People arguing that if a pitcher had bad luck, he should still win the CY award despite allowing way way more runs than the guy who had good luck. Maybe deGrom should get it since he's the best pitcher, but just had bad injury luck.

It pisses me off I have to watch and write up two games. They were shitty games too. You know they’re bad when you’re bored watching the all-action edited version. It looks like it was just these last two weeks, though. I was worried it was now going to be a thing, the way they snuck in Thursday night on us 15 years ago.

. . .

The Eagles are really good. I know you know that, but I hadn’t watched an entire game of theirs this season until this morning. They open big holes for their backs, have big-play receivers and a mobile quarterback.

Seems like AJ Brown and Devonta Smith will just alternate unpredictably having good games. They’ll need an opponent to shoot it out with them for both to go off, and next week’s game against the Football Team probably isn’t it.

D’Andre Swift is so much faster and quicker than Kenneth Gainwell, though Swift had huge holes through which to run. I still have a Rashaad Penny share, and I’d like to see him go to work in this offense. I’ll hang onto him as long as I can.

I started Danny Dimes Thursday night at the last minute over a concussed Anthony Richardson (DNP) and Baker Mayfield who I picked up off waivers. Mayfield got 13.5 points thanks to that borderline garbage-time TD to Mike Evans and the two-point conversion. Dimes got only 5.35, thanks to a late forced pick. Obviously, I wish I had started Mayfield, but in retrospect the decision wasn’t crazy.

Rachaad White didn’t do much, but he broke some tackles and looked okay to me against a tough front. I had briefly put him in the Mike Davis box, but the only Mike Davis so far is Alexander Mattison who I knew was Mike Davis, but took him in the seventh round anyway. Besides, all my Week 3 declarations of who is and isn’t Mike Davis (former ATL starting RB people took in Round 5 two years ago because he was the only game in town, who sucked and lost his job) will look ridiculous a month from now.

It annoys me I got Chris Godwin everywhere, but it’s Mike Evans for whom Mayfield only has eyes. Godwin almost scored a TD though and caught a two-point conversion. Godwin’s and Smith’s weak games cost me a W in the Primetime, something that’s irritating me as I type this, but that team is good. I just have to keep grinding and not think about it.

Joe Burrow looked more or less like himself, but didn’t attempt many deep throws.

Joe Mixon ground out an okay game in a Mike Davis sort of way. Mixon is an old-school power back in a league of De’Von Achane, Jahmyr Gibbs, Kenneth Walker, Bijan Robinson and Travis Etiennes, but let’s see who’s left standing in December. I avoided Mixon like the plague (bubonic, not covid), but he seems fine. Mixon actually ran a 4.43 in 2017, but doesn’t seem especially quick these days.

Ja’Marr Chase (15-12-141-0) sure gets a lot of targets and catches almost all of them. Tee Higgins got an OPI, had a drop and wasn’t as involved.

Matthew Stafford looked good to me, despite the pedestrian stats and the picks. He’s throwing a nice ball, but his offensive line didn’t hold up in the second half.

With Cooper Kupp out, the Rams have a narrow tree — just Puka Nacua, Tutu Atwell and Tyler Higbee. I finally got to see Nacua, and he’s okay, but more Robert Woods than Kupp. The 165-pound Atwell was mocked as a second-round pick but he looks like a player. Big receivers were in fashion for a while, but now low-BMI quick ones like Devonta Smith, Jaylen Waddle, Chris Olave and Diontae Johnson have carved out a place in the league. Although Atwell’s frame might be pushing against the limit of this trend.

Speaking of small players, 5-9, 194-pound Kyren Williams looked okay, but didn’t have much room. With Cam Akers gone, Williams being that little (and slow — 4.65 40) and backup Ronnie Rivers being more or less his clone, maybe someone else gets a shot before long. No idea who, but Williams is a long shot to carry the load all year IMO.

I don’t even know where to begin.

That was maybe the worst week against the spread I’ve had since 1977 (when I was six years old), and I lost 75 cents to my grandfather when all the favorites lost, and come to think of it, I didn’t even have to give him points.

It’s not the 2-8 mark that jumps out — I’ve done that before — it’s the margin of wrongness. It’s one thing to lose on a two-point conversion or pick six, quite another to think the Bills were laying too much (6!) on the road in a game they won 37-3, or liking a desperate Denver team to cover the six points on the road, and they lose by 50! I also had the Bears getting 12.5 against the Chiefs (41-10) who pulled their starters up 41-0 in the fourth quarter. And the Jaguars -8.5 who lost *lost* by 20.

If you were this out of sync in the real world, you’d still be masking outdoors and lining up for your fifth booster.

. . .

