Fantasy Football is BACK!

Despite being English, I have found myself becoming more and more enamoured with the sport that the Americans call “football”. Watching American Football in the UK used to be a most difficult proposition, aside from the Superbowl the only way to watch any action was a highlights show at 1am on a Wednesday morning. During the nineties and early 2000’s I was school aged, but after that coverage started to improve. In recent years Sky Sports have added the Thursday and Monday night games, as well as three Sunday matches. Even then, the absolutely baffling decision to host games only on nights when most people have work confuse me no end. But as my interest has grown, I’ve put additional effort into trying to keep up with the games when I can. My wife has since joined me in this interest, but unlike me she is a reasonable person, who goes to bed at a sensible time rather than staying up into the night watching foreign sports and typing up nonsense for strangers to read (4th wall break! Hi, thanks for reading).

But there is a great equaliser, a way that we can both find some enjoyment, and that’s fantasy football. Obviously, we can’t have a league with just two teams, so several friends and onlookers have been roped in. My wife has joined a group on Facebook specifically for female fans of the game, and has made friends that have joined in, and I have Shanghaied in some of my friends that I know are fans of the game, and we have made an 8-team league. I obviously ended up drafting 8th out of 8, but I was pretty happy with the way that my team turned out.

We have a pretty diverse bunch in our league, both in terms of equal gender and a large range of teams that are supported. By my count we have 2 Packers fans (My Wife and I), 2 Bears supporters (Boo!), a Minnesota Vikings fan, 1 Miami Dolphins fan, 1 KC Chief, and 1 Cincinnati Bengal. None of us are likely to write for NFL.com anytime soon (although that would be awesome) but we should all have fun. Below, here’s a list of the teams and this first week’s results:

Teams

AllWeNeedIsLove – My Team

LeaderOfThePack – Fellow Packer Fan

HowBoutThoseChiefs – Kansas City Fan

Kirk is King – Vikings Fan (Don’t boo him, he was a groomsman at my wedding)

Tarn Knights – Miami Dolphins Supporter (and my brother)

Shay Don’t Play Bout My Bears – Literally shuddered just writing that

Newton Abbott Saints – Despite the name, a Cincinnati Bengals Fan

BearDown Diva – Another one, but the admin of the Facebook group I mentioned earlier

Week 1 Matchups:

Match 1

Newton Abbott Saints – 98.46 vs 79.40 - BearDown Diva

An opening weekend win for the Saints in a low scoring, knockdown drag out affair. If this was an actual football game, it would have ended 7-3. An even closer match than the score suggests, as Team Diva won the Running Back battle, but the Saints pulled away with victories in almost all other positions.

Points left on the bench:

In any fantasy game, you’ll generally see that if you had started one player over another, you would have seen better results. For the Saints, this came in the form of its defence. Despite their Eagles defence (13.00 points) being one of their highest scorers, playing the Jets (20.00 points) would have led to even greater gains.

For Team Diva, Running Back was really their position, and they should have ridden it further. Playing new wunderkid RB Bijan Robinson (20.30 points) would have been an almost game changing substitution over a sub-par performance from Tyler Lockett (3.00 points) of the Seattle Seahawks.

Current Record and League Position:

Newton Abbott Saints: 1-0, 4th place.

BearDown Diva: 0-1, 8th place.

Match 2

Tarn Knights – 104.96 vs 127.22 – Shay Don’t Play

Another game that was much closer than the scoreline suggests, top 10 performances from both a QB and a Wide Receiver were not enough to close the 23 point gap for the boys from the Tarn, as mostly solid turnouts from all the No Players helped them cruise to victory with a high score.

Points left on the bench:

Little blame can be placed at the coach of the Tarn Knights for his decision to start Ja’Marr Chase (9.10 points), he has been one of the most consistently high scoring players since entering the league. But taking a chance on Michael Pittman (23.70 points) would have seen this a much closer game.

Unless, of course, Team No Play had made a hero call of their own. The normally solid Jaylen Waddle (11.80 points) gave an unspectacular but not shameful accounting of himself, whereas the 49ers ran roughshod over the hapless Pittsburgh Steelers, and one of my favourite sleeper players, Brandon Aiyuk (32.90 points), had himself a game, coming second of all Wide Receivers in the NFL this week.

Current Record and League Position:

Tarn Knights: 0-1, 6th place.

Shay Don’t Play Bout My Bears: 1-0, 2nd place.

Match 3

HowBoutThoseChiefs – 114.24 vs 108.36 – Kirk is King

The closest game of week 1, Team Chiefs eked out a narrow victory over Kirk is King, owed in no small part to an excellent performance from the 2nd highest scoring RB this week in Austin Ekeler (26.40 points) which was enough to overcome the Kings 5th AND 6th highest scorers at the position.

Points left on the bench:

A rare event, in that Team Chiefs did not leave a single point out of the starting line, although that may have more to do with injuries and shocking results from those players, and 114.24 points was the maximum result possible from their players this week.

As for The Kings, you have to show some sympathy for the fact that two normally reliable high scoring players crashed and burned in week one. Changing out either of these two powerhouses would have resulted in victory, but the most obvious of these was at WR, where Tee Higgins (the Cincinnati Bengals WR2) score a big 0 points. As the Bengals went down in flames to their biggest rivals, the Browns, Higgins had 0 catches on 8 targets. If he had been replaced by the Vikings own rookie Jordan Addison (16.10 points) then this would have been an entirely different writeup.

Current Record and League Position:

HowBoutThemChiefs: 1-0, 3rd place.

Kirk is King: 0-1, 5th place.

Match 4

AllWeNeedIsLove – 166.42 vs 95.84 – LeaderOfThePack

Our final match of the week is a Green Bay on Green Bay affair, as I took on my highly competitive wife in a fiery, but unfortunately one-sided, affair. In a week where everything came together at once for my team to take me to the top of the table as I had both the highest scoring Running Back, Aaron Jones (26.70 points), and by far the highest scoring Wide Receiver, the incomparable Tyreek Hill (44.50 points), leaving no way for The Leaders for make up the gap with an underperforming team.

Points left on the bench:

Despite the awesome points total gathered by Team Love, there were more points to be had if I had swapped Justin Herbert (20.92 points), the QB4 for week 1, and taken my own advice and realised that all I needed was Jordan Love (23.00 points), the QB3 for the week.

Speaking of QB changes, Josh Allen (9.04 points), normally as reliable as they come, massively underperformed, and could have been replaced by a resurgent Tua Tagovailoa (27.14 points) in a move that would have closed the gap, and moved The Leaders up the table.

Current Record and League Position:

AllWeNeedIsLove: 1-0, 1st place.

LeaderOfThePack: 0-1, 7th place.

It has been a fun week, getting back into football season, and as you can tell, I feel that the fantasy aspect is one that brings us together.

Until next week.