Author: Jack

Author of The Wire and LeagueStory

The Wire, Vol. 2: It Is Wednesday, My Dudes

Hey fellas, here we are again! We had another week of heroics and heartbreak, and I’ve made it my job to zoom in on the misfit players looking for glory and the owners who for better or worse spend their precious resources on them.

This week had some interesting developments; with the official introduction of COVID-19 into the NFL, players were being added and dropped but still secured on the “COVID IR” which has confused some but surprised none. Week 5 games seem to still be up in the air, so expect some more craziness in next week’s column (if the season lasts that long).

A few clarifications to the main table above since I changed it up a bit from last week:

-Column K’s difference is Dollars minus Points, pretty much a Bang-For-Your-Buck metric. Obviously QBs will generally have higher points overall and kickers less, but it’s fun to see who “wasted their money”.

-Column N’s difference is your opportunity cost for the player you dropped. It’s a less effective metric if the players are different positions or weren’t a starter, but it shows your future-predicting skills nonetheless.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into it. The MOST EXPENSIVE player of Week 4 was also the BIGGEST BUST! Max obviously saw my hilarious tweet about Rex Burkhead and decided he needed to have him, spending one-fifth of his total FAAB bucks on the RB (no one else even bid on him). Cam Newton contracting the ‘rona probably didn’t help, but Brian Hoyer and Rex look so much alike there should’ve been some kind of connection. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, and Max dropped a close close game to Kris.

The story of the defenses continues with Kris in Week 4, where he picked up the number 1 Colts (8 points for 8 bucks) in exchange for the Cardinals (-2), the positive 10 point difference being the second highest of the week. The Norse Horse also had one of the most favorable waiver adds with Randy Bullock, who kicked his way to 17 big ones for the Bengals and Dirty Mike and the Boys. I just realized there isn’t even anyone on your team named Mike, what’s with the name? McKinnon, maybe? I guess anything to forget the implication of “Boats and Younghoes”. This will be the first of many wrong predictions I’ll have made in this series, but it turned out that Kris’ early scrambling last week worked out in his favor, and I bet he’s pretty glad his $1 offer for Mason Crosby didn’t go through. More on that later…

The next matchup played out entirely on the auction block, no waiver moves from either (as you’ll see in the new “waiver summary” at the bottom). Brendan had two very solid and efficient pick-ups for $7 each: Alexander Mattison (7.7 points, didn’t start) and Rams D/ST (12). There’s nothing really special about these picks, and Beans Corp. is pretty unstoppable regardless so I don’t have much else to say. This series is about good waiver moves, not so much wins and losses.

The clear winner of the week’s waiver moves was Abie, and I’ll tell you why. A pretty efficient offer of $11 FAAB for the ever-reliable Cole Beasley, a perfectly efficient $6 acquisition of Mason Crosby–as a numbers guy I just love when that K-diff is 0–and the late STEAL OF THE WEEK in Mr. Tom Brady. Sadly, Abie decided to start Patrick Mahomes instead (who wouldn’t?) and ended up losing a pretty close game. On the bright side, he saved $10 on an offer for Justin Jefferson, the most saved this week. Look out for this guy, he’s still got 2/3 of his FAAB bucks, he’s gonna be quick on the mouse all season, and might make a late-season push once he mixes and matches the perfect squad.

Now we’re getting to the moments that some of us would rather forget. The match-up of two 0-3 teams is like a slow-motion car wreck: agonizing to look at but you kinda want to see how it ends up. This was the battle of the Andrews. Vigs got Jared Goff for $2, pretty solid right? In reality, the guy turned into Jared Goof (another typo from when I was writing his name back in that last sentence) this week against the G-Men. To make matters worse, Carson Wentz scored nearly 10 points more than Goff while riding Brent’s bench (more on that later). Poor performances from Darrell Henderson Jr. ($10) and Russell Gage ($5) added insult to injury in a loss that could’ve been avoided had Wentz, Jarvis Landry, and Damien Harris started. Let’s not dwell on it though, this is getting long.

Lebron didn’t have a much better week, having to drop his precious Big Ben due to COVID delays and picking up Joe Burrow, who didn’t do great fantasy-wise in his first NFL win. Something tells be the Bengals win was more important to him, I don’t know. The only offer Lebron made this week hit for Justin Jefferson, although he could’ve gotten the Vikings WR for $1 or $0. Gotta start being careful with your budget there! He also made the blunder of the week by letting go of Tommy B for Gronk, my notes for this transaction just say “oof”. Guess it didn’t really matter, because God was listening and gave this man a win anyway.

The last two games had next to no auction/waiver impact, but here’s a (hopefully) quick rundown: I picked up the Cowboys defense (if you can even call it that) in the second-worst blunder of the week. Brent added Robert Tonyan for no one and then dropped him for Carson Wentz, sounds like there’s trouble in paradise for Brent and Deshaun Watson 0_0. Tonyan dropped a quick 30-burger but it didn’t matter because of Austin Eckler’s injury on my side and the Cowgirls defense (that wasn’t a typo). Alex had some pretty low-stakes, low-dollar pick-ups in Auction, added and dropped Dalton Schultz who turned out to be a hot item, but his big move was grabbing the Chiefs D/ST for free. They scored 18 points and helped him defeat Ryan, who played around on the waiver wire a bit but kept a tight fist around his FAAB bucks.

