after last week's debacle in lineup setting, I'm not changing anything, barring a locker room murder-suicide

It's about time Justin Tucker got some field goal attempts

last week I was lazy and made stupid lineup decisions because I didn't want to do research and just listened to other people. Never again.

I went 3-2 on both sets of picks last week to put me at 10-15 in the “Normal” entries and 12-12-1 on the “Ugly” one. It’s nothing special, but it beats going 1-4 on the wrong side of blowouts.

Here are my picks for this week:

Normal 1 and 2

The Jaguars got off to a rocky start, but seem to have hit their stride. The Colts are okay, and Gardner Minshew is a competent backup, but this line is small enough to lay the wood at home.

The Texans lost last week, but they were in the game, and they are playing with confidence on both sides of the ball. I like selling the Saints high after an easy blowout win.

Maybe I’m missing something but the Bears and Vikings strike me as roughly equal teams, yet the Bears are getting three at home.

The Bengals feel like a bit of a sucker play as the Seahawks usually show up, and Cincy’s been erratic. But as long as Burrow’s really healthy, I like them at home laying less than three.

Finally, I’m buying the Team low to bounce back after a bad Thursday night game against the Bears.

Ugly

I’m taking the Titans plus four in London. No one is rougher and uglier than they are, and with both teams possibly being out of sorts after the long trip, give me the underdog.

QB1 has played better of late, and the Jets play defense. What’s the point of having an “ugly” entry if you’re not going to use the Jets?

The Bucs have been solid this year, and while the Lions are probably better, laying three on the road is a big ask. The Bucs are also coming off the bye.

I doubled-down on the Texans because I didn’t want to get involved in the double-digit games, and there weren’t enough options left. I could have taken the Rams, but passed.

The Raiders are bad, but the Patriots are worse, and the Belichick premium is a couple years out of date.

Thursday Night Observations

I had Russell Wilson in at quarterback in a league that is *not yet* drawing dead, but as I was setting my lineup last night, I thought, “maybe I should check Erickson’s Value Meter, just in case I’m way off on this.” (FantasyPros is dead to me after last week.)

But then I remembered my vow never to check anyone else’s rankings ever again and just to make my own mistakes. So I did what I did not want to do and that was bother to research the decision.

I looked up the Chiefs defense which was seventh against QBs, and the Cardinals’ (facing my other QB, Matthew Stafford) which is 27th. I also figured out the Vegas implied totals which had the Broncos around 19 and the Rams around 27.

Stafford has only five TD passes this year, while Wilson had 11 coming into this week, but the yardage was closer, and Cooper Kupp is back. So Stafford it was. (I also opted to sit C.J. Stroud home against the Saints.)

While I was heading to sleep last night (Portugal time), I thought, “This was a mistake, I shouldn’t switch at the last minute.” But then I thought, “Well, in that case, it’s my mistake,” and fell asleep.

. . .

Wilson moved well, but he was herky-jerky, on the run, threw two bad picks and couldn’t get anything going down the field. Happy I didn’t start him, and you wonder how long he is for the job, ruinous contract notwithstanding.

Jerry Jeudy caught a few short passes, but the tackle he made on one of Wilson’s interceptions was sadly the highlight of his game. It’s hard to produce when your quarterback has 95 passing yards, though Courtland Sutton salvaged his day with a TD.

Javonte Williams looked healthy and ran well, but wasn’t involved as a receiver. Jaleel McLaughlin had nine touches to Williams’ 10. Samaje Perine caught both of his targets (one of which he fumbled to end the game), but didn’t see a carry. There’s room for two productive backs in an offense, not three.

Patrick Mahomes showed some great moves when scrambling — unpredictable spins and fakes to buy time. His numbers have been modest this year, but the Chiefs haven’t lost since Opening Night.

Rashee Rice is the only non Travis Kelce target to show a spark. He looks fast and explosive when he catches the ball. Kadarius Toney is a talented gadget guy who can’t stay healthy, and the rest are scrubs. Mr. Pfizer looked 100 percent healthy at least and had a nice game.

Isiah Pacheco had 16 carries and six catches. He’s the workhorse now, with Clyde Edwards-Hilarious-The-Chiefs-Used-A-First-Round-Pick-On-Him and Jerick McKinnon both relegated to modest roles.

The only painful thing about this game (other than Jeudy in my Primetime lineup) was seeing Harrison Butker kick a touchdown, a near touchdown and two other field goals in some opponents’ lineups. I won’t check until the third quarter of the first wave Sunday, but it’s just something else to dread.

Surviving Week 6

Last week was fairly uneventful unless you got crazy and used the Football Team or the Bills. Both the Lions and Dolphins won without much of a sweat.

