Picked up Allen Robinson in a couple leagues. Faded him as a fourth-rounder last year because of over-the-hill risk, but he's still only just turned 30, and as a cheap waiver pick-up, worth the gamble IMO with Diontae Johnson out.
Last week was fairly uneventful in Survivor as most of the biggest favorites won. You had a scare if you took Washington, but it really doesn’t matter how the game went once it’s over.
Let’s take a look at this week’s slate:
(Screenshot from officefootballpool.com as of early Thursday morning.)
With no team more than 30-percent used, this will come down to picking the team you believe is most likely to win. (There is no “pot-odds play” here.)
The Bills and Cowboys are the two biggest favorites, and if you agree with the market, you would choose whichever among those two you thought had the slight edge. Right now, I’m leaning Buffalo because I think the Cowboys are a sell-high, and the Jets are going to slow down games by running and playing stout defense. But if someone were big on the Cowboys, I wouldn’t try to talk them out of it, and in fact among my 12 survivor entries I will sprinkle some of both.
The Niners, Eagles and Giants are the next tier down, and it’s conceivable one could put any of them in the tier with the Bills and Cowboys, but the Giants have a bad offensive line, and Andrew Thomas, by far their best lineman, is iffy for the game with a hamstring injury.
The Eagles were life and death in New England, and the Vikings could shoot it out with them. And the Niners are on the road against a team that just notched a blowout win. I’m going Bills and Cowboys, with a majority of my entries on Buffalo.
Alan Seslowsky and I discussed this in more detail on our podcast:
https://www.realmansports.com/p/week-2-survivor-podcast#details
Week 2 Survivor video plus a plug for #NOSTR
Guessing the Lines
I actually went 9-7 in my picking pool, though really 10-6 if you count the Chiefs-Lions software error, but I was bad where it counted, going 1-4 in my first two faux Super Contest pools and 2-3 in the “ugly” one. At least my worst fears of having a good enough record to win the Circa Millions despite not being in it are allayed for a week.
Let’s take a look at Week 2.
Unlike Week 1, I was much more in tune with this slate with my guessed lines rarely differing by more than a point from the actual ones. At first glance, I like the Giants (they’ll bounce back, I think), Titans (doesn’t feel right), Rams (feels even worse), Jaguars (betting against Mahomes is usually dumb) and Falcons (maybe.)
I won’t hew religiously to these disparities, but it’s a good way to get my mind working on the problem before I revisit later in the week.
Maybe this is recency bias but seems like there are more injuries to top players early this year than usual. Already missing or slated to miss games: Travis Kelce, Cooper Kupp, Jonathan Taylor, Christian Watson, Mark Andrews, Diontae Johnson, JK Dobbins, possibly Aaron Jones, Aaron Rodgers. It's only been one week.
Monday Night Observations
Contemplating retirement, Aaron Rodgers spelunked deep into the recesses of his soul on an ayahauscha trip and emerged with a clear mind: he would play for the New York Jets.
Or at least that was the story. I knew at once something was off. Maybe he had overdosed. You never play out the string for the Jets. Then again he was guaranteed $75 million, and it was the Jets who ponied up $27M in guaranteed money for Le’Veon Bell’s carcass a few years ago, so who am I to calibrate Rodgers’ ayahauscha dose from the living room sofa?
I joke about Rodgers, who as you know is likely out for the year and perhaps done for good with a torn Achilles at age 39. Rodgers was an all-time great quarterback, Patrick Mahomes 1.0 at his peak, and a hero of mine for refusing to inject himself with pharmaceutical chemicals he did not want, despite intense pressure from the league and its media lackeys.
To remember what peak Rodgers looked like here are two consecutive plays from a playoff game against the Cardinals in 2016. (Youtube won’t let me embed this clip, but the link is worth clicking.)
In any event to lose Rodgers four plays into the year is so quintessentially Jets the way blowing a lead in the closing minutes is so Chargers. The personnel and coaching might change, but sometimes a franchise’s core identity stays ever the same.
Rodgers’ injury means QB1 is now the Jets starting quarterback, and after a bad interception, I thought he played okay. But make no mistake, this will be a run-and-play-defense team this year. I’m just happy QB1 is relevant again, to be honest.
