To clarify on the front end, this is not my story. This is the retelling of a recent fantasy draft with people I have never met, co-workers with my wife in a league she entered me into because she “felt bad” I was going to miss a league I’d been in just a few years due to an upcoming dinner commitment.
Prologue
The league conducted the draft online, as most do these days. I have to say, I kind of miss getting together at someone’s house or a sports bar for a football draft. But, the days of hauling in stacks of magazines and keeping up with rosters with pen and paper are long gone. Gradually, everyone just started bringing a laptop to the meetups and finally, even in a league I’ve been in for twenty-five years, no one wanted to gather and the whole thing was done online.
This league my wife entered me into was filled with millennial techies and the draft was conducted on a sight I had never heard of – Sleeper. I’ve done CBS Sports, Yahoo, and ESPN, but this one was new to me. I liked the interface well enough and could see why a Slack-obsessed workforce would gravitate to it. Dark mode with color-coded icons for different positions. Elaborate chat features, including emojis and polls. A lot of drag and drop features. I get it.
The Tale
As the draft got underway, there were very few surprises. With the third pick, I knew I was getting either Barkley, Kamara, or McCaffrey. Sure enough, I got Alvin Kamara of the Saints. I had him ranked second, but in a PPR, I can see the case for Christian McCaffrey at two. Saquon Barkley went first overall. JellyFishFlow, of whom this ditty is about, took David Johnson of the Cardinals at six, a bit of a reach for my taste but there are those buying the Bruce Arians Kool aid from down in Arizona.
Patrick Mahomes coming off the board in the second round was eye opening. To be fair, passing TDs are worth six points in this league and if you think he’ll come close to repeating his 2018 performance of 50 TD passes, perhaps you should go for it. JFF got good value with Odell as the fifth receiver chosen. Then a pattern began to emerge.
In the third round, Fish boy selected Chris Carson, the Seahawks feature back. The pick lines up nicely with ESPN rankings. This was the 30th pick and Carson is ranked 31st. And given the dearth of proven WR paired with a Brian Shottenheimer offense, it’s safe to assume the twelves will witness a plethora of swing passes out of the backfield.
In the middle of the fourth round JFF lights up the message board when Tyler Lockett goes one spot before he can draft him. It’s beginning to dawn on me that this guy or gal was hell bent on rostering a majority home town team, which is then confirmed in the fifth.
Things get really batty as JellyFishFlow takes Russell Wilson as the fourth QB after Mahomes, Deshaun Watson, and Aaron Rodgers. In most projections, Wilson is expected to put up anywhere from the eleventh best numbers at QB to the fifteenth best numbers under center. In 2018, Wilson ranked 18th in passing yards with 3,448. He was tied for fourth in PA TD with 35, but his number one target from last season, Doug Baldwin, is gone. And Matt Ryan was still on the board, who also threw 35 TD also but with 1,476 more yards through the air. To each his own, I suppose.
JFF’s thirteenth-round pick may have been salvaged by the real-life stupidity of the Houston Texans. You guessed it. Jelly belly will be headed into week one with a Seahawks defense shored up somewhat by Jadeveon Clowney. The DE out of South Carolina has 18.5 sacks in two seasons with the Texans but has never been the wrecking crew envisioned after “the hit” in college. Still some creative use of Clowney paired with Ezekiel Ansah could score some fantasy points if the secondary doesn’t give up a ton of big plays. The pick was made BC but sometimes in fantasy you get lucky.
Epilogue
To quote Dylan, “The moral of this story, the moral of this song, is simply that one should not be where one does not belong.” Time will tell if all these Seahawks on one fantasy team can produce W’s. I, for one, am a bit skeptical.
