Book 'Em

Krissy and my absence from Facebook is partially functional, partially because we admittedly like to act like we're "too cool for school" sometimes. I mean, we have to be considered "1st generation Facebook-ers"...we had accounts back when you had to have a valid college email address to join. By the time we closed our accounts, Facebook apps were just starting to catch on, but for the most part they didn't exist. Farmville was probably still a glimmer in some software developer's eye at that point. Now, grandmothers and kindergarteners alike can join, and there are enough Facebook apps and games that you probably can save you Xbox money for something else if you really want to. But Krissy and I (summoning my best "hipster" voice here) liked Facebook before it was cool...well, not really I guess, but you get the point. The fact is that it's fun to go against the grain sometimes. When you were a kid, you may have bought this really dope pair of sneakers that no one else had yet. If everyone else went out and bought them a week later, where's the fun in that? Some of the looks you get when people find out you are not on Facebook are priceless though.

So, part of it is just being a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian, but truthfully by the time I deleted my account Facebook had become more of a pain in the ass than anything else. I am awful enough at correspondence and responding to people's emails, texts, and voicemails. Sometimes I really do wonder if people tried contacting me by carrier pigeon whether my response time would take just as long as it does now. Facebook was just another communication medium on top of all of those that was bogging me down. And for anyone who has ever read this blog, you know that I can be pretty wordy with even the simplest subject matter...not a good combination for me. The sad part is that it's not even like I had "that" many friends, but I guess I should be glad I didn't. Also, Facebook is nice for staying in the loop on what's going on in your circle of friends and stuff, but most of the thrill is gone once you're in a committed relationship. Just as The Social Network made perfectly clear, Facebook was and still is fueled by sex. Sure, it's nice to reconnect with old friends and look at a family member's vacation pictures, but at the end of the day people go on Facebook to look at and read about people they want to bone...people they knew from back in the day, people they know now, people who are friends of friends of their friends and they actually have no idea how they stumbled onto their page, but they're there now and...anyway. Even when Krissy and I were just in the beginning stages of going out, we still used it as a means to flirt with each other and whatnot. We are, for all intents and purposes, and old married couple now, so 90% of the intrigue that Facebook has for most people is gone for us. The other cue for me to exit stage left on Facebook was when kids that I used to be a camp counselor for in summer camp started to send me friend requests. On the 1 hand, it was kind of cool that these kids remembered me enough to look me up. On the other hand, it's annoying when you have to explain to your wife that all the girls she doesn't know that are writing on your wall are actually 12 years old. Also, most of them type in that weird version of English that kids use these days ("hAi, wAzuP?")...sigh. It was all just too much to deal with for an old fart like me.

That was pretty much the end of Facebook for me, and Krissy soon followed suit. Our friends like to chastise us for not having it, but I'm not sure how much we're missing. Every once in a while Krissy will go on her little brother's account because she heard that some girl she went to high school with got fat and she wants to see pictures, but those times are few and far between. My friend Mac has made the argument before that even if I no longer used it or kept up with it, I should have just kept my account open. What would it hurt? But to me doing that is just silly. Before long, Facebook would be a bottomless wasteland of a website just like (shudders) MySpace. No, a clean break is better in the long run I think. Besides, it's nice to be somewhat off the grid. Maybe the world could stand to be a little less connected from time to time, but that's just me (he says from his blog...oh well).

A Little Bit Of Everything

While this year I didn’t have much luck with my fantasy football team, I have probably covered the full spectrum in terms of the type of season you can have over the years. Looking at my Yahoo fantasy profile (discounting the couple of leagues I’ve done on ESPN and Fox Sports), I’ve played in 11 fantasy football leagues dating back to 2006. In those 11 leagues, I’ve won twice, and I’ve finished anywhere from last to 3rd place in the other 9 leagues. Fantasy basketball has been a slightly different experience for me. In the same time period, I’ve been in 6 (now 7) fantasy basketball leagues on Yahoo. My best finishes (coincidently in the last 2 leagues I’ve participated in) were 7th out of a 12 team league and 8th out of a 16 team league. My 1st 4 attempts were historically bad though: 13th in a 14 team league, 13th in a 16 team league, last in a 14 team league, and 13th in a 16 team league. That’s “Curse of Le Boulez” bad.

