The Wire: Double Feature

I know, I’m super late and we have two weeks of fun to cover. Luckily, I have “trainings” for work today that I can “multi-task” during and get you guys the League content you so desire. I’ll try to keep it short and sweet:

Some of you probably don’t want to rehash the distant past (2 weeks ago), and are only wondering about how I thought you did this past week. I’m not sure why, because most of us did pretty awful in Week 6. So to Kris, Abie, Brent and Vigs: If you’re in a rush or just want to see me talk about how much you won by, you can scroll down and find Week 6 under the picture of another famous #6.

First thing you may notice from looking at the chart is a lot of blue, some red outlines on the “Add” side, and now some orange outlines on the “Drop” side. This is the first weeks that these orange bois have showed up, literally indicating that this player has been dropped multiple times (whatever significance that holds for you), and figuratively indicating that we are in the thick of it in terms of the revolving door of added and dropped players. I’d recommend not spending too much $ on these guys in the future, since you’ll probably end up getting rid of them.

We also had another interesting week in terms of the order in which transactions happened, with 3 players dropped before FAAB offers went through and 3 rounds of auctions due to dropped players being claimed on waivers after the main Tuesday night/Wednesday morning auction. All three late auction pick-ups resulted in Double Whammies (more on those next), which just goes to show that exciting things are happening in the League every day!

So now in the interest of saving some time, I’m just gonna rattle off some good and bad moves made in the lead-up to Week 5. A Double Whammy is when an owner gets more points than the number of FAAB bucks spent on them, as well as more points than the player who was dropped. More significance if the players are of the same position, less significance if the player dropped was injured or on a bye week. Overall, you decide how significant this really is. I think of it as “getting what you paid for” but sometimes you gotta make sure you outbid potential rivals and saboteurs, and other times the player’s dividends are cashed in later in the season.

The GOOD
Beans – Picked up Samaje Perine at a 4.3 point profit (16.3 points – $12). The Bengals Defense getting -1 point made this look even better on our trusty spreadsheet.
Spin: He sat on the bench and then got hurt so was subsequently dropped. He still beat Thomas by 10, so the blunder was not detrimental.
Max – Got his hands on Seahawks back-up Alex Collins for $5 and was rewarded with 8.2 points. K.J. Osborn was let go, and was so sad that he only got 2.9 points. Apparently, Collins’ performance was not good enough in Max’s eyes (maybe his opinion was skewed from the brutal loss to me), and he was dropped right after the Monday Night game. More on that later…
Additionally, Max snatched Tim Patrick from Brent for a scant $2 and got 12.4 points in return. He also rode the pine though, so had no hand in the effort to keep Max’s win differential against me at the high highs they once were.

The BAD
Brad – I’m really sorry that “Brad” rhymes with “bad”, truly an unfortunate start to the season for this guy, can’t catch a break. I really hope you’re doing better in any other fantasy league you’re in and whoever’s running the content in that league is giving you tons of praise. You’ll get there eventually, but right now I think our groom-to-be is in his own head a bit in between cake tasting and color-scheme choosing. $20 FAAB for AJ Green and dropping Rondale, who you spent $34 on, once he actually had a decent week? Big oof. I guess I was right when I named you as one of the guys who would spend all his FAAB first (even though I named literally half the League). You also did that thing again where you offered $5 for Jamison Crowder and also picked Rondale to be dropped so once he was let go in the Green transaction there was no one to drop for him. Plus, Crowder did even better than AJ this week. I have a feeling we’re going to see more of this as the season goes on, but who knows with this guy? I think I’ve mentioned this quote before, but some Jew named Bob once said, “When you ain’t got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose”.
Silver Lining: Maxx Williams getting .9 more points than the $1 spent on him, along with .6 more points than Robert Tonyan, still counts as your first DOUBLE WHAMMY!! Congrats buddy, here’s to more to come.
Thomas – The other newbie of the League is not immune to stumbling blocks either, despite his more “agreeable” start to the season. Streaming the Raiders Defense and having nothing to show for it aside from seven less FAAB bucks is not the move you want to make when there was a chance for you to put the sliding Beans Corp. firmly into stand-up watch with Brad. I’ll admit that it makes sense that Mike Gesicki would score more points than a defense, so it doesn’t really count for me as a reverse double whammy.
The even bigger mistake was the $22 spent on Latavius Murray, the only thing keeping this from being the dreaded RDW was that you dropped DJ Chark (who was injured) in the separate transaction before the auction went through. But hey, we all gotta be the Top Spender at some point. I’m watching the Chapelle special (with a permanent scowl and my arms crossed, don’t worry), so I’ll stop “punching down” at this point.
Brent – Actually one more thing. My guy picked up Rashod Batemen, who didn’t play, as a free agent and dropped Tim Patrick, who scored 12.4. Why man?