Of coure, this hurts Garrett Wilson’s (5-5-34-1) value a good deal, incredible juggling TD catch notwithstanding. Instead of going late-first, I think Wilson goes early third now. So much for being thrilled about my Bijan Robinson/Wilson start in BCL3.
Breece Hall (10-127-0, 2-1-20) looked awfully spry off the knee injury. A podcast I listened to suggested maybe gambling on Hall being even 80 percent himself was worth it, but unfortunately, I didn’t listen. Dalvin Cook (13-33-0, 3-3-26-0) actually saw more work, looked fine to me, but was far less efficient. I think this will be a 50/50 timeshare for the foreseeable future as Hall works back from the knee.
You have to feel pretty good if you took Stefon Diggs (13-10-102-1). To put up that line in an ugly, defensive struggle on the road against the Jets stout defense bodes very well. Gabe Davis (4-2-32-0) and Dalton Kincaid (4-4-26-0) will get more involved when gameflow allows.
James Cook (12-46-0, 6-4-17-0) looked fine, and the six targets were nice. It was a little disturbing early when the Bills threw to Deonte Hardy, formerly Deonte Harris, (4-3-9-0) a few times instead of Cook. Why do players suddenly change their names so often? It used to be a name change was only in case of religious conversion.
Damian Harris got only one carry, while Latavius Murray saw two. Harris did have two catches for 16 yards, but he’s buried.
Josh Allen will get his. Two of the interceptions were on deep balls, one was on 3rd-and-long, so I wouldn’t be overly concerned. He moved well and scrambled deftly on the TD throw to Diggs. Just a rough matchup made rougher by Rodgers’ injury and the Jets need to slow it down. That last interception was bad, though.
What a finish for the Jets and rookie Xaiver Gipson bringing the punt return to the house in overtime. As much as it was so Jets to lose Rodgers, it was so not Jets to pull out the win. Whenever someone asks what pro sport I’d play if I had my choice, I always say baseball or basketball because the money/damage ratio is so much better in those sports than in the NFL. But there is nothing more glorious than taking a run, catch or return to the house in front of 80,000 people, and imagine doing that in your first game to win it overtime.
I’m still traumatized by the Giants performance Sunday night.
Will write this up in a minute, but it's soooo Jets to acquire a free agent QB in the offseason and have him tear his Achilles four plays into the season. But it's so not Jets to pull out the win against a good team anyway.
I'm still in shock from that Giants-Cowboys game. This was the worst 9/11 I can remember since 2002.
No, I didn't mean bring *that*
I no longer remember what I planned to write about before I watched the edited version of the Sunday night game. Shakespeare would not have words to convey what I just witnessed. It was the worst game I have ever seen in any sport at any level. The pick-up nerf football game on my middle school’s warped astroturf never sank to such depths. A bum fight between two people whose nutritional intake over the last month consisted solely of nicotine and heroin would reflect more positively on humanity. I am understating it, I know, but this is as close as I can get.
For me it was even worse than that. I am a Giants fan, but I stacked the Cowboys passing game in my highest stakes Primetime league. The Cowboys won 40-0, but Dak Prescott threw for 143 yards and no touchdowns. Turns out I sold my soul, and when I went to collect the proceeds, I got rugged.
Of course, Tony Pollard, who I faded all year got two walk-in TDs. Of course, the Dallas defense scored 37 points in the NFFC, though — and someone should do a wellness check to make sure he’s still alive — the guy in my Primetime had them on his bench for the Broncos who scored four.
Sometimes the misery of others is the only thing you have left.
The Giants simply cannot block. This has been a problem for the last decade, but the line improved somewhat over the second half of last year, and Andrew Thomas has turned into a star left tackle. But Thomas played through a hamstring injury for much of the game, and now he’s headed for an MRI. If the Giants lose Thomas for any length of time, I’m confident they would not be a top-31 offensive line.
There’s nothing to take away from the performance of any other player in this game — Daniel Jones was under assault all game, Saquon Barkley looked like himself, but the team could never sustain a drive, Prescott barely needed to throw a pass, CeeDee Lamb saw four targets. It was a total zero.
