The Second Half

The second half of my season was less than perfect. I was solidly in second place, but did not think I could win. The reasons were two fold: 1) the manager in 1st place had Randy Moss and Tom Brady, as well as a NE player in every other position including DEF. 2) I was hit by injuries each and every week after the 7th. As a result, I lost four out of five games at one point in the last half of the season, and dropped to 3rd place (and got painfully close to 4th).

Now this admission may seem to suggest that I have no idea what I was doing, which may be the case to some extent, but as I kept having injury problems I began to notice something about the other teams in my league. They were all having the same trouble as me and suffered even worse from management failures (the latter destroys more teams than anything else, in my humble opinion).

There was one exception to the rule--the manager at the top of the league consistently dominated for no other reason than his team was made up almost entirely of Patriots (which honestly means his entire season was a fluke in my book, but that can be covered in another post). He rarely checked on his team and almost never made roster changes. Who could blame him really, he was just riding along on their stupendous season. But I think he already believed he had the league cinched, which gave me an idea. Three games into my losing second half, I realized I needed to position my team to play him in the playoffs. If I could do that, I thought I just might be able to surprise my lackadaisical friend. In case you are having trouble following my logic here, I will state it bluntly: I intentionally started to lose in order to play the best team in the league during the first round of the playoffs.

The reason for my madness. While I began to lose I also started stacking my team with players from teams who were fighting to get into the playoffs. That way, I would have hungry players while my opponent would have guys looking for a rest before the playoffs began. Sadly, my ploy failed.

While I kept losing, the fourth manager in the league did as well. Instead of a cakewalk against a team I figured would have no players for the last game (considering their season, I figured Belichick had to give his team a rest in the last game or at the very least they would not put up the same numbers as earlier in the season), I had to play against the #2 team in the league and unfortunately he had been stacking his team just like me. It was a tough match up. Luckily, I got some solid performances and advanced to the next round. Just as I expected, the #1 team fell to the #4 team (which really should've been me!?!).

Next: The Big Game