by Kevin Burton
I just broke the all-time record for fastest to drop a player off a fantasy football roster.
If you know fantasy, you know this is not a happy occasion.
Footballs have not even begun to fly yet. That comes tomorrow when the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs host Detroit.
(I don’t bet on sports or anything else. But if the line moves to Chiefs by 7.5, take the points. I’m telling you this is a one-score game.)
OK, back to my roster shakeup. I tried something different this year, signed up for a 20-team league. The rosters are set at 14 players instead of the usual 15. Even so, with 20 teams, we got down to players you normally wouldn’t draft.
There are different strategies for 20-team leagues and I didn’t know them. I was smart enough to grab a great quarterback, Jalen Hurts of the Eagles, with my first pick, 16th overall. I was stupid enough to not draft a second QB. I noticed too late that all the QBs left in queue, available to draft, were backups. That means no valid players available if Hurts gets injured.
My first attempted remedy was to draft New Orleans tight end Taysom Hill with my 14th and final pick. Last year on Yahoo Fantasy, Hill was listed as a tight end AND a quarterback. I did not have time during the draft to check to see if he was so listed this year.
He is not. Oops!
Fortunately I had done one other smart thing. I drafted Kareem Hunt with my 13th pick. Hunt is a fairly good running back but had not signed with any team at the time of the draft (and this writing). The idea was to take him, keep him if he signed in a good situation, dump him for somebody else if he didn’t.
I potentially had a running back steal. But I had to cash in that chip immediately thanks to my stupid one-quarterback move.
It hit me in the shower, right after the draft, that maybe the Philadelphia backup quarterback, Marcus Mariota, was still available. So I checked and he was! So I added Mariota and dumped Hunt.
I am known to make a lot of roster moves, but I outdid myself this time.
This solves my most-of-the-year problem, but I still need a solution for week 10, Philadelphia/s bye week.
I have read horror stories in fantasy football groups on Facebook, about dishonest fantasy commissioners. People who cheat if they need to, to get their team to the championship. The commissioner has the power to bend the rules in his/her own favor.
This 20-team league is the first, and perhaps the last, instance of my joining a league where I did not know the person running it. I have already seen this commish do some squirrely things. He changed the bench from eight players to six and the injured reserve from two to one, just moments before the draft, at the request of one of the other players.
Already, the league I am in is not quite the one I signed up for. But I’m just going to roll with it. I wanted to play in a league with 20 teams to see how it goes and perhaps start a 20-team league of my own next year.
Commissioner Kev in 2024? Maybe, maybe not. But I’m all into the NFL and fantasy football now.
In exhibition week three, The Houston Texans third-stringers played the New Orleans Saints third stringers and I was there watching. I also took in Eagles-Colts that Thursday, Lions-Panthers that Friday and Chiefs-Browns that Saturday.
I can’t confirm or deny tuning in Cowboys-Raiders and Broncos-Rams on radio that Saturday night.
I can’t say I am in mid-season form until there are two games on at the same time and I can wield the clicker like a pro. However, I did take out the trash at halftime of the Houston-New Orleans game. That shows me as a good fan, a good time manger and a good husband.
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