Lastly, Ryan spent his first small piece of his FAAB-le pie on Kenneth Gainwell who, as noted by the red outline, has already been added and dropped this season for poor performance. You were shorted by 10 cents of a point on the $3 you spent, but that’s no matter when you crush Brent by the biggest margin of the week (38.4).

Alright, that’s it for Week 5. Let’s get to the present:

EVERYONE was clamoring for Devontae Booker, God knows why. I could have told you it was a bad idea, and it’s not just because J-Tay is finally getting his shit together and I’m not desperate for RBs. Max was the big winner, once again not giving a previous pick-up (Alex Collins) the time to blossom. Tom Collins (that’s a drink) scored 7.4 more points than Booker D. Washington and spent $28 on him. 7 time 4 is 28. Weird coincidence, aliens. Anyway he lost big time to Brent.

The Commish has been clawing his way back into fantasy relevance, currently tied with me for 2nd place. This move scares me, because we haven’t seen the second-highest offer to go through result in a Double Whammy since Week 2 when Beans scooped up the Cardinals Defense who scored 15 in an 11 point win over Brad. Khalil Herbert is his name, running is his game. I thought Andrew was joking when he said we all fucked up by letting him have him, I thought this guy was a combination of Khalil Mack and Justin Herbert. Turns out, this guy is legit. Knowing this League though, Vigs’ll probably drop him by tomorrow. I also forgot to mention this was my roommate’s first spend of the season, which means that everyone has finally spent at least some (and in some cases most) of their budget this year! Yay for arbitrary milestones!!

Beans hit another Double Whammy with the Colts D, even though the Falcons were on a bye week it was still a smart move, so the moral victory is there. I also hit one with Graham Gano, even though Rodrigo was injured. Those three points contributed to my 10 point win, so I’ll take it.

Kris got some bang for his buck with the 3 points he got from Nick Folk, but maybe should have held onto Daniel Carlson and hit that 50 point win margin for the stats. Same idea with dropping Jared Cook for Hunter Henry. A dozen less dollars for what’s probably a pretty comparable player. Once I get my “Long Term Comparisons” project in full swing we’ll see if I’m right, stay tuned…

We got some good news for Brad! After a handful of successive adds and drops, our guy found Rhamondre Stevenson and ran with him, picking up a respectable 13 points from the New England back-up and 115 points overall. Biggest point total since your Week 1 win against Bonez? Not bad not bad. Let’s keep making things interesting. In another attempt to baffle me while organizing the data for this column, Brad was somehow able to put a $1 bid on Van Jefferson that didn’t go through because, and this is true, his maximum roster size would be exceeded. Don’t they not let you put the bid in in the first place if that’s the case? Mans just doesn’t want to pick more than one player to drop in any given week. Please, for all of us, go on the pod and explain this. You may very well have some good reasoning that I can’t think of, it may even be a trade secret you don’t want to reveal. This is getting mysterious Brad, what do you know?!?!?

Aside from the above, nothing of note really happened in Week 6. You all saw how your teams did, it was a stinker and the lowest combined point total of the season thus far. So there you have it, we’re all caught up. This has been a special Double Feature of The Wire, I’m gonna go have some beef stroganoff.