Well, Week One is in the books, and I hope you had a better premiere than my team did. I scored a whopping 63 points, second worst in my league. If you take away my Jets’ stellar defensive performance, that leave me with 35.
Yikes.
In dishonor of this achievement, I present 35 random thoughts from this past weekend.
35. Just because you write for a fantasy football web site doesn’t mean your team is going to be good. I know, I know… you’re shocked.
34. Miami’s home stadium is now called Land Shark Stadium? How did I miss this? Apparently, in May, it was renamed following a sponsorship deal with singer
Jimmy Buffett. I wish I had money to burn, man. I would get a licensing deal and name it after my favorite movies scenes and SNL skits, too. I think my first stadium would be named “Drexl Spivey Stadium”… after Gary Oldman’s white Rastafarian pimp in the movie True Romance. Plus, it just sounds badass.
33. Carolina sucks. Good luck, Steve Smith owners. Oh, and Jonathan Stewart sure looked pretty healthy for someone who’s coming back from hurting his Achilles. Sorry, DeAngelo Williams owners.
32. Braylon Edwards could’ve changed his karma with that one big TD grab… but it was ruled out of bounds. Sorry, Braylon Edwards owners (wait – what do you mean I’m the only one?).
31. Yup… I tried to tell you. Steve Slaton is going to be awful this year. As my brother said in our Draft Recap: “I hated the Slaton pick. I hated him last year too – but this year, reports are that he looks sluggish, they are taking touches away from him, and he’s losing goal line carries. I was staying away from him at all costs.” Amen, brother.
30. Cleveland ain’t never winning nothing playing like it did – three straight runs close to the goal line? Two from the wildcat? Morons. I thought Herm Edwards got out of coaching.
29. Jeremy Shockey is so hated by so many football fans, he may become the first player (TE, no less) ever to catch 2 TDs and not get picked up in the much-anticipated Week 1 add-drop frenzy.
28. Also from our Draft Recap article, after I took Michael Turner 15th overall: “As much as I don’t like that little fat f**ker, I couldn’t pass up that value there. I have a feeling Turner will replace Brian Westbrook as the “Player I Love to Hate for 2009.”
27. This just in: I have already traded away Michael Turner.
26. Ocho Cinco is back. He may be the only thing worth watching on that Cincinnati team this year. They suck worse than Carolina.
25. It was good to see my eventual Turner replacement (Detroit’s Kevin Smith) doing well this weekend, even though I had him on the bench. Even when he’s not running well, he’ll be a frequent check down option for Stafford.
24. That Serena Williams is one crazy bitch.
23. Steal of the Draft Alert: Thomas Jones was taken by a guy in our league in the TWELFTH ROUND (!), along with a bunch of kickers. He had 107 yards, 2 TDs and one big giant F –YOU to all the non-believers out there.
22. Romo looks amazing now that he dropped that big, fat blonde albatross from around his neck. He’s making even Roy Williams and Patrick Crayton look good.
21. …but not Jason Witten. Why is it MY guys who never get the love.
20. Did I mention that my draft sucked?
19. Kyle Orton looked terrible – maybe it’s the finger injury. Maybe. On the other hand, he did target Brandon Marshall a whole bunch. Marshall, despite the meager yeardage, actually led the team in catches. Marshall plays Cleveland this week. Cleveland sucks. What I’m trying to say is, you could do a whole lot worse than to start Marshall this week.
18. …oh, and that dull, thudding sound you hear is Eddie Royal fans slamming their heads into the wall.
17. Calvin Johnson was robbed on that TD catch. Calvin Johnson finished 10 yards short of 100. Calvin Johnson is pissed off. Detroit will get their ass kicked by Minnesota and be forced to throw early and often. What I’m trying to say is, you better trade for Calvin Johnson at all costs.
16. …like I just did. Nice knowing you, Michael Turner.
15. At my draft, we made fun of my friend Tom for drafting McNabb as his QB. You’ll be lucky if he lasts through the third game, we mocked. Boy, were we wrong…
14. This year, my league instituted a rule whereby your defense does not get charged for opponents’ points if they’re not on the field (e.g., pick six, fumble recoveries for TDs, etc.). I thought this was an awesome rule… even before the Jets gave up an INT return and my defense was only charged with a single point (for the point after).