That about wraps it up for Week 4! If you made it this far, I love you (but you probably already knew that). Someone should write a new column about trades, I was thinking about getting into them here but that’d be way too much content for one sitting. My advice: don’t pick up the Cowboys defense, and as always, don’t spend it all in one place. This has been The Wire, go League.

Next week: Ryan finally spends some FAAB bucks!!

…on two tight ends??

^FAAB Summary
^Waiver Summary, only includes adds and drops, all $0 transactions. Ryan’s two moves actually netted to 0 (one got him 6.3 and the other lost him 6.3, which is think is really cool too.)

A (Hopefully) Weekly Column from Jack

Alright, alright, alright. Due to the unique nature of The League and our Free Agent Acquisition Budgets (that’s what FAAB stands for, who knew), I decided to run the numbers a bit and liven up the mid-week storylines so they don’t go unnoticed in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

Introducing: The Wire. I’ll be taking a look back at the performance of the free agents who were picked up last week, speculating about the ones picked up this week, and analyzing everyone’s FAAB strengths and weaknesses. I’ll also dive a bit into those free agents who were added/dropped post-auction. Let’s begin with Week 3…

Boy oh boy, were there a shit-ton of injuries in Week 2. I think everyone had one of their first three picks go down with a multi-week or season-ending injury, and if it didn’t happen to you in this league it probably happened in another. The most sought-after player in The League on Wednesday, September 23rd was Devonta Freeman, the man who returned to the NFL to replace second-overall Giants star Saquon Barkley. I think everyone may have forgotten that the Giants are gonna Giant no matter who’s in the backfield. The big winner, or should I say loser in this case, was Kris, who spent a whopping $26 on this man (and that wasn’t even his biggest purchase this week). The one silver lining for Kris is that he decided not to start Devonta, who put up 1 point and is therefore the LEAST efficient pickup of the week. Kris also spent $27 on Jerick McKinnon and $15 on Dion Lewis who did not start and was dropped immediately, if you’re doing the math at home you know that Kris has not very many FAAB bucks left.

On the other side of the coin, we have Mike Davis. Now I don’t want to gas Lebron up too much, but he was the only person in The League to think of picking up the man who would replace number one overall Christian McCaffrey. Maybe it’s because the Carolina star’s injury isn’t season-ending like Saquon’s, maybe it’s because Mike Davis didn’t sign an emergency contract and was just kind of there already, kudos to you either way. This was actually one of the few position players who scored more points than FAAB bucks spent on him. Ultimately Lebron could not convert this smart spending into a win, as he did not start his new recruit and ended up losing a close game in which Davis outscored RB2 Kareem Hunt and Flex Devin Singletary. He also dropped Justin Jefferson who was quoted as saying “Thank God Almighty, free at last” and dropped a quick 27 on the Titans, only to be picked back up again by Lebron this morning for $10 (he actually beat Abie’s $10 bid in our first tiebreaker, don’t ask me how). I guess there are some things you can’t teach, better luck next week.

The biggest winners in the Week 3 auction, were interestingly enough the people who picked up defenses. Looks like I’m learning the names of some more defensive players because these guys are the real deal. The BIGGEST STEAL of the week went to Beans Corp. and their acquisition of the Colts D/ST for $7 and a whopping TWENTY-SEVEN points. Of course, playing the Jets didn’t hurt, but this defense was Beans’ second-highest scorer of the week in a very close game with Kris (see two paragraphs up). Brent also ditched the Bears and picked up the Bucs D for $3 and got 16 points for his trouble. Alex tried to sneak in with a $1 offer but had to stick with the Chargers, although I don’t think that would have affected the outcome of his matchup ;).

Speaking of the Vignali twins, they had quite a rough week of free agency. I love them to death and am forever grateful for welcoming us to their home on a weekly basis, but this got ugly, plain and simple. Andrew picked up Darrell Henderson Jr., who got 18.5 points sitting on the bench in a close loss and a drop to 0-3. Then, Russell Gage gave The Commush some negative returns (that was a typo but he’s Eddie Mush so I’m keeping it). Alex’s only pickup was his hero Rodrigo Blankenship, who for just a buck gave him a solid 11 points. He actually saved the most money on offers he didn’t get, so hopefully he’ll use that extra $17 wisely in the future. It looks like Alex also entered two identical offers of $5 for Devonta Freeman, which is weird but he definitely dodged a bullet there. The ugliness continued into the FA Add/Drops, with Alex’s pickup of the Chargers D/ST scoring 1 point less than the Seahawks who he dropped to make room, and Marquez Valdes-Scantling simply not showing up on Sunday. Andrew actually had a decent add post-auction with the Titans D/ST, giving him 13 points vs. the Browns’ 2, but it still wasn’t enough to get the win. If we didn’t love them so much, these two may have been better off ending their careers with The League as the Champ and the Top Scorer. Best of luck for the rest of the season.

You can see all of the auction results in the spreadsheet above, which is ordered a little more clearer than how ESPN puts it to show who bid on the same player(s) and the handy point total for the week of the pickup. I also included a FAAB bucks summary below, I didn’t include the remaining balance because ESPN only shows the current balances and subtraction is tough. Yes, I’m an accountant. I’m also hungry, so I’m not going to get much into Week 4’s auction without the point totals to show you all that you wasted your money again. Just based on the adds & drops so far today, I can tell you that Kris is in panic mode. We’ll see how that goes.

My advice: Spend your FAAB bucks wisely, pick whichever defense is playing the Jets or Giants, and don’t spend it all in once place. Ryan, you may want to start spending some of yours, buddy. Until next time, this has been The Wire.