Category: The Wire

Edit: I failed to mention that despite my win, I arguably made two of the worst moves of the week, losing points by grabbing Cole Kmet (was gonna go for Uzomah but for some reason didn’t want to double up on Bengals even though they’re legit this year) and Randy Bullock (11 points is solid for a kicker to be sure, but the G-Man Graham Gano won out for this week). Just wanted to make sure I’m not covering up my own mistakes while pointing out yours. Thanks!

Big doings happening here at Must Be Sunday, huh? It looks like we’ve gone “public” and had our biggest day of traffic on the site ever after some structural renovations, which is great to see. Don’t be alarmed though, we’re still the same guys doing the same shit for your entertainment for absolutely free. There is still much work to be done before we become the top result on Google when you type in “fantasy football”. That said, welcome to anyone who’s new here. Things may be a bit confusing at first if you’re not in The League, but if you know us (or even if you don’t) then the storylines should catch on easily enough. You may even pick up some strategy when it comes to bidding on waiver wire heroes and horrorshows, who knows?

This week was a special one to be sure. Not even bringing points into the equation, we had the second-highest percentage of player pick-ups to start in the following game (17 players for 70.83% vs. Week 4 with 10 players for 71.43%) AND the second-highest percentage of those players who got the immediate start helping their new team to a win (8 players [all positions] for 33.33% vs. Week 3 with 4 players [D/STs, Ks & Emmanuel Sanders] for 40%). There were also some pretty slim win margins this week, which makes some of these acquisitions that much more important. Wait, picking up free agents and spending your FAAB on players is actually important? Of course it is, you jabroni! That’s why we do what we do here at The Wire. Let’s take a look at some match-ups:

Max vs. Beans: Very helpful that the highest spender of the week also had one of the closer games of the week so that I could kill two birds with one stone. For the second week in a row our Southern Man was embodying the Big Baller Brand, spending $27 (which is the second lowest top bid, not including my $4 for Todd Gurley in Week 1 lmaoo) and beating out a different BBB: Beans, Brad and Brent. I bet Brendan really wishes he could rethink his bid for this one and add an extra Hamilton, because even though it’s well-known that he rarely spends big bucks on position players (and is a loyal reader of this column so knows not to go too crazy on any one bid) that 23.8 point return would have eclipsed the 12.44 point deficit he lost by and kept him one game further away from working on his stage presence and mic-holding stance. I always like to end on a bright note for those who fell into unfortunate circumstances though, and Max’s recent spending spree all but ensures that Beansie will be able to out-bid him for the rest of the season (unless he trades for some FAAB). Plus it seems like Max short-circuited on the Add/Drop side of things, settling on O.J. Howard (1.4) and sticking with Tim Patrick (2.6) instead of holding onto Robert Tonyan (14.3) and Bryan Edwards (11.8), which goes to show that things are shakey despite the win. Maybe start cracking some jokes on-air to practice for us. Lastly, the Beans Corp. hire of Derek Carr was the first time this season that someone spent money on a QB, so that’s exciting for me.

Vigs vs. Tom: We knew from the draft that this week was gonna be tough for the Buffalo Bonez, with his first three picks in the draft on a bye. Our Fearless Commish went over this a bit in his Power Rankings from earlier today, but I’d like to emphasize just how close Tommy was to pulling off the W despite being short-staffed (just like the rest of the country/world, ooh he’s political). If Vigs left the nearly 30 points he got from Corey Davis and Khalil Herbert on the bench and these events I’m about to describe happened differently than in our timeline, there’d be a lot of stomping around and yelling coming from Apartment 3B/Meriwether Trail since he was up there this weekend. Maybe in the alternate timeline he was here, so I’m keeping it. A respectable 8.1 points from Ricky Seals-Jones, along with the pebble in Ryan Succops’s cleat and the Ravens Defense looking more scary than the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name are the deciding factors in this battle between former Congers residents. You really would not expect any of those to decide a game for you, but this is The League, where anything is possible if we look at it close enough. Tommy Boy’s smart move of picking up Devonta Freeman for a solid 11.4 also ended up being for naught, as it looks like he’s already back off the team. Hopefully your starters had a nice rest-up during their bye and are ready to come back with a vengeance.