There’s a laundry list of reasons why I have done so poorly with fantasy basketball leagues. 1st, I just never seem to care quite as much about fantasy basketball as football. Football has established itself as “the” fantasy sport, and everything else (even though fantasy sports originated with baseball) is pretty much small potatoes compared to it. When people ask me how I like fantasy basketball compared to football, my usual response is something to the effect of, “It’s ok. It’s just different.” So, take that for what it’s worth, but it leads to my next reason of why my past fantasy basketball teams have sucked so hard…2nd, I have never actually been present for a fantasy basketball draft (at least not that I can remember). The amount of times I wound up with a starting frontcourt of Adonal Foyle and Lamar Odom those 1st few years was absurd. Missing your league’s draft is a cardinal sin of any semi-serious fantasy player. At the bare minimum, you at least should pre-rank the players you want to draft if you know you’re going to miss it, but I rarely did this either. So distracted was I with my fantasy football prospects (and life in general) that fantasy basketball drafts would usually come and go without my knowledge at all. 3rd, I was very often the victim of the strange and bizarre. I’ve said it a million times before, but injuries and luck are part of the deal with fantasy sports…but it was tough to account for some of the things that would happen to my teams. One year, I made a trade with someone where the centerpieces were Yao Ming and Amare Stoudemire. The deal got accepted, and Yao had one of his many season ending injuries while the trade was still pending. I thought this was fair game, but the deal got vetoed by the league commissioner, and I was stuck with Yao’s decaying body. I was furious, but there wasn’t exactly much I could do. In a last gasp effort, I traded away my next best player, Rashard Lewis, for 3 or 4 lesser players. I just needed bodies, and I was hoping that I could catch lightning in a bottle with at least 1 of them. The league commissioner, my friend Josh, thought I was up to some kind of shenanigans though where I was trying to throw my season and give an unfair advantage to my trade partner, Eyun. He essentially David Stern-ed my team (locking me from making moves and assuming control of my roster).

I’m hoping that this year turns out a little bit different. Through 3 weeks, Krissy and I (she’s my co-commissioner) are 13-11, which is good enough for 7th place in a 14 team league. We weren’t logged in to our draft, but we at least had the good sense to do a draft pre-ranking this time. I thought I was going to have to live through another trade veto when my offer of D-Rose for LeBron got accepted, but it eventually got pushed through. Our roster is at least solid. If it wasn’t for 2 long term injuries to Manu and Z-Bo, it might be downright scary. One thing’s for sure though: at least I will be paying attention this time.

The key to our fantasy basketball season...

My last post was my Redskins wrap-up for the 2011-2012 season, but I couldn’t help but add 1 more little tidbit of information after reading an article in the Washington Post. Strangely enough, the Redskins hold a 7-2 regular season against teams that made it to the NFC championship game during a particular season dating back 4 seasons. It was an idea I actually had (but can’t take credit for since I didn’t write it) back when the Giants beat the Falcons during Wild Card weekend. If the red hot Giants could upset the Packers, it would be yet another year where the Skins beat one of the championship game participants during the regular season. In 2008, Washington beat the Cardinals once and the Eagles twice to go 3-0. In 2009, the Skins lost by a field goal in a game that they absolutely should have won to the eventual Super Bowl champion Saints. In 2010, the Redskins beat both the Packers and the Bears. This year, they had their 2 most convincing wins of the season against the Giants (although they got manhandled by the 49ers in a game that wasn’t as close as the score indicates).

It should be noted that in none of these 4 seasons did the Redskins have a winning record. The article correctly points out that this gives Redskin homers something to point at to feed their delusions that the Skins are a relevant franchise. It’s also one more thing that could serve to drive the more grounded Redskins fans mad. How can they be that bad, and yet still give good teams competitive games? Well, maybe that is the whole point (if there is 1 at all). They NFL thrives on competitive balance, and any 1 team can beat another on any given week. Even in the event that a seemingly dominant team pops up in this day and age (the Patriots in 2007-2008 and the Packers this year), there’s a good chance they will get beaten at some point as well. Also, those teams that the Redskins beat those years were either teams with records barely above 0.500 who got hot at the right time of year (the Cardinals in 2008 and the Packers last season), were not the team they were by year’s end that they were at the time the Skins played them (the Bears last season), were talented but wildly inconsistent (the Eagles in 2008 or the Giants this season), or some combination of the 3. So, when Brian Orakpo tries to convince us through Twitter that the Skins are actually not that far away from greatness, and they just need to bring the same intensity every week that the team brought to those 2 Giants games, try to look the other way.

So, that means the Skins are really at least the 2nd best team in the NFC, right?

