may favor since then as well.

Now, if only I can avert any other disasters for 2 more weeks, I should at least make the playoffs, and getting a chance to make a playoff run is really all you can ask for in fantasy sports. So, even if Starks or Tate might be slightly better plays, I felt it was only right to roll the dice and go with the backups of the guys I used to have this week (Murray, CJ Spiller, and Roy Helu). I also couldn’t resist changing my team name to “Injured Reserve.” I know they say you shouldn’t tempt fate, but nothing about this fantasy season has been conventional for me thus far…why should it stop now?

A heavy dose of Roy Helu against the Jets would be just what the doctor ordered.