Kris vs. Ryan: It looks like Ryan finally got the memo to start spending some FAAB and is wheeling and dealing out here. Don’t worry buddy, you’re not behind or anything, and your team has been doing pretty solid without the money moves. You dropped to second-highest budget in The League after Vigs (lots of “second” things this week, maybe it was because I’m second in the Power Rankings lol) after you held the title of Most Leverage for Week 6. Most importantly keep doing your thing, don’t let this one close loss and two small waiver missteps get you down, and if you want more players with “III” in their name, I heard Robert Griffin and Golden Tate are available ;). For context, newly-minted Martians Henry Ruggs III ($11, 5.1 pts.) and Mecole Hardman ($7, 2.8 pts.) were outscored by the newly-grounded Earthlings, Big Play Slay (8.8) and Kenny Gains (12.1). Refraining from making these moves would have kept King Marzy at the top of the Budget Pie and out of the L column for this week, but instead the Norse Horse pulled ahead by a 5.14 point nose. Kris, you staved off the hungry dog for this week, and it’s undisputed that you’re doing the best out of anyone in terms of net points from add/drops (see the Waiver Report at the bottom), but long-term trends sometimes speak louder than current-season stats.
I’d like to direct everyone’s attention to the chart below, which maps Kris and Ryan’s total games above and below .500 through the past three seasons. I finally added the 2020 records and it’s super interesting to get that birds-eye view of our performances over time. This is my personal favorite 2-team comparison (it’s crowded with all 10 teams on one chart so I played around with the filters), but it’s also super pertinent in the wake of this week’s match-up.
Is Ryan a force to be reckoned with?
Did Kris miss his chance to win a championship?
Will we see these lines cross this season?
Only time will tell…

OK. Gonna wrap up with a few oddities since the other two match-ups were blowouts and therefore the moves made were not super consequential. You can see the chart at the top if you’re really fiending for more.

So Ryan picked up Ryan Tannehill this week, and if it wasn’t freaky enough that they have the same name, the Tennessee slinger scored (19.40) his exact projection (19.40). You’re not seeing double, don’t attempt to adjust your picture, this actually happened.

Last but not least, any post about this season would be incomplete without a Brad mention. We must both be Jay-Z fans, because we landed at a point differential for this week of 44:4. The real reason for the mention this week though is what I’d imagine is the last possible surprise I could possibly see when I open up the Offers Report. You may have already noticed it in the chart at the top, if not I’d recommend you go look at it quickly. You may be wondering, “How did Ryan get Henry Ruggs III for $11 when Brad offered $12?” Then you might assume that, like in previous weeks, Brad promised the drop the same player in more than one transaction and once Jalen Reagor was was dropped for Emmanuel Sanders it was deemed null and void. Close, but no. It turns out that once Waylon’s Doggie Daddy paid $18 for the E-Man on his bye week, he didn’t even HAVE $12 to spend! Therefore, the reason becomes “Acquisition budget would be exceeded.” This is true, check it out on the website. I’m not sure who would have had the tiebreaker if both he and Ryan bid $11, which is all Brad has left, but I’m pretty certain at this point Brad’s just trying to spend all his FAAB so that I’ll shut the fuck up about it. Well you’re in luck, because even though I’ll still be covering your add/drops for the rest of the season, I’ll be shutting the fuck up for this week right now.

This has been The Wire, Happy Halloween, enjoy your treat.

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.

Yo yo. We had some stuff go on this past week, you were all there. You listened to the pod so you largely know if anything significant happened but here’s another recap for your face to look at:

We started off the week of new teammates with an interesting development – we had an Add/Drop before the waiver claims went through! Who knew that could happen? Not me, that’s for sure. I guess you can only drop in preparation for a later pick-up, thanks for the tip Bonez. Not sure how useful it really is but good to know. We’ll be seeing more of these in the future.

The BIG story of the week was the man who would replace the number 1 pick in nearly every fantasy football league in existence. It would be useful to remember, however, that the man replacing the #1 is in fact NOT the #1 himself. Perhaps it’s a bit of a placebo effect or some form of Murphy’s Law that had more than half the league thinking the big shoes of CMC needed to be (and would be) filled by the man with a name sounding like the combination of a nursery rhyme and a Ben & Jerry’s flavor. $144 FAAB was offered up in total for this man, who I had just heard of the previous Sunday, but in the end it was Kris who ended up taking the cake with a whopping $41 out the door. Chubby Hubby returned the favor by putting up a measly 8 points, we know this already. Lost to Max by about 12, Jared Cook being added to the line-up kept this loss from being more embarrassing. Looking at the table now, it almost seems like everyone else who bid put in progressively higher amounts just to get Kris to overpay like in a classic eBay scenario. At least you can take solace in the fact that he played better than the player you dropped for him – no one.

My pick-up of Dalton Schultz seems like more and more of a good move as the days go by, we’ll see if that extends to weeks as George Kittle is dealing with some more injuries (which is the exact thing I was afraid of when I stuck his nametag on my spot on the draft board). Kinda sucks that no one else even went for him and I spent $21 though. It made by total budget afterwards $69, so I got that going for me, which is…wait for it…wait for it…nice. Moving on:

Sports betting, NFTs, and now FAAB? Is there anything Abie can’t do? Our man Baberaham Leider continues his series of calculated moves to get exactly what he pays for, if not more, in his acquisition of Hunter Renfrow for $11. The 13.5 points he grabbed on Monday Night were just what he needed to knock The Commish off the top spot in the Power Rankings. We should really start thinking about how we’re gonna beat this guy before it’s too late and he’s wearing that championship belt all over New City. When no money is involved, Abie can afford to drop Quintez Cephus (10.3) for a shot at Nick Westbrook-Ikhine (4.4). We’ll see if that move plays out long-term in an upcoming project I’m working on, but I’m sure Abie will still be taking care of his chickens by the time that drops later in the season.