Speaking of “The Curse of Le Boulez” and “historically bad seasons” earlier on in this post, the Wizards might be well on their way this year. The only thing that might save them is the fact that this lockout-shortened season will come with an asterisk in the history books. It’s not just that they are 1-12 so far, it’s that they look like the most bumbling franchise in the NBA (maybe in all of sports). I have always been somewhat emotionally detached from the Washington franchise. I am and always will be (rightly or wrongly) more of a fan of the college game, and the Wizards/Bullets have been as consistently mediocre as any team in the league since I was a kid. Couple those points with the fact that they traded away 1 of the only Washington players worth watching (Chris Webber) in the last 20 years and made dumb personnel move after dumb personnel move ever since, and they aren’t exactly doing a lot to gain my undying support. Still, I admit that I went to a handful of Wizards games during the Gilbert Arenas era, and if there is a team that I would call my NBA home team, the Wiz would be it. 1-12 is 1-12 though. In this 66 game season, that extrapolates to a record of 5-61 for the season should they keep this pace up, and it would mean only 6 or 7 wins if it were a full 82 game season (the record for futility in an 82 game season is 8 or 9 wins I believe). Even worse than the record is the cast of characters that makes up Washington’s roster. John Wall appears to have regressed, and there are fair questions about whether he is really a basketball player, or just a great athlete who happens to play basketball (his turnovers are up, and his shooting is down). I’m willing to give him a pass right now just because he has literally no help. Actually, “no help” doesn’t begin to describe it. Just from the standpoint of basketball as a sport being played for fun, the other guys logging major minutes for the Wizards this year look like the least fun players to play with ever. Rashard Lewis, unfairly or not, has become the posterboy for the overbloated contracts in today’s NBA that were partly the blame for the lockout. While his skills have declined, and he’s not worth a third of the money he’s making, he probably is at least a serviceable player…but he carries around the stigma of the bad apple that spoiled the bunch, and given that he’s getting old and playing for a team going nowhere it often looks like he is only interested in cashing his paycheck and getting the hell back on the team bus. Worse than that are these 3 characters: Andray Blatche, Nick Young, and JaVale McGee. Where does 1 start with this trio…“7 Day Dray” is the epitome of the lazy selfish athlete. Young is a glorified chucker. McGee appears to have no basketball IQ (or overall IQ for that matter) whatsoever. Add to that 2nd year guard Jordan Crawford, who is at least young and relatively inexpensive, but who is almost as big of a black hole on the offensive end as Blatche or Young. All are enormously talented…none will be in the league in 5 years. None of them “get it.”

Yesterday’s game was a microcosm of this. McGee, who earlier in the year started an online campaign lobbying fans for All-Star votes (really, All-Star votes?), threw a pass to himself off the backboard for a fastbreak dunk in the 3rd quarter, and was subsequently benched. The post-game comments of Blatche, Young, and McGee were quite revealing. Young actually had the gall to give McGee props. Why that surprised me, I am not sure, but it did! Blatche, team captain as he is (cough, gag), said he didn’t really care for McGee’s play, but basically gave a “that’s just Javale being Javale” type of response. McGee’s response was that of a high school prankster who has been sent to the principal’s office one time too many for it to have any effect on him. “Apparently, if you get a fast break and throw it off the backboard in the 3rd quarter, and you’re 1-11, you’re not supposed to do stuff like that,” McGee uttered after the game. He could have saved his breath. If he had rolled his eyes, and said, “Whatever,” to the reporter’s question, that would have sufficed. Wall, who had his best all-around game of the season in defeat (38 points and 8 assists), sounded like a guy who would rather be somewhere, anywhere, else. “A dunk is a dunk. I would rather seen him do a regular dunk. We’re down. We’re 1-11. 1-12 now. So there’s no point in doing any kind of excitement…” No wonder Wall always looks like he just got the news that his dog died; he goes to bed knowing who he has to come to work with the next day! What’s truly sad is that the Wizards brass had a chance to unload all of these guys this offseason. I don’t know the ins and outs of the new NBA “amnesty clause,” and I’ve read that it wouldn’t have been entirely beneficial to use on Rashard Lewis, but they still could have used it and got out from under his enormous contract. Young and 7 Day Dray could have been given their walking papers. McGee’s trade value (whatever you could in fact get for him) was certainly higher before the season started than it is now. At 1-12, you couldn’t be any worse starting all the young guys on the roster than you are right now. And yet, they chose to bring them all back. Why, we may never really know. Your 2011-2012 Washington Wizards, everybody…where amazing truly happens

Another Merciful End

This might be the longest gap in between blog posts since this blog’s current reincarnation. Holiday travel and deadlines at work don’t make for ideal blog-writing conditions. So, as I started writing this I couldn’t help but think that a Redskin season wrap-up would be way late…and yet this past weekend was the 1st weekend since their bye week that there was no Redskins game. This served as not only a reminder of how crazy the holidays are, but how dismal this current stretch of Redskins seasons has been, as another year has passed with not even close to a playoff appearance. 4 out of the last 5 weeks I didn’t even see the game. For anyone that knows me, this would probably come as a shock. From the time I was a 3rd grader, I probably averaged missing about 1 Redskins game a year on TV. Granted, I was either in the car or outside the viewing area for all of these games, but in years past I would have made every effort to plant my can in front of a television set to see the game somehow, someway…not this year.