Let’s take a look at Week 6:

I don’t see a pot-odds play here. It’s Bills or Dolphins for me, preferably Bills because the Giants are so decimated, and the 32 percent vs 25 percent doesn’t move the needle much.

If Daniel Jones, Saquon Barkley and miraculously Andrew Thomas play, maybe they’d put up a fight against a jet-lagged Bills team, but even then they could lose by double-digits.

The Dolphins are a little more vulnerable if the Panthers defense shows up, but Bryce Young hasn’t shown he can play yet, and the Dolphins move up and down the field with ease.

I wouldn’t use the Rams unless I had to — just not sure who they are yet — and the Cardinals have shown up more often than not.

The Chiefs haven’t played that well of late and face a divisional rival that knows them, with a veteran QB that has some weapons.

The Eagles are on the road, and QB1 hasn’t been terrible his last two games.

The 49ers are good, but if Deshaun Watson is playing, this is a tough spot on the road against the Browns who are coming off a bye.

If I had used the Dolphins and Bills, I’d go Chiefs, and if I had used all three, I’d probably go Rams.

bad enough Barkley is still iffy for Week 6, but even more annoying that the Giants don't play until Sunday night, so I won't know whether to start him.

Guessing The Lines

Last week wasn’t too bad. I won $70 in my picking pool after going 11-3, but only 3-2 in both the Normal and Ugly faux-Super Contest picks. How did I only lose three games in the home pool and four combined with my official picks? Well, first off, the Falcons were -1.5 in the home pool and -2.5 in the contest, and secondly, I don’t always make the same picks because the lines are often different, and I sometimes just zip through the slate on feel (for my home pool) and don’t care if they line up. The most important thing is to hit the “save” button before closing the window.

In any event, it was nice finally to win some money this year, even if overall I was only 6-4 on the higher stakes entries, which aren’t really that high stakes because it’s $20 per entry, and I’m almost drawing dead in a massive field. But that would never deter me from trying to string together a couple 10-0 slates, however improbable that might be. Actually, I know exactly how improbable it is because 2^20 is 1024^2 which is just over one in a million. But stranger things have happened in this world, and I don’t really believe in luck.

Here are my initial numbers for this week:

At first glance, I’m far apart on the Titans and Texans. I see Houston and New Orleans as roughly equal teams, but the Saints are laying wood on the road. Keep in mind though that at 2.5 (below 3) it’s basically a pick ‘em, and the market just has it as a pick ‘em in the other direction. So this isn’t that big of a deal.

I made Ravens-Titans an actual pick ‘em, but the Ravens are laying a whopping four. That is a massive difference, crossing the three and even hitting four. What am I missing? The Ravens receivers probably won’t drop so many passes this week, but Tennessee is a tough, nasty team that usually shows up under Mike Vrabel. That line just seems very big to me in Tennessee… Of course it’s in London! That takes away about two of the four points, so I’d have made it Ravens minus two, but it still crosses the key number. Those London and Mexico City games are annoying.

The other fairly big discrepancies are Colts-Jaguars and Bengals-Seahawks. I’m higher on the Jaguars who seem to have gotten it together, but they have to travel back from London too.

And the Bengals look like they’re finally back with Burrow healthy and on the same page with Ja’Marr Chase. But Seattle is coming off a bye and isn’t a doormat. I’ll probably lay the wood there if it stays at three. But no commitments this early in the week.

Monday Night Observations

That was low-key a very satisfying game. Not only did it clinch my weekly home picking pool — only $60, but the first money I’ve won this year — but Davante Adams somehow caught only four passes for 45 yards against his old team.

It’s so interesting when a defense takes away a team’s best weapon, and you wonder why every team doesn’t just do that. Reminds me of the NFC title game between the Seahawks and Panthers in 2006 when Seattle held triple-crown-winning WR Steve Smith to an 11-5-33-0 line, one week after Smith had torched the Bears for 218 yards and two TDs. It’s as though an ingenious defense got together and decided maybe they should dedicate some resources to covering that guy!

Instead the Raiders looked to TD-machine Jakobi Meyers 10 times, hopefully on people’s benches, though with the byes you never know.

The shine has come off Jordan Love’s star. He’s more in the Kenny Pickett probably-just-a-guy bucket rather than in the CJ Stroud (maybe a future star) one.

AJ Dillon ran hard and showed his usefulness, but Derrick Henry he is not.

Christian Watson looked all the way back from the hamstring injury and saw targets down the field. He should get his. Romeo Doubs also did nothing, hopefully in other people’s lineups. In life you shouldn’t be a hater and root for other people’s failures, but fantasy football is a zero-sum game, so you absolutely should be doing that, especially if due to your own mismanagement it’s all you have.