Speaking of Abie, he’s playing Brad in the upcoming week. Beans and I speculated what they would talk about if they were the only two in a room together. After relistening this morning, I realized it’s pretty heartwarming to think that a New City Jew and an Honorary Congeroid would actually have a lot to discuss. Aside from the obvious topics of fantasy football, hockey (I’m convinced without any inquiry that Brad’s a Penguins guy despite the Philly football loyalty) and golf, they could both talk about having dark hair and being Big Burley Boys. That’s really all you need in life. Anyway, Brad picked up the Titans Defense ($8, 2 pts.) who did nothing for him. He also pulled the move I mentioned last week where he put the same player to be dropped for multiple pick-ups, so the offer for the Bengals D ($8, 1 pt.) fell through, not that it would make a difference. I actually decided to do the same move on my offer for Tim Patrick ($5, 5.4 pts.), so you’re welcome Brent.

With all of this other stuff going on, it’s easy to see how this next claim flew a bit under the radar. Longtime Martian mainstay, Mike Gesicki, is starting to get hot (more hot than he is to begin with lol). He may as well be the Dolphins WR1 until we hear back if Jaylen Waddle is good or not. Tommy Bonez, the Comeback Kid, picked up the boy for $2 and got a very handsome 14.2 points out of it already. Those points stayed on the bench, but in the end it didn’t even matter (RIP Chester Bennington) because he had defeated Brent Flandrews by a solid 15 points. On top of that, he outbid Vigs by just a dollar, and even if the losing bid in question was itself one dollar, that could’ve been a gamechanger if it went the other way. Sneaky sneaky, I’m keeping an eye on this.

My roommate has mentioned a few times that he picked up Dawson Knox for free and was rewarded with 18.20 points. I’d like to imagine if someone from 1820 was transported to today, they’d be impressed by this pick-up, but sadly it’s less impressive when you also lose, so here’s to another strong showing next week.

Last thing I’ll say is, surprisingly, a compliment to Max. It’s not terribly significant, but he picked up the Colts defense, who got him 10 points in his 12.6 point win against our top spender of the week. Mike Williams. By the way, I listened to that Paul Pena song you sent me and then a few others on the album afterwards. Pretty good stuff.

Alright, that’s about it for The Wire this week, remember not to spend it all in one place! Check out the charts below, have a happy Friday, and Go League.

Alright chucklefucks, I’m back in the office for the first time in probably a full week (that’s a lot for me) and of course I drank coffee way too late in the day and stretched an order of Dunkin hash browns across 6 hours (that’s 1 hashbrown per hour or hbph for those in a rush). Basically I did a bunch of useless shit in the office until I felt I had done enough to say I’ve been productive and then realized I was really hungry and dehydrated. Now I’m sitting here with a bunch of Chick-Fil-A and water, ready to crank this out and get to the gym for a bit before The Challenge comes on at 8. Hopefully my debaucherous roommate will be able to join me, I know he needs to take a load off (or maybe he’s done that enough already after last night). Hahahah alright I’m trying too hard to make jokes, analysis time:

As you can see above, there weren’t a ton of players that had multiple people putting in offers this week, but the top two had two bids each. Brad handsomely outbid me for Rondale Moore, spending $34 FAAB for a 1.4 point payday. This happens to be the largest difference between dollars spent and points scored in the HISTORY of The Wire, as meaningless as that may be. Seriously, there’s no significance to that metric, who’s to say that he doesn’t score 50 points next week and then he’d be worth every dollar spent? Nobody, that’s who. But we like to have fun with numbers here, so a little perceived positive or negative impact can be good fun for The League, and one thing they always say about us here at Must Be Sunday is that we like to have fun. I guess we’ll see next week if Chubba Hubbard puts up less than 8.4, then there’ll be a new sheriff in town when it comes to overspending.

Next biggest purchase was quite possibly one of the best FAAB pick-ups I’ve seen. King Bean$0 swooped in and grabbed the Cardinals D like a cardinal would grab a stick with a worm on it or some shit to bring home for its babies. In the case of Beans Corp. however, the Arizona defense scored 5 more points than the amount of dollars spent, which again means next to nothing but is fun to see. On top of this, a real consequence of the pick-up was the Company’s much-needed win against none other than our top spender this week, Brad. As you can see in the chart above, the Cardinals 15 points were INSTRUMENTAL in Beans Corp’s win by 11.7, without that pick-up we may have seen the anticipated “I Don’t Wanna Be Around Anymore” article from the CEO. Right now he’s riding a high though with all his teams on the upswing, so enjoy it.

I’ll mention now how I spent another 6 FAAB bucks on a useless player in Demetric Felton. I should have known, yards are not in De-Metric System. That brings me up to $10, or one Hamilton, down the drain. We’ll see if Dalton Schultz does me any favors as a worthy back-up for Kittle.