I also had Graham Gano going in one league, and he scored zero obviously, despite having two field goal attempts, one of which was blocked for a TD and the other he shanked. The Giants couldn’t even block on special teams and almost had some punts blocked too.
The only silver lining besides that one dude leaving the Cowboys defense on his bench was thinking back on all the times I cursed the people in my drafts for snaking me on Daniel Jones. I have only one share, but would easily have had four had he fallen nearer to his ADP range. Get your guys, sure, but don’t be an idiot.
I don’t want to read too much into this one game, and what it means for my Jones, Barkley and Giants futures, but the total lack of pass protection or even basic competence on special teams is disturbing.
Oh, now I remember what I was going to write about. NFL Game Pass switched to DAZN, and for God knows what reason it cuts me off from streaming on more than one device at a time, so I was stuck watching the red-zone channel half the day, and then the red-zone plus the US Open final during the late games. That’s bad because you don’t get a good enough sense of gameflow doing that, and it’ll be worse when the Giants are not in a standalone game. So this is something they need to fix, or I’ll have to buy a second stream for another $140 and fight them on the back end.
The other annoying thing is the 40-minute edited version doesn’t work on the AppleTV app, so I have to sit at my desk and watch on my computer rather than the large TV. Just another Week 1 kick in the nuts among many. Finally, the edited version isn’t 40 minutes anyone, more like 48, as they leave in a lot of replays and announcer commentary now, which meant I had to listen to Cris Collinsworth make the same obvious and annoying points 100 times during the blowout.
The Steelers are like the Giants. They have some interesting players, but they can’t pass protect against good defenses, and they are DOA. It really doesn’t matter who else in on the team.
I faded three players on the Niners this year, two of whom were Christian McCaffrey (22-152-1, 5-3-17-0) and Brandon Aiyuk (8-8-129-2).
I have Bijan Robinson (10-56-0, 6-6-27-1) in three leagues, and while he did fine, it was alarming to see Tyler Allgeier (15-75-2, 3-3-19-0) get the two easy TDs from inside the five. Robinson would probably drop into the late second round if we were to run it back again today. But like Jahmyr Gibbs, he looked the part at least.
In the Snarky150, the comment for Drake London was “sounds like a hotel.” An abandoned hotel in fact.
Alan Seslowsky told me a beat writer who was at Panthers camp said Hayden Hurst was getting a ton of targets in practice. I didn’t believe him, but sure enough Hurst (7-5-41-1) was the team’s leading receiver.
The only thing worse than my Cowboys stack was the Burrow-Chase and Burrow-Higgins ones. People forget that while correlation is great in an overall contest, it can wipe you out in weeks where it goes wrong. I didn’t watch much of the game, assume the rain was a factor, but how much of it was Burrow being rusty or not 100 percent?
Higgins rugged people hard twice last year, once on a late scratch and once during the Damar Hamlin game, and he starts of this year with an 8-0-0-0 line. Tee Ruggins is next year’s Snarky150 comment.
JK Dobbins’ torn Achilles is why these running backs want long-term contracts and also why the teams don’t want to pay them. I feel badly for Dobbins, but the NFL is a harsh place, and wishing it were otherwise will not change that.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the Ravens roll with Justice Hill and Gus Edwards or bring someone else in. Jonathan Taylor would be a difference-maker for them.
Lamar Jackson had a surprisingly unproductive game. He wasn’t needed to do much, but he did less than that and threw a pick. Zay Flowers (10-9-78-0) looked as quick and fast as advertised, but keep in mind the target share will shift when Mark Andrews returns.
Calvin Ridley (11-8-101-1) is all the way back. I didn’t get my money down on him winning the receiving title at 52:1 when I had the chance, but I do have him at 31:1 to win Comeback Player of the Year. That might actually be for the best with Justin Jefferson and Tyreek Hill around.
I had Travis Etienne (18-77-1, 5-5-27-0) everywhere last year and nowhere this year, and that could turn out to be a problem. The five catches are the thing to watch. Tank Bigsby fumbled and had a bad game too. I also traded Etienne for Amari Cooper and Taysom Hill (I had no TE, and there were none available on waivers in a 14-team league with deep benches) in the Staff Dynasty League this summer which is already an obvious mistake.