Jimmy G is just a guy, as his initials indicate. (Any QB with initials JG is just a guy.)

Josh Jacobs had nowhere to run for much of the game, but broke free late. He still looks more or less like the guy who led the NFL in rushing a year ago, no worse for the wear.

Josh McDaniels settling for a 52-yard field goal on 4th-and-2 up four when a first down wins the game was malpractice. Even if the field goal make was slightly more likely than the first down (it’s close), the reward for making the first down is game over, while making the field goal gives the Packers get the ball back down seven with two minutes left. Less importantly, but still true, the miss costs you seven yards vs the stuff. Luckily for him, he got bailed out on a forced throw by Love and a great play by his DB.

The worst part of fantasy football is lineup setting. You know you’re going to get some close calls wrong, and instead of being like me where you want to defenestrate over it and actually root against the guys on your bench (whom really you should be rooting for), you should accept it and calmly incorporate the new information into your subsequent decisions.

But in a season of lineup errors, this was maybe the worst week I’ve ever had on that front — or so I thought. And then, with that idea in my head, I made a last-minute switch that made it catastrophically worse.

I had Kirk Cousins in my lineup against the Chiefs in one league, but I read somewhere that Anthony Richardson’s points per minute were tops in the league (remember he got hurt early in one game, coincidentally the other one when I used him over Cousins the week Cousins went bananas against the Eagles), so I made the swap.

Richardson of course got hurt in the first half (again!), with five points, and again I have Cousins on my bench in a high total late game. As I’m stewing over that, I’m also upset I started CJ Stroud (even though I knew the Falcons were the type of team to grind games into the muck) over Matthew Stafford who has Cooper Kupp back. At this point, it’s the first half of the late games, and Stafford already has two TD passes and a decent amount of yardage. Everything I’ve done has been wrong.

But there’s more. I sat Jared Goff in the Steak League (for obvious reasons) and Goff (in this TD-heavy league) has three TD passes and a rushing TD! My alternative was Brock Purdy, who plays Sunday night, and I went Purdy.

Moreover, I had Kyle Pitts in as my flex in one league, due to byes and injuries, and at the last second I swapped him out for Skyy Moore because (and this is what drove me nearly to suicide) I looked on Fantasypros, and those midwits had Moore higher in their PPR flex rankings. Keep in mind this is the same Fantasypros that gave my Main Event NFBC team an F, the one that was in first place much of the year and finished second. I used Moore over Pitts and didn’t even consider Zach Moss with Jonathan Taylor coming back.

But I haven’t gotten to the pièce de résistance yet. Feeling positive Cousins was going to go bananas against the Chiefs and Stafford against the Eagles, I thought — well, I’m stuck with Purdy and his likely meager output in the Steak League, but I can still swap him out for Dak Prescott in the Sunday night game! After all, I had Prescott in initially, and (I did two seconds of research) the Cowboys defense is No. 1 against the pass. (Of course, it only dimly occurred to me they were No. 1 against the pass because they faced the Giants, Jets, Patriots and Cardinals.)

So I made the swap, watched the game this morning, and it’s only because I am able to express myself via this post that I haven’t pulled a Jeffrey Epstein. (Just kidding, everyone knows Epstein didn’t kill himself!)

And the final kick in the nuts (although it’s almost funny at this point) is that Goff outscored Purdy by one point from my bench in Steak, i.e., it was still a bad decision to have Purdy in, even though, I tried to hedge against that by inflicting utter catastrophe on my Primetime team which is 1-4 and pretty much drawing dead even when Saquon Barkley returns.

. . .

The other lead lining in all this is that when I checked the final scores of the late games this morning (I quit watching half way through because I was so annoyed), Cousins and Stafford did almost nothing in the second half, i.e., the Stroud-Stafford decision wasn’t that bad, and Richardson was in fact probably the right call over Cousins had Richardson not gotten hurt. And Purdy/Goff made little difference.

In other words, I had imagined a narrative of disaster (besides the truly idiotic Pitts/Moore move) that didn’t exist and used it to justify the one truly catastrophic decision Purdy/Prescott that might have destroyed my Primetime’s chances to compete as it took me from 2-3 to 1-4.

The moral of this story is threefold: (1) Don’t listen to other people. You will make your own mistakes, but that is 100x better than making someone else’s; (2) For the love of God, once you’ve decided on your players never make implusive, last-second switches, barring new and *material* information; and (3) Do not spin up narratives about how because you have failed at (1) so far, so that you need to violate (2).