As many of you know, I spent this past Sunday at the Governor’s Ball Music Festival, and while Andrew Cuomo’s testicles did not make an appearance, I thoroughly enjoyed the vibes instead of constantly checking the fantasy app or ESPN for score updates. Between the lack of cell service in the Citi Field parking lot and the sheer number of people in attendance, I was hardly able to send or receive anything from about 4pm to 10:30pm. I knew things weren’t looking great for my by 4, so I decided not to worry about it and stuck to dancing, eating, drinking, and giving Mr. Met the old “va fangool”. I digress though, when I got around to compiling the point totals and everything else that goes into this production, I fully realized just how close I actually was to winning against Kris this week, if not for a few calculated moves made in the lead-up to our match-up. I will detail them below:

Defense and kicker. One of my leagues doesn’t even have kickers, and it all came down to these positions that people will not care about. If you read this column, you’ll know that they can make or break you in any given week, but also who the hell knows when one’s gonna pop off? Daniel Carlson with a twelver (double his prior K, Jason Myers, as well as double the $ spent) and Panthers D/ST with a tenner for free are what ultimately did me in after all the bad RB/WR moves I made with my roster. If it’s Myers and the Rams D, I’d be the one with the big smile and the blonde hair and the well-defined muscles. Instead, it’s Kris. I’d like to say it’s just classic me getting in my own way, but in reality I was beaten at my own game. Well done buddy, if you beat me again in Week 11 then I’ll still be up 4-3 on you all time 😉

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you’ll have heard all you needed from Max about his team winning this week. He’s handling success like a cool-looking duck, calm and cool-looking on the surface but frantically paddling paddling paddling below. Our man with the mic ran the gauntlet of available running backs, ending on Peyton Barber and Ameer Abdullah. Both men sat at gametime however, with Barber racking up an impressive 21.7 points. Probably lucky for us that he wasn’t given a starting spot, as it would have embiggened the already impressive 34.74 point win margin, and our newly signed contributor may have taken over my job writing The Wire this week and just typed Peyton Barber and Mike Williams over and over again. Just remember: anybody can get it, the hard part is keeping it mothafucka.

Lastly, I’d be remiss to not mention the moves made by our mostly-beloved Commissioner and my A-1 roommate. After a shaky Draft Day and Opening Day loss to the guy with the most PA through three weeks, it seems like Thomas and Friends is getting itself “on track”. See what I did there? At what I want to say was the very last possible minute on Sunday before game time, Vigsy picked up veteran Emmanuel Sanders as a body to round out the his line-up in a tilt against the powerhouse that is Brent. The unlikely hero ended up spazzing out, catching 5 of 6 targets for 94 yards and 2 of Josh Allen’s 4 touchdowns (and none for Devin Singletary, bye!) This almost certainly helped the Friends pull ahead after a nail-biter of a Monday Night game…
But wait, that’s not all! You may not have even noticed this on your first look at the chart, but waaay back on Wednesday there was a little free agent pick-up by the Commish for a little defense from a little town in Nevada. That’s right *Chris Berman voice* THE RAIDERS! To say that this match-up was a nail-biter honestly doesn’t begin to describe it, because if this little pick-up didn’t happen and Vigs ended up using the Bears Defense, Brent wins by a margin of 0.58 if everysinglething else stays the same. Truly incredible. At some point on that day, Vigs actually mentioned to me that he was hoping to be sneaky and grab the Cardinals D/ST early that morning before realizing Beans had swooped in like a baby bird or whatever I said before, and so he had to settle for the Raiders instead. I thought nothing of it at the time, but looking back now we can see, in the words of Bobby Frost, “that has made all the difference.”

Okay, and that’s my story! Enjoy the other charts below, I need to take a shit from the Chick-Fil-A and it looks like I’m Citi-biking it home instead of the gym since The Challenge is on in about a half hour. For now this has been The Wire, tune in next week for coverage of the all-out brawl over CMC’s replacement and other fun tidbits that no one else cares about. Don’t spend it all in one place, but Ryan and Vigs maybe start spending some at all, some of these guys are running low…

Man oh man oh man. I tell you one thing though: it’s good to be back! We have an all new chart set-up to not care about, and a whole lot of reading to not read. I’m excited, hope you are too. If you’re just reading this as I’m posting, I’d probably go to sleep and start with this fresh in the morning. It’ll be like the morning paper, but better. Also, did you see that I’m listed as the author of this post instead of Beans? Plus I gave myself a cool ramen noodle avi, nothing to do with football. If you want to get your name in the author space, hit me up with an e-mail address and we’ll get you on the payroll. But I digress, let’s get into it:

Auction:
We had our first big scramble for a player, as well as our first 30-burger! The big winner, our reigning champ Brent, went on to trade Mr. Mitchell after spending nearly a third of his entire budget. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it works out. Max, Brad, Thomas and Abie all put up some money for Elijah “The Prophet” as well and lived to see another day. Check out the chart at the bottom of the column, I’m keeping track of that shit.