Aside from the ATS disaster, the week was bizarre in other ways. Like everyone I had De’Von Achane on my bench, but unlike everyone I had a preseason premotion about him and didn’t act on it. Lest you dismiss my preseason premonitions, I had one about “The Hound” (Chris Bassitt) in baseball that panned out pretty well.

This year, my pick was up in the RotoWire Dynasty Draft, and my instinct was to take Achane who I had already drafted in the first two BCLs. Because I’m not at all a college football guy, I put a poll out on Twitter:

This was the ensuing conversation from the poll:

So Seslowsky told me to take Zay Flowers, but Stopa used a word that got my attention: He said Achane would have to be a historic “outlier.” As I posted on Twitter, I was just that day drafting a piece entitled Outliers (which I didn’t publish until a couple weeks later.)

Its argument was we should always be looking for outliers, rather than dismissing them as anomalous as we’ve been trained to do. Because while outliers are rare, finding them makes all the difference — and this is true in any endeavor, not just fantasy sports.

So I ask who to take, and people give answers, but Stopa gives the answer for which I was really looking with the words (conditional though they might have been) “historic outlier.”

Of course, I was a total nutless monkey and took Flowers, and Seslowsky even patted himself on the back for it in our last video, saying something like, “Aren’t you glad you took Flowers,” and like a donkey I agreed I was glad.

Now, Flowers has been fine for a rookie over his first three games and looks the part of a future star. And Achane has had only one good game in a bizarre blowout. But it’s not only the size, but the magnitude of the sample that counts, and this magnitude was 10-plus on the Richter scale. How many running backs have gone 18-203-2, 4-4-30-2? I don’t have a subscription to pro-football-reference.com, but I’m going to guess it’s less than five, and he might be the only one.

So the lessons in this episode are the following: (1) Look for outliers; (2) trust your instincts; (3) heed your premonitions; (4) If you fail at 1-3, make sure you have someone else to blame; and (5) Reverse jinx the entire process by declaring the magnitude of the one-game sample sufficient enough to conclude your premotion was correct.

. . .

It used to be the dumbest announcer stat was, “Team A is 20-2 when running back B rushes for 100 yards” as a way of explaining why it was important to hand the ball to B. No shit, when B gets enough carries to crack 100 yards, A is likely to win because they only do that when they’re chewing clock, and they’re only chewing clock when they’re ahead. It was a confusion of cause with effect.

But the new dumbest stat is “They can’t afford to start 0-3 because 0-3 teams have only a three percent chance to make the playoffs.” That stat is generated by searching 0-3 teams and seeing how many made the playoffs historically. Wow, it’s only three percent. That means if the Joe Burrow Bengals lose tonight, they’ll have a three-percent chance!

No. There are two reasons 0-3 teams rarely make the playoffs: (1) Being 0-3 is bad for your chances; and (2) Most teams that are 0-3 have bad players and coaches, which is why they’re 0-3. The announcers are conflating (1) and (2) and chalking it up to (1), as though the Joe Burrow Bengals (should they lose) belong in the same pool of teams as the Justin Fields Bears.

Plainly if Burrow were 100 percent recovered from his calf injury, the Bengals would have a far higher than three percent chance to make the playoffs even if they were to lose Monday night.

. . .

I’m just going to jump around randomly and not cover every game. I was boring myself too much by doing that, and I don’t need to recite to you the stats of the players because you know them already. I’m the boss of this newsletter, after all, so why I am doing something I don’t want as though I’m obligated to do it that way?

. . .

The Broncos were so close to contending — they had a good defense, good skill players, all they needed was a quarterback. So they traded a king’s ransom for Russell Wilson and signed him to a ruinous contract. That didn’t work because the coach was terrible, so they traded the Saints first, second and third round picks for Sean Payton and paid him roughly $20M per year! And they’re still on the hook for $12M to Nathaniel Hackett over the next four years. Now all they need is a new coach, a new quarterback and a new defense, but unforunately all their recent draft picks have gone to the Seahawks and next year’s will go to the Saints.

The Cowboys kept running the ball in the red-zone down two scores with four minutes left, as though they had all the time in the world. The Dak Prescott pick made it moot, but Mike McCarthy is still out to lunch.

I had the Chiefs defense going, and they were pitching a shutout until Blaine Gabbert came in, the announcers praised his career as a valued backup and he immediately threw a pick that was returned inside the Chiefs’ 30. Even then I had a chance to keep the shutout, as the Bears were set to go for it on 4th-and goal from the four, but Justin Fields got hurt, so they instead opted for the field goal. (The Bears scored again later, but I had stopped watching.)