. . .

The Giants lost by 15 despite being plus-three on turnovers, including a pick six at their goal line which was essentially a 14-point play. But for the second half against the Cardinals, they have been not just beaten but absolutely destroyed for 18 of the season’s 20 quarters. They are not a top-31 team with their current healthy roster, and now Daniel Jones is going for an MRI on his neck.

If Jones is okay, Darren Waller, who everyone was bellyaching about, will be just fine, however. I said this last week, on my NOSTR feed, but no one really sees it, so it’s just a place where I jot down mental notes.

It’s worth revisiting the De’Von Achane discussion in this post. CJ2K is a good comp, only if Chris Johnson were playing for the Greatest Show On Turf Rams.

Raheem Mostert had a good day, averaging 6.5 YPC, but Achane had more than double at 13.7 YPC. The Dolphins moved the ball with such ease and in such huge chunks, they could have won that game by 50.

I went to the park yesterday to get some sun and read a book rather than watch the London game, but got back before the fourth quarter, pleased to see Josh Allen, Gabe Davis and Travis Etienne hadn’t yet done much for my opponents. (By the way, the book (Broken Money) is excellent.

Damar Hamlin did a CPR tour in London, replete with gifts of defibrillators to youth organizations, because young people have always have had heart attacks!, but was inactive. I know people might be upset that I’m harping on poor Hamlin (who really was a victim), but turning a crime against humanity into this abject charade is too much to stomach.

I faded the top QBs, and that would have worked out just fine had I made even 60th percentile lineup calls this year.

If CJ Stroud (who is on pace for a zero-interception career) is the real deal, consider how loaded the AFC is at quarterback with Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson, Trevor Lawrence already there. And that’s with surefire Hall of Famer Aaron Rodgers out for the year and possible Hall of Famer Russell Wilson looking cooked.

I neglected to mention I swapped in Jonathon Cooper for Will Anderson as an IDP lineman at the last second, and Cooper doesn’t show up in the boxscore, even though he wasn’t listed as a pre-game inactive, and I can’t find any news on it. On RotoWire in his game log, he’s listed as “DNP”. And on Twitter, if you search for Cooper, you get 100 posts by a bot called “JonathonCooperBreakoutSzn.” The information ecoystem is deterioriating in real time.

I argued with Seslowsky during our Survivor video about not overbidding on Jaleel McLaughlin and was set to take the W when Javonte Williams logged a full practice Friday. But Williams was scratched, and McLaughlin caught a TD and had 89 yards on 12 touches, making him worth it, at least for this week.

It’s interesting that during the preseason Williams was deemed the healthy, fully-recovered back while Breece Hall was still working his way back and being eased in.

DeAndre Hopkins looked more or less like his old self, and Ryan Tannehill only had eyes for him.

I ask this every week, but what is the purpose of this Patriots roster? Why even bother? Rhamondre Stevenson, who I liked before the year, has his value on life support.

I know the receivers dropped a lot of passes, but there’s something not quite right about the Ravens offense under Todd Monken.

Cooper Kupp looked very much like himself, but Puka Nacua can still be Robert Woods.

Like Kupp, Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase are back. It feels like the season finally started in Week 5 for a lot of players and teams.

Justin Jefferson left the game in the fourth quarter after hurting his hamstring. He seemed to get hurt two other times, earlier this year too, but returned to those games. Maybe he’s been playing through something the whole time. A couple weeks ago, you’d have been aghast you had to settle for Chase at pick 2, instead of Jefferson at 1, but that’s now flipped 180 degrees.

Did I really swap out Kyle Pitts (11-7-87-0) for Skyy Moore (2-2-11-0) at the last second because of something I saw on Fantasypros? Why yes I did.

This week will be known as lineup gate. It's just a matter of how much damage my errors have done.

reminder -- never consult other people's rankings. Start who you want, live with the mistakes. The alternative is 10x worse.

If Stroud is the real deal, you have the AFC with Stroud, Lawrence, Mahomes, Herbert, Burrow, Tua, Josh Allen, Deshaun Watson and Lamar Jackson. And if Richardson, who keeps getting hurt, that makes 10. Golden age in the AFC or maybe just inflation.

Truly miserable day of football, but at least that younghoe made a FG for two of my teams.

Jonathan Vilma is pretty good as an analyst.

Dimes targeting Waller all over. Almost had a TD there.

FFS, I've started Anthony Richardson twice, and both times he's gotten injured in the first half. Watch Cousins go bananas against on my bench

Giants game is fucking unwatchable

Giants got Thomas back after all -- Jalen Thomas

Josh Allen went from a nothing day to a monster day in like two seconds