Abie spent $13 FAAB on Sterling Shepard, who put up that same amount of points in his Sunday Slaughter of yours truly. I guess he didn’t have to worry about replacing Raheem Mostert when Derrick Henry plays like 3 RBs in one.

Max Cohan. Who did you sell your soul to for Elijah Mitchell? Everyone who was anyone from 9/13 to 9/14 was talking about picking that bad boy up, and you got him for free? You even “outbid” Brad for Kenneth Gainwell, even though he had a higher offer, since he ended up getting Mark Ingram II for $8 and choosing Baker Mayfield as the player to drop for every offer (including Jared Goff, who got a $5 bid (same as Kenneth)). Hey Brad, you saving Sony Michel for later or something?

Nobody really had positive returns on their FAAB pick-ups this week, but one team who definitely saw a negative return was our other new guy Tommy Bonez, who dropped Graham Gano (22 pts.) for Ryan Succop (5 pts.). At least he only spent a buck and still got the win.

As a refresher and for the new guys, a player’s name highlighted blue means they’ve been added or dropped already this year, with a red/orange border meaning they’ve been added/dropped multiple times. The rest of the colors are just to show how high or low your offer is, or the positive or negative point returns the player/team saw the week of the acquisition.

Add/Drop
New for this season, I’m also going to highlight some of the good and bad free agent pick-ups. It’s definitely nice to see that all the players who were added scored more points than their dropped counterparts (even though a lot were due to injuries), but three transactions stood out to me this week:

Beans picked up Jared Cook who got a couple points. I wrote this down but I don’t think it really has to do with Jared Cook, but he could have won if he played James White instead of Miles Sanders. Sorry to rub it in, who could have known?

Daaaaaaaaaa BEARS. Their defense went on a tear this week and helped Justin Fields get his first W, you love to see it. Especially from the previously downtrodden Commish on a week when you’re not playing him. This add definitely helped Vigs in his win over the Jewish Journalist. L’Shana Tova, buddy.

If you’re like me, then you watched a seven-part YouTube documentary on the History of the Atlanta Falcons (shoutout Jon Bois and the rest of Dorktown). If you watched that documentary, then you know that the Falcons always find a way to screw up in the most surprising but at the same time predictable ways. That kind of luck came my way when I decided to hang back from the auction and pick up Cordarelle Patterson as a handcuff to Mike Davis, then he proceeded to sit on the bench where he notched a pair of TDs and 21 points (about the same margin I lost to Abie by). Classic.

“New charts, what do you think?”
That’s a little riff on a quote from the business card scene of American Psycho. Problematic Alert, uhhhh you know you’re not supposed to idolize those characters right??? Well then why the fuck are they all so COOL and GOOD LOOKING? I blame Hollywood, the jerks. Anyway, here look at this:

Okay, it’s late. I need to get myself hydrated for another fun day at work now that all my content has been created. Just kidding, I’ll probably set up for next week with the Auction Report from yesterday. Some more big buys, maybe some big points in return? Who’s to say? In about 22 hours, Week 3 will begin. For now, this has been The Wire, thanks for hanging in there if you’ve read this far, hopefully there will be less stuff to explain next week and maybe I won’t write the column Stoney Baloney like I did this week 😉

What’d you think I wasn’t gonna find time to do the write-up this week? I almost didn’t, but luckily I ran out of work to do at 3 on a Friday which is great. I’m gonna take a nap after this. We had A LOT of Double Whammies this week, which doesn’t really mean anything but we like to see everyone making good moves. Unfortunately, there will still be an Ugly section this week because there were some blunderful blunders made as well. Let’s talk to it:

The Good: Before you keep reading, scroll down to the bottom and check out the Waiver Summary (the last table included). Done? Ok, so you see the clear winner of the waiver wire this week was The Commish, Andrew Vigs. This the most free points I’ve seen in my short career of looking at that kind of thing. It really hurts to look at that small difference in the net points acquired and the points that were put into the starting line-up, because one small line-up change would’ve also made him a winner where it really counts. Who would’ve thought that Rex Burkhead would go dummy in a primetime game against the Ravens? Nonetheless, hell of a fight. Keep it up and you’ll be Back before you know it.

Alex, who is done with fantasy football, was the highest bidder of the week. He grabbed John Brown for $10 after I dropped him in the trade with Vigs for Waller and Gordon. Now that I think about it I should’ve kept Brown and dropped Gordon, since it remains to be seen that Gordon will provide fantasy value. Brown scored 10.2, so Alex got what he paid for almost exactly. He also decided to start the Lions defense, who scored -1 point (points?) but didn’t stop the departing owner from logging a win against Max. What section is this again? Let’s move on to a couple of winners.

I’ve been saying it for months, Abie is making moves and should be feared because we are now entering the Endgame. The decision Sunday morning to take Kalen Ballage (after he had been added and dropped many times throughout the week) could be what put his team over the top this week. Granted, removing the 12.7 points still would’ve given him a win, but the butterfly effect is very real. I told him to go for Jamaal Williams, what do I know? I’ll tell you, not too much.