2011 was a year to forget for Redskins fans. I got frustrated during the middle of the season because so many people had clamored for the Redskins brass to finally truly rebuild the team by tearing the roster down and starting from scratch, and yet in the same breath those people complained about how terrible the team was. How can you be overly critical of a strategy that you wanted in the 1st place? However, by the end of the year I was admittedly just as disgusted with the product on the field as the same people I was originally angered by. I still maintain that the Redskins could actually have an improved team with the same or a worse record this season compared to last year. Well, my theory is about to get tested out…Mike Shanahan’s record in his 1st season: 6-10. Shanahan’s record this year: 5-11.

In Shanahan’s 1st season, it was evident just how much dead weight was on the roster. The Skins roster was not only old but overpaid and underperforming as well. Shanahan and GM Bruce Allen did well to make the roster younger and cheaper in their 2nd season, but they misfired on 1 acquisition so badly in year 1 that they contributed to their own problem. Donovan McNabb was a completely failed experiment, and while the Shanahan/Allen regime has done well overall in its 2 years of stockpiling draft picks, acquiring young talent, and avoiding the overpriced aging veterans (at least compared to the Vinny Cerrato era, where management gave away draft picks like they caused an allergic reaction), the McNabb trade may still prove to be the singular move the dooms Shanahan’s stint in Washington. The draft picks and money they spent getting McNabb and the team’s mistake at the most important position in the sport probably set the team’s rebuilding/development back at least 2 years. The best thing you can say is that at least they cut their losses early on and didn’t stubbornly hold on to him too long when they realized McNabb was a complete bust at this point in his career.

Next year will be the 3rd year of the Shanahan/Allen battery. While a combined 11-21 record over the last 2 years was acceptable and somewhat expected, a plucky 6-10 season will not be tolerated in 2012. 3 years should be long enough to clean house, put your system in place, and fill the roster with the type of player that can produce a winning team. Shanahan is oft-criticized in the personnel department, but most of the players they picked up last year look like they could help the team for the next few seasons. Roy Helu shouldn’t be mistaken for Arian Foster, but he and Evan Royster look like steals for 4th and 7th round draft picks. Ryan Kerrigan could be a bookend rush linebacker along with Brian Orakpo for years to come. Leonard Hankerson showed promise as a receiver in the 1 game he was given an opportunity before getting injured. Barry Cofield and Stephen Bowen look to be cost-effective upgrades to the defensive line. And Jarvis Jenkins, who was hurt in preseason and lost for the year, will basically be an extra 1st or 2nd round pick next year. None of this means that anyone deserves a parade just yet, but it’s at least a small glimpse of hope to hang on to.

There are still plenty of holes to fill. The defensive secondary is awful. London Fletcher could use some help at inside linebacker (if they even choose to resign him). You can never have enough offensive linemen, and that’s even if Trent Williams gets his act together. Fred Davis probably cost himself a lot of money with his shenanigans as well, which may have made him much more affordable for the Skins to resign if they so choose. The receiver corp has lacked a fast, big-bodied, do it all Calvin/Andre Johnson type receiver since forever. And most importantly, the Skins need an upgrade at quarterback. While John Beck was a complete disaster in his audition, as bad as Rex Grossman was at times you would have to say he at least did a serviceable job as a fill-in this starter this year. If the Redskins believe Grossman is actually their answer at QB, they are nuts. However, their draft position puts them in a tricky position: they have a high pick, but not high enough that the guys thought to be elite franchise-type quarterbacks will still be around when it comes their turn to select. Hopefully, they don’t reach for a guy that they really don’t believe in just out of desperation. I would be more than fine with someone like, say, Justin Blackmon (probably will be picked by then as well, but one can only dream). If they can’t pick or trade up to pick Andrew Luck or Robert Griffin, I fully expect them to be in the Matt Flynn running, as he seems to be the guy most likely to have someone throw starting quarterback money at this offseason. Otherwise, the best we can probably hope for next year with Grossman at the reins is 8-8 or 9-7 (assuming the team improves in other areas). That’s all pie in the sky stuff for now though, but hope springs eternal. As for Skins talk, see you in April at the draft.