13. Brady Quinn fumbles while trying to pull his arm back to throw. You have to go back to the Giants and the Dave Brown era to find a QB this incompetent.
12. Just so you know, Philly D owners… they’re not really that good. It’s Delhomme (see early reference: “Sucks, Carolina.”)
11. Maurice Jones-Drew sure looked like the real deal. When healthy, he can carry the club pretty far, I think. I just wonder how long he can avoid—what? Hurt already? Oops. Nevermind.
10. Hmmm… smell that? Someone set fire to last year’s Arizona bandwagon. And Kurt Warner to Tim Hightower? Just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?
9. To paraphrase Swingers: “It’s no so much me as it is Adrian Peterson. He’s good.”
8. That Kanye West is one crazy bitch.
7. From now on, I will refer to him only as SuperBrees. SIX touchdown passes (one short of the all-time single game record, by the way).
6. At the start of the Giants-Skins game, the announcers refer to Eli as being “crisp.” I have no comment about this… it just makes me laugh every time I re-read it.
5. Aaron Rodgers needs to grow his beard back immediately. I think that’s why the defense was beating him up so badly.
4. Speaking of which, the only way the Packers were going to stop Adewale Ogunleye was if Rodgers rifled a couple of passes into his nuts – like Burt Reynolds did to Ray Nitschke in The Longest Yard.
3. By the way, that Adam Sandler sequel? It NEVER HAPPENED. Understand?
2. Matt Forte? The guy I traded up to pick second in my draft? Yeah… um… he didn’t look too good. And he gets the Steelers defense next week. What I’m trying to say is, you should sit Forte. But you can’t (unless you have AP and Jones-Drew on your team, too). So you’re screwed. So just do what I do and ply Jobu with cigars and rum and hope for a miracle.
…and finally…
1. My wife was watching the Raiders-Chargers game with me and was struck by how good looking one of the players was. I missed it, so I ran it back. It was Louis Murphy, Oakland’s rookie WR.
“He’s a black guy,” I said. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you… it’s just that my wife has commented in the past that she’s never been attracted to African Americans).
“No way he’s black… I think he’s Hispanic or something.” Was her retort.
“Um, no… look at him. Black guy. Plain and simple.”
But she was adamant. “No. Look at his skull shape. There are three kinds: Negroid, Mongloid and Caucasoid. That is NOT a Negroid skull.”
While we can get into the fallibility of craniofacial anthropometry in a moment, I just found it funny that my wife was so adamant about defending the dependability of her physical attraction history that she’d start throwing out skull shape as her leading counterpoint.
Oh, and just for the heck of it: although the categorization of a skull is clearly given arbitrary parameters, it will not locate the owner’s geographic ancestry concretely all the time. While one’s perception of an individual’s race can be affected by cultural aspects, the “race” of his skull is less ambiguous.
As Dr. Stan Rhine put it, “…it is clear that race does mean different things to different people. In the context of forensic anthropology, the term race is unambiguous.”
Although their craniofacial race based on skull indices is unambiguous, it will not pin point their geographic origins accurately all the time due to variation in skulls within a geographic region.
In other words, your argument is moot, honey. You were attracted to a black guy. Good for you. First time for everything.
Oh, and see the rest of you next week.

September 15th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
If Drew Brees was as dreamy as Tom Brady, maybe he would get a little more respect in the major sports site’s weekly rankings. For some reason, most people still don’t take him seriously.
I think the worst part about Brees from a fantasy perspective is that, unless you own him, you have no reliable way to capitalize on his greatness. With Brady, you have Moss and Welker. With Brees, you have 350 yards and 3 touchdowns distributed randomly to six or seven different people. Colston seems to get the fantasy nod as the top target, but why? One week it is Moore, the next it is Shockey, the next it is Devery Whateverson. You either own Brees or he frustrates you.
September 15th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
By the way, what do you think of changing our slogan from “Rotoholics… where every day is Sunday” to “Rotoholics… drinking your milkshake since 2008″?
just a thought