I’m a little short at running back in my other league after losing Saquon and taking a completely failed gamble on Cam Akers. So I picked up J.D. McKissic a few weeks ago, and he did okay. Then in Week 9 he started going off. I didn’t necessarily NEED another RB, but I saw my guy was on the auction block and threw a three dollar bill out there, if anything to keep others (my opponent) from possibly getting a lowkey player with high fantasy value. That’s exactly what happened. Brendan and Brent both put $2 bids on J.D. and lost out to me. Leading up to Sunday, I started questioning his legitness and decided to sit him despite spending the $3. It turns out that all my lineup decisions were wrong, and I left a TON of points from him, DJ Moore, Ronald Jones, and Malcolm Brown on the bench. I still managed to win in a nail-biter thanks to a relatively quiet performance from Dalvin Cook. I’m starting basically all those guys I sat last week and I won’t be surprised if I get screwed over again, especially after the bad omen of spending $4 on Jameis to find out today that he won’t be starting. You gotta wait until next week to find out how that turns out though.

Rounding out the Good is Kris, who had two solid Double Whammies with the Packers D/ST and Duke Johnson, both of whom started and helped Kris get a much-needed win. Can these standings BE any closer??

The Ugly: We skipped the Bad section this week, as there are only two other teams I want to talk about. Beanzy and Lebreezy, both of you guys pretty much reenacted the Simpsons gag where Sideshow Bob can’t stop stepping on rakes that pop up and hit his face (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRq1Ksh-32g). Both of them had decent pick-ups in the FAAB auction, but the waiver wire absolutely demolished both of them. Let’s look at one at a time:

Beans – If you listened to the podcast, you’d know that Ryan Nall was a big topic of conversation. Sadly, he didn’t get a chance to shine because he was dropped for Kalen Ballage. But wait a minute, didn’t Abie start Ballage? You’re absolutely right! Brendan had the bag secured and dropped it for Jared Goof. At the very least, he did better than the alternative of Carson Wentz, and Brendan probably would’ve slashed his own tires if he lost because of Wentz. Then, Beans Corp. terminated Boston Scott due to poor performance only to have him score 13.9. The guy he picked up instead was Hunter Renfrow, who was then dropped for Darnell Mooney, started and ended up doing worse than Ryan Nall. Big oof.

Lebron – Brendan’s paragraph above really read like A Series of Unfortunate Events to me. Lebron’s week can be summed up by one bad move: dropping Nyheim Hines. 26 points. This hurt me too because of the back seat that Jonathan Taylor has apparently taken in the Colts offense. Had Lebron kept NyHeimdall (as I’m sure he’ll be called) in at flex and all other conditions were the same, he would’ve squeaked out a win against Abie by 0.5 points. I did the math. Butterfly effect though. Ts & Ps.

Welp, another week in the books. The biggest room in the world is room for improvement, let’s all strive for that. This race is tighter than ever, and there’s no telling who will be in and who will be out. Let’s see if Taysom Hill really has what it takes to eat a W. Maybe Mike Thomas will have a good game, maybe Austin Ekeler or George Kittle or Joe Mixon or CMC will come back, maybe the Jaguars will cover (not fantasy related). For now, this has been The Wire, Go Bucks.

Just kidding, we miss it though! What is there an election going on or something? Nobody wants to only read this, it’s a supplement to the game recaps either in podcast or article form. By the way, who’s working on the article analyzing all the trades from this season? And does anyone want to write this for me next week? I promise there aren’t a lot of players who got bidded on and I’ll even send you the charts. Let me know! Anyway, let’s get it started in here:

The Good: Our Founder Beans, who was just given a good-natured ribbing by Yours Truly, redeemed himself from last week when he found himself in the Ugly section. This week was quite different, and Beans Corp oversaw an under-the-radar Double Whammy with a late bid on Brandin Cooks (a familiar face) and a “Same-Start-Win” with his pick-up of the Rams defense. See the charts above and below for why those are two of the best moves of the week, things turned out overall pretty bad in most of the few transactions that went on. We’re getting into the nitty-gritty here. The win against Brent in Week 9 was much needed, but now a running back is what’s needed. We’ll see if he gets one next week…

Max grabbed Jerick McKinnon (another familiar face) for $8, outbidding Brendan by $2. The San Francisco RB scored 14.3 points in a matchup that was won by Max by only 6.5. Lebron made a bunch of moves on the waiver wire that didn’t really work out, one in particular we’ll discuss soon, but if all else stayed the same, it really was this smart bid that put Max’s team over the top. Just watch your back because as I’ve told Brent before, the view from the top is nice but the fall is that much longer.

I was about to write about how Abie offered a total of $22 and none of it was actually spent, but I just realized he paid $16 for Devonta Freeman (a third familiar auctionee). My formulas didn’t pick up that amount as spent because Freeman had 0 points this week out with an injury. The Giants didn’t need him to win, but Abie might’ve needed this valuable player in order to win this week. Hopefully that $16 was well spent and Devonta comes back and leads the G-Men to a division championship, regardless of how pathetic the division in question may be. I fixed the formula by giving him 0.000001 points and calculated that Kris actually saved the most this week with $8. Good job Kris.

