Fantasy Football

Fantasy Football: Are receivers necessary?

Coming off a fantasy season that was pretty much the highlight of my year, I had fairly high expectations for my 2008 team. At least, I did before I drafted them.

Now, I have placed those same high expectations in a much more achievable place, somewhere between not finishing last and maybe scaring someone one week.

Truth be told, I’m probably being too hard on myself. My fantasy team will be fine, provided I work the waiver wire like a mad scientist genius who puts his fake football online league before his marriage. Am I okay being “that guy”? Ask me again in Week Four.

My precipitous fall from world-beater to dust-eater happened fast and furious, not unlike my favorite movie franchise. One moment, I was stocking up decent players, and the next, I was floundering in a sea of bad picks and jumping on the wrong trends.

No trend was more incorrect than my complete avoidance of drafting wide receivers. Well, to be honest, I didn’t completely avoid wide receivers, but only because the Fleaflicker drafting program wouldn’t let me. I did, however, succeed in drafting receivers no one had heard of.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My draft took a turn for the worst pretty much from the get-go. First off, I had no idea where I would be drafting, which would turn out to be a convenient excuse once things went poorly. About half an hour before the draft started, I found out the draft order, and the news was not good. In our 12-team league, I was picking eleventh.

Eleventh?! At least Derek Anderson will still be available! By the time the eleventh pick rolled around, the draft board looked like the fifth page of my fantasy draft guidebook. Look, there’s Marshawn Lynch! He’s got dreads! Ooh, Carson Palmer! He hasn’t blown out his knee for a couple seasons! (This line of thinking would later lead to me drafting Palmer.)

But all was not lost. Thanks to an early run on quarterbacks of which I was simply an innocent bystander, St. Louis RB Steven Jackson was left standing, which was tragically ironic considering his health the past few years.

I live for injury-prone running backs, especially when they have the chance to carry my fantasy team. As such, I jumped all over Jackson like I didn’t have any other options (I didn’t!), and I officially hinged my fantasy season on the cankle of a guy no one else cared to have. But hey, he was on the cover of ESPN Fantasy last season. That can’t be all bad. ESPN knows what it’s talking about (nervous laughter).

Strangely enough, that was the best pick I would have for the next hour. My next choice was Palmer, out of panic and poor judgment, followed by another running back, Laurence Maroney, in Round 3. At this point, I had an interesting decision to make: should I balance out

my roster with other positions or should I build a running back cache that would make Mike Shanahan’s head spin?

I can’t say no to Ryan Grant’s obvious overratedness! Running back cache it is!

After Grant, I drafted Jonathan Stewart in Round 5, and I would have had more RBs if the Fleaflicker program would have allowed me. Who are they to say that owning four running backs in a league that starts at most two is a bad idea? Communists.

Forty-five minutes into the draft, I had one quarterback, four running backs, and no one to catch the ball. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “what are the odds that Maroney gets switched to wide receiver in the next 12 minutes?” I should have been wondering how things got out of hand so quickly. Throughout the first five rounds, I was under the impression that I was doing well, not reaching for players I didn’t want and avoiding Atlanta Falcons. Everyone else was drafting players based on something called “balance;” meanwhile, I was drafting the best available player every round, like some sort of bizzaro Dennis Green. We all know how that ended.

It was at this point that the Fleaflicker draft program was starting to lose its patience with me. Throughout the draft, it had tried to give me helpful advice, assuming I wanted it. Ha! I hadn’t taken advice from a computer since Oregon Trail DOS! I wasn’t about to start now.

“You have no wide receivers,” it told me. “You should draft WR Roy Williams from Detroit.”

Um, thanks but I’d rather have backup quarterback Jason Campbell.

Finally, in Round 7, I could not wait any longer. I had to draft a wide receiver. So I pulled the trigger on…Jerricho Cotchery?

What. Had. I. Done. I had just drafted the New York Jets No. 2 receiver to be my go-to guy, a man whose name was a cross between an ancient Biblical city with big walls and a word that up until a week ago, I thought was “Crotchery.” And I used to giggle when I said it. Now I was expecting him to lead my receiving corps into whatever sort of point abyss I was headed.

My rationale behind drafting Cotchery was simple: I needed a wide receiver. Actually, there was a little more thought than that. Cotchery will be playing with Brett Favre this season, and I expected a Greg Jennings-like explosion from Cotchery now that Favre was throwing the ball his way. I had no actual facts upon which to base this.

My next wide receiver pick was even worse: Atlanta’s Roddy White. Yes, the Falcons have a starting rookie quarterback. Yes, they are not a good team. Yes, I understand that I won’t get points for dropped passes. But hey, someone on NFL Live told me that White would be a sleeper, and I was at the portion of the draft where I start listening to the guys on NFL Live. This is also called the “desperate” portion.

When all was said and done, my fantasy roster looked like this:

• Quarterbacks: Carson Palmer, Jason Campbell, Troy Edwards
• Running Backs: Steven Jackson, Laurence Maroney, Ryan Grant, Jonathan Stewart
• Wide Receivers: Jerricho Cotchery, Roddy White, Ted Ginn, Jabar Gaffney
• Tight Ends: Jeremy Shockey, Kevin Boss
• Kicker: Ryan Longwell
• Defense/Special Teams: Cardinals

I had some comfort to take from the evening’s affair. At least I wasn’t drafting kickers and team defenses in rounds six and seven. At least I recognized all the players on my team. At least I didn’t reach for Derek Anderson at No. 7.

And most importantly, at least it’s over now.

© 2008 KevanLee.com.