MLB has the Minor Leagues. The NFL has the NCAA, UFL, and the CFL. Does the success and competitiveness of Brothers Keeper require a developmental league? Should we give potential players the chance to see what the league format and scoring settings are before actually committing to a full season or more of Brothers Keeper Fantasy Football? Building a keeper team on the tails of someone else's successes or failures could be quite the challenge.
Should it be required for one who wishes to be invited to Brothers Keeper to serve time in a Developmental Brothers Keeper League before being asked to join Brothers Keeper? This could help ensure that any potential league owner is the right fit for established vetrans of Brothers Keeper and for the potential intiate. The potential league owner may not be up to the challenge of owning an expansion team and building a dynasty from scratch or taking a team over after someone exits the league. In order to eliminate league and new owner stressors, should a Developmental Brothers Keeper League be built?
Crash Davis has some advice for anyone wishing to be in the Developmental Brothers Keeper League: "Relax, all right? Don't try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls - it's more democratic."
Again, we have a unique entry for a completely different sport. The 2010 MLB season is almost complete. In rare form, Ken Burns has produced a sequel to his famous Baseball documentary: Baseball: The Tenth Inning which airs on PBS stations across the country beginning tomorrow night at 7 PM CDT. It will air for 2 hours on two consecutive nights, September 28th and 29th, for a total of 4 hours.
I am particularly interested in the 2001 World Series, Cal Ripken Jr., and other story lines from the era of baseball I have grown up with. This film will probably appeal to those 35 and younger more than those who are older because it covers their baseball memory from the 1990s to the present day.
So if you have a chance, either watch it live, DVR it, or break out the old time VHS.
There are chokers in this world....and even if he's a choker, and the place kicker was certainly that--quite possibly the biggest choker in the NFL... which would place him high in the runnin' for biggest choker worldwide--but sometimes there's a place kicker... sometimes there's a place kicker. Wal, I lost m'train of thought here. But--aw hell, I done innerduced it enough.
Week 2 saw a ton of NFL games and perhaps a few fantasy games decided by kickers. Kickers who kicked 5 FGs to win and those who missed FGs to make their teams suffer losses. Perhaps your kicker was iced into a loss (e.g., Graham Gano).
Someone finally did it. They confirmed what we hate to know... and believe me, as a viewer of this sort of non-sense, it's kind of botherin' to think that the bad habit of Icing the Kicker by NFL head coaches is being validated with statistics. Thanks a lot University of San Diego.
There's a lot that happens in a single week of NFL play these days. This directly impacts the fantasy season one way or another. Either your guy was injured or you picked up an injured guy's replacement or you are finally ready to trade your entire team to the competition. Perhaps you want to call out your fantasy players and tell them, "Be a man!" Slap 'em around a little and make your fantasy team #1 priority in their lives. Totally understandable. You're probably not the first. The NFL just doesn't play out the way you'd like it to work out. It is out of your maniacal control and you just don't think you can keep it together any more.
It is also National Jump to Conclusion Week too. Tom Smykowski: "It was a 'Jump to Conclusions' mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor... and would have different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could... JUMP TO."
Maybe we also need the rest of Tom Smykowski's advice to Peter: "Just remember If you hang in there long enough, good things can happen. I mean, look at me!"
How ironic that a near fatal car accident can be considered "good things." Fantasy football might not be Office Space, but it is a test to see if you are looking long or short term. The moves that do or do not transpire now can either make you or break you. So with that in mind, take a look at a few pieces of help out there available to us for free because even if week one was akin to a car wreck, "good things can happen. I mean, look at me!"
Maybe you benched H Nicks WR on his 3 YD day (ahem: Yankinfowlsandfeline). If so, maybe you need some better sit/start advice. So take a quick look at FantasyPros first week's accuracy results of the experts sit/start advice (yes that is two separate links; one for the results in statistics and one in a commentary format).
The draft is over. All the anticipation from the draft has been eliminated from your system. Time to sit back and relax right? Right? Let the games begin (this Thursday!) right? Wrong. Now it is time for team management to the extreme for that competitive edge. For 16 weeks of football goodness you need to be on top of every piece of pertinent fantasy football information you can get your hands on. Everything from injuries to sit/start advice and the like should drive you to be like this guy, only for Brothers Keeper.
So let me point you to a few easy tools you might want to utilize in order to make it through your fantasy season. You ever wish you could remember if a player is on your team in one of your leagues? You ever wish you knew if a particular player is an available free agent instantly? What if you wanted to know all of this for all of your fantasy teams/leagues without having to scour each league's player search every time. Have no fear there is a perfectly easy way to get all of this information quickly and efficiently.
There is a pretty cool add on to your preferred web browser that will be helpful for your fantasy football season that I tried out this weekend. It's called Pickemfirst. It is free and easy to download and install. Once installed log in to the Pickemfirst website and set up access to all of your fantasy football teams (or other fantasy sports teams too if you'd like). It will only take 2 minutes tops to do all of this and then check out your first page of player rankings to see it's awesomeness. Once you get to a new page of rankings simply do a Shift + F on your keyboard and you'll see the results. The little colored boxes next to all of the players indicates whether they are on your team, someone else's team, or a free agent. Click on the colored box to see the multiple leagues/teams you have and the status for that player in each league. Such a simple tool never made life so easy before for the fantasy football player. Get it today.
If you'd like to know more about it look at the very short video describing what it does:
See it's awesomeness now?
So what games do you get to see on TV this week? Well, check out the506.com's NFL TV Distribution Maps for the answer.
Ok. Before the draft, Fantasy Football Calculator's Average Draft Position tool might have helped you. Now, I'll let you see it since the draft is completed. It basically allows you to create an instant graph of a player's ADP over the preseason mock drafts to see if a player's value is rising or dropping. You can select the league size and scoring method to narrow your research too.
Another pre-draft help would have been CBSSports.com's Fantasy Football 2010 Power Projector. The tool is nice enough to let you see Accuscore's information for free. Kind of nice since Accuscore's information looks incredibly expensive.
Sorry for all the post-draft tools being given. Here's a free Rate My Team utility by Footballguys.com to take a look at what they think of your squad.
Footballguys.com also has the best most updated depth chart for every team on one succinct page. Definitely the most handy depth chart I've seen.
9/10/10 UPDATE: Check out this cool tool by the folks at FantasyPros.com which will point you to experts opinions after you enter in the names of two players who you might want to sit or start.
So let's check out a powerful search engine one should figure out how to learn to harness for fantasy football purposes. Try to figure out supertrackr where you can track anything on the internet in real time. I was first made aware of this tool from either a tweet or a blog by Mark Cuban. I haven't had enough time to fiddle around with it but it seems powerful and helpful to the competitive fantasy football nut who wants instant information about their fantasy football team's players. I feel like it would be akin to streamlining coffee through an IV in the morning. Something we'll all need this fantasy season.
The draft day came and all were in attendance except for D Pilcher, J Fullerton, and P Smith. The first half of the draft took only 1 hour before an emergency call came thus pausing the draft for nearly 24 hours. The second half of the draft was completed online via the Yahoo! League Message Board (and is still in progress).
The results are thus:
Good luck to all of the Brothers Keeper participants on the upcoming season.