The Bad: Vigs, the Commissioner we all know and love, was this week’s big spender, balling out for 2019 Heisman hopeful J.K. Dobbins (the fourth and final familiar face). If you haven’t noticed, when you bid on someone who was already bid on this season there’s about a 50% chance they’re gonna be a bust. The key is to bid low on these guys, like Brendan and Max did. J.K. knows how to run, he does his job well there’s no doubt, but the Ravens running game has not really panned out this year. Dobbins is also a rookie, and I know I drafted him but he definitely needs a few years to get his footing before he becomes the next Ray Rice (but less abusive). 4.5 points for J.K. on a $20 bid, 7.9 points for Tre-Quan Smith who was dropped, double saddness. Andrew also dropped Brandin Cooks (15.8) for a hurt Matt Breida, adding insult to injury and helping his podcast co-host in the process.

Rounding out the Bad section is the other Vignali twin. Alex’s team performance definitely belonged in the Ugly section, but I’m not here to discuss all that. He dropped the Titans D (13) for the Cardinals D (2) in a “Same-Start-Loss”. Keeping the Titans onboard wouldn’t have secured the dub, but it would’ve made it look a little closer.

The Ugly: Standup Alert! This move really couldn’t have come at a worse time for Lebron. I don’t want to get into all the drama since I wasn’t present at the Owners’ Retreat and the Secretary didn’t take the best notes. That’ll all be discussed in the soon-to-be-greenlit reality show/webseries called League Watch. We’re shopping it with Viacom, they want a funny animal sidekick/ref but I don’t know if that would really fit the dynamic we have right now. But I digress…Lebron saw CMC was coming back and decided that Teddy Splashdown would just hand the ball off the rest of the season instead of slinging dimes to Curtis Samuel and my nearly acquired friend Robby Anderson (anyone want DJ Moore?) Unfortunately for Lebu, that’s simply not the case. Plus, the #1 overall pick is out once again. Big Ben did well for sure, idk how that guy is still playing outside of maybe using that deer antler shit, but leaving Teddy in the starting line-up would’ve gotten The Big Lebuski three points closer to a much-needed win. Crunch time, buddy.

Well, that about wraps it up for this week. Thanks for playing along, and think about what I said in the first paragraph. If you’re thinking about it, just start doing it and you’ll make time for it. Lots of different aspects of The League to be covered and discussed ad nauseum for an audience of 9. We love to see it. For now, this is The Wire. Happy Armistice Day!

Sup sup. I worked a little later than usual today and we have a pretty short list of offers for this week, so let’s get right into it:

The Good: DOUBLE WHAMMY ALERT! Abie, Abie, Abie, the moves are off the chart, you’re killin’ it. If you’ve read this column before, you know how I feel about the savvy defense streams, and this is up there with some of the best. The Cowboys are a new Opponent people are looking for in a defense week-to-week, and the divisional matchup paid off in dividends for HOCKEYPRO69. Six bucks is a modest but not crazy offer for a player you might immediately drop, as shown by Andrew V’s competing $3 bid. As you can see above, big point returns in both categories. To top it off, he had a big win this week, and this is one of the steps he took that solidified it.

Next, we have our resident e-boy wiggle dicker, Ryan O’Connell. The Martian went into this week’s auction hopeful for a few quick position player pick-ups in Sterling Shepherd and Carlos Hyde. He bidded low – as he should have – and unfortunately lost out to higher bidders named Alex and Brent. They both sat the guys they spent their money on, Ryan took his $7 and ran. On to the waiver wire, he immediately dropped Dalton Schultz (an earlier auction grab) and picked up Curtis Samuel. Go Bucks. I had him last year for a little while in one league or another, he always flies a little under the radar. Had an okay season last year, but got demoted like Dwayne Haskins when “Big Robby Anderson” came to town. This week though, he played just like he did when he was a whipper-snapper catching passes in Columbus. This nearly 20 point performance put Marzy over the top for a big win. Makes it seem like he DOESN’T want to do more Tik Tok dances 😉

Lastly, we have the Commish, who is definitely Back. A few good moves can turn into one great move, textbook case here for our fearless leader. First, he picked up Joey Burrow for a very solid performance (no double whammy bc the player he dropped was on a bye), then he grabbed the Saints defense for nobody and got a cool se7en points from them. These both contributed to him being the victor of the Battle of the Blackouts II. You missed out on the Eagles defense which would’ve give you and even more commanding win, but you saved $3 and I like where your head is at.