I didn’t see enough of Anthony Richardson to have a strong take, but he threw for 223 yards and didn’t seem overmatched. He did get hurt and leave late, but has since downplayed the injury. Forget about the scrubby Indy backs while Taylor is out.
I would have liked to see Chris Godwin (6-5-51-0) get as many targets as Mike Evans (10-6-66-1), but it wasn’t that bad for my 4/5 turn pick. Baker Mayfield is now where Jared Goff was two years ago — former No. 1 overall pick who had some early glory, but now totally written off. I could see him settling in as a league-average starter like Goff.
Justin Jefferson (12-9-150-0) is like peak Antonio Brown — he so rarely doesn’t do what he’s supposed to (except in that one fantasy playoff game last year.)
Chris Olave (10-8-112-0), Rashid Shaheed (6-5-89-1) and Michael Thomas (8-5-61-0) are a good trio for Derek Carr. We’ll see how long Thomas holds up, but it’s nice balance of skill sets with Thomas catching the short stuff, Olave making plays everywhere and Shaheed going deep.
DeAndre Hopkins saw 13 targets, but I can’t tell yet if he’s the same guy at 31.
I don’t have much to say about Football Team-Cardinals except that you can’t start any of the players in this game with confidence.
I have no Aaron Jones (9-41-1, 4-2-86-1) but two shares of AJ Dillon (13-19-0, 2-2-17-0.) Jones hurt his hamstring late though.
I didn’t watch a lot of Jordan Love, but the numbers looks nice, albeit thanks to a huge catch and run by Jones. I thought the Bears would put up a better fight, but maybe Love inherited title to the team from Aaron Rodgers.
In retrospect, I should have used the Raiders as one of my faux SuperContest bets. The Sean Payton hype was a sell signal even if the Broncos do turn out better than last year which is a low bar. It was odd to see Jakobi Meyers (10-9-81-2), who didn’t score all year for the Pats a couple seasons ago, catch two while TD-machine Davante Adams (9-6-66-0) got none.
D’Andre Swift owners were the big losers in Philly yesterday as at least Rashaad Penny owners got notice not to start him as a healthy scratch!
The Patriots had a ton of chances to win that game, but they just don’t have any playmakers on offense.
The Tua (466 yards three TDs)-Tyreek (15-11-215-2) stack was the winner for Week 1. If I had to pick three receivers in NFL history to put on my team, I’d go Jerry Rice, Randy Moss and Hill.
Every year I fade Austin Ekeler (16-117-1, 5-4-47), and every year he puts up monster numbers. Joshua Kelly (16-91-1) ran well yesterday too.
There’s always something wrong with the Chargers, no matter how much hype they have coming into the year.
Somehow the Rams blew out the Seahawks in Seattle. I had never heard of Puka Nacua (15-10-119-0) until two days ago, either.
Kenneth Walker (12-64-0, 5-4-3) is healthy at least after a scare heading into the week. I’m not sure what was wrong with Geno Smith and the passing game.
Remember when I changed my Chiefs pick to the Lions ahead of the Thursday night game, but didn’t save it? I’m now *tied* for first place in my weekly pick ‘em pool, and that error is likely to cost me the week. (In the event of a tie the pool doubles for the following week.)
I can’t believe I made it through the slate to complete these notes after watching that atrocity of a game this morning. A better man would have defenestrated.
US Open men's final is bananas
Those Burrow-Chase and Mahomes-Kelce stacks not off to a good start
appreciate Vrabel securing the cover there
nothing doing in Survivor this week
Not having Etienne hurts a bit too. The TD was nice, but it's the catches that really matter.
Mayfield now is Jared Goff two years ago. These guys are never as good as you think in conditions and never as bad as you think in bad ones.
Not especially thrilled to see Allgeier score two TDs from in close. The Falcons will run a ton, but that would send Bijan (who had a good game) down half a round
Wow, Dobbins likely out for the year. Had no strong opinion on him one way or the other. Wonder if the Ravens put their hat in the ring for Jonathan Taylor.
sometimes schadenfraude is the only joy in fantasy football, and it's enough
love the Justice Hill rushing TD after Dobbins went out -- no Dobbins, and that has to hurt for those who have him