One tiny bright spot of my week (and you have to hold onto these or fall into an abyss of insanity) was starting Clyde Edwards-Helaire in my high stakes Primetime league in place of Saquon Barkley. CEH scored a TD, got 12.7 points, which is roughly what I would have expected from Barkley against the 49ers this week anyway.

Justin Tucker was just short on a would-be game-winning 61-yarder and that hurt, but this Gay dude really showed him up, kicking four field goals of 50-plus including the actual game winner in overtime. Matt Prater also hit a 62-yarder, and Chris Boswell drilled a 57-yarder yesterday. Golden age of kicking.

I don’t like two Monday night football games. No one has time to be in front of the TV 24/7, and I say that as someone who will be watching the “40-minute” edited versions in the morning. (It’s worse now because 40 has become 48, as for God knows what reason they leave in all the replays. I’ve got to watch the Raiders stuff Najee Harris from three different angles now. I get it, the man on the defense met him in the backfield as Harris was sluggishly trying to get his feet moving and brought him to the ground. It was routine. I don’t need to waste my precious time on planet earth with this shit.)

I got Jerry Jeudy with the last pick in the sixth round of my Primetime, and he missed only one game. What a steal! Except Wilson still sucks, only has eyes for Courtland Sutton (who lost two fumbles), and Jeudy had a TD called back. Jeudy actually did fine, but when you think about the expected garbage time for receivers in a 70-20 game, it’s like a cleanup hitter going 2-for-4 with a run scored when his team scores 10 runs.

The problem with this game was while Achane was scoring harmlessly on everyone’s benches, Raheem Mostert (13-82-3, 7-7-60-1) was wrecking people who faced him. I can’t see him holding up, and Jaylen Waddle will presumably be back to take some targets, but Mostert/Achane isn’t Ingram/Kamara it’s Kamara/Kamara, if Kamara ran a 4.3.

When Gene Steratore or Dean Blandino come on, I flip to a different game, but I’m tempted to kill myself and flip to a different realm.

Maybe I posted this in prior weeks, but if I were picking three receivers in NFL history to have on my team, I’d take Jerry Rice, Randy Moss and Tyreek Hill.

People are sleeping on the Browns. Deshaun Watson was maybe the second-best player in the NFL (after Mahomes) before he got accused of sexually assaulting every masseuse in Houston.

I can’t believe the Chargers won that game. It was exactly the type they almost always lose. I agree with the decision to go for it up four in their own end to seal the win. The Vikings still needed a TD, and if the Chargers convert on 4th-and-1, they win.

I’m real sick of Keenan Allen (20-18-215-0) and Davante Adams (20-13-172-2). I want some of my receivers to get 20 targets in a game. Instead I have CeeDee Lamb (7-4-53-0) and Garrett Wilson (9-5-48-0.)

Maybe the Panthers should have taken CJ Stroud.

I drafted Kenneth Walker (18-97-2, 3-3-67-0) in two leagues this year because “he passed the eye test” last year, and apparently my eyes weren’t lying. There’s a new trend toward lighting quick and fast running backs, and Walker is as nimble and hard to catch as any of them.

QB1 is a lover, not a fighter. The announcers kept talking about what a bond he has with Aaron Rodgers, and I thought, “That’s because they can wingman for each other in the middle-age singles scene.” Sadly QB1 is probably not long for the league.

Dallas running the ball like they're only down one score. Mike McCarthy is out to lunch

dumbest announer points: 0-3 teams have a three percent chance to make the playoffs. That's because most are bad. Good ones are much higher

Gabbert throws the pick, to set up the shutout-breaking score, and they still would have had it except Fields got hurt, so they had to take the chip-shot on fourth down. Garbage all around.

fucking Gabbert is going to cough up the Chiefs defense shutout

The NFHell

could really have used that Tucker 61-yarder. Just short.

have to sell a lot of jerseys to pay for that contract!

this is a shit week, what was I thinking?

Broncos were close, just needed a QB, so they signed Wilson. Then they needed a coach, so they hired Payton.

Seslowsky was patting himself on the back last week for telling me to take Zay Flowers in the dynasty league. The guy I was considering was Devon Achane

Fuck sake, illegal shift on the Jeudy TD. At least he's in the game.

Now a bomb to Marvin Mims. Jeudy in the doghouse or something?

Russell Wilson only has eyes for Sutton. Where is Jerry Jeudy?

if they go to Gene Steratore (however you spell his name), I switch games. Rules analysts are not good TV

If I had to choose three WR to start an NFL team, I'd take Jerry Rice, Randy Moss and Tyreek Hill

How did they Dolphins get into the end zone? They took the A-Chane

Funny, friend asked me about my two best bets today. Told him I liked the Broncos and Football Team. Already Tyreek has a long TD against the Broncos and Bills are moving with ease against the Team.