The Bad: Brent left Week 8 looking to shake things up, and for good reason. First, he lost out on Joe Burrow and had to settle for Derek Carr, who put up 7.46 less points. Then he bought Carlos Hyde who is…injured? Got injured? I’m not entirely sure, go Bucks. He also left some points on the bench in the form of Jarvis Landry and Tony Pollard. Who knows, a few better moves on his part, Abie doesn’t make the moves that he does, and you could’ve held onto a win and prolonged your view from the top. It’s a long fall from there, just saying. I won’t tell you how to spend your FAAB, but seems like trades get you better players 🙂

The Ugly: These moves were just awful, backfired entirely. Any good feeling these owners had related to these moves went unfulfilled, you really do hate to see it but it happens. We’ll start with Yours Truly, who picked up Demarcus Robinson just one week too early. Scotty Miller vs. the Giants with Chris Godwin out? To me that is the most appetizing pick-up since I-don’t-know-when. Bye Demarcus, hello first place in the division. I stayed up all Monday Night to watch this 3 on 2 finisher between me and Max, pitting teammates against teammates and Graham Gano against Danny Dimes. Ronald Jones fumble at the beginning, fuckin Mike Evans touchdown at the end, Scotty gets looks but ends up with a meager 5.7. Just torture. Oh, Demarcus? FOURTEEN POINT THREE. Max and I are not on speaking terms but I’m really just mad at…myself.

Beans buddy, savin up your FAAB isn’t the worst decision ever. What IS the worst decision is to drop Mecole Hardman the week that Patrick Mahomes decides to come back. You picked up Nelson Agholor and kept him on the bench, but the Hard Man scored even more points this week than Demarcus! Nineteen point fuckin one. You too would’ve held on a little longer to your secondary dominance of the League and your division. Better hope Dalvin keeps putting the team on his back.

Best for last, right? Come on, you’ve been reading it, you know which direction this list is going. By far, the biggest spender this week was Alex. 20 for his 40 dollars sat on the bench, both giving above-projection performances. Corey Davis must’ve had pigskin magnets on his gloves because he almost picked up 25 points in the best game of his season. The one player he did decide to play was Henry Ruggs III, who disappointed Henry Ruggs II and Henry Ruggs I by scoring a measly 1.9. In the process of that trainwreck, Mike Williams got a casual 18.5 for no one. Would that have saved Alex’s week? No, but it adds insult to injury. I’d say better luck next week, but we’re playing each other so maybe wait until Week 10 to fix this nose-dive of a run.

Well, that’s my story. Short, sweet, and to the point. I’m gonna go watch Arrested Development, or Clone High, or maybe Jojo’s Bizzare Adventure. Live from my work-from-home desk, this has been The Wire.

You can’t make this stuff up, I was three paragraphs into this week’s write-up when I got a notification on my laptop screen that says “Your computer is being restarted by IT.” Son of a bitch, I hope this doesn’t delete everything I was writing. It did though, so here we are. It’s too late to do that all again (what I had was basically a love letter to Brendan’s and my team (or our FAAB moves at least) and a lot of good jokes that will never see the light of day.

If anyone knows how to get that back, maybe I’ll finish it out but the short story is this: Brendan made great moves and won, I made a good move (the best move) and won, Max and Alex made some not great moves and lost, and Ryan made many mostly bad moves and still won. You can figure out the rest by looking up at the chart. Speaking of the chart, I made some additions and want to show you some new things I’m working on in lieu of a proper rundown.

So the owners’ names that are highlighted blue are just who I write about for one reason or another, I think I’ve left that in there before. Any player name shaded in blue has shown up on The Wire before, either as a player bought with FAAB or dropped for a FAAB pick-up. A red border around a player added means they’ve been bought with FAAB bucks before (used goods used goods). Orange border means this person has been dropped for a FAAB pickup before (whatever that’s worth, they’re good at being dropped). This doesn’t take into account waiver wire pick-ups for free, only money transactions, but maybe I’ll add that later.

What you see now is the list of players who have achieved what I’ve dubbed a “Double Whammy”. This means the player has positive differences in the K column (points-amount paid) and the N column (more points than who was dropped for them). Bonus points if they’re the same position (I highlighted), and extra bonus points if it’s the #1 most expensive player of the week. That’s what half of the love letter to Brendan’s Boston Scott pick-up was about. I also thought it was a coincidence that he and I both got a Double Whammy on a defense in a week where we beat Abie. Really cool that three happened this week, but now onto something completely different.

This is what I named the “Fate Chart”, because it’s based on the player you bought’s fate whether or not you actually got points for the FAAB dollars you spent. If anyone has a better name I’m very open to suggestions. Basically, this table looks for value in the players you bid on after the week of their pick-up, but it only counts the points they scored on your team whether they started or sat. There will be more to this as the season goes on and I have time to toy with it a bit, but look upon it now in its young glory! I can also sort it by owner, position, team, offer amount and most efficient offer (even though you can clearly tell it’s Rodrigo the GOAT).

There were a lot of other things I wanted to say, I wanted to congratulate Ryan on the win despite sitting Christian Kirk, dropping Randall Cobb, and not picking up Gio Bernard, but my IT Department took that chance away from me. They’ve helped me out of many jams before so I’ll let it slide this time. I thank you all for your continued readership and hope we all score 150 next week! This has been The Wire, kind of. Go League and goodnight.