Week 4

I went into week 4 with a 2-1 record—not exactly bad, but not really what I expected. Looking at my team, I was still feeling confident and annoyed by the trouncing I received at the hands of the all NE team. It just seemed unfathomable to me that a team so heavily filled with players from one NFL team could be successful. Of course, little did I know how good NE would be this past year and thus how good the team filled with their players would be.

My opponent in Week 4 was Ron Mexico’s Dogs, which was headed by the guy who always wins the league. In fact, he is usually so far a head of everyone else in past seasons that the playoffs become a joke. We all knew he would win, and the playoffs just put of the inevitable. In all honesty, I felt like I had to win this week. It wasn’t about the season, just one match up. He loves to trash talk, and he started sending me smack Sunday night—before we were even officially matched up.

By Tuesday, I had enough of the chatter and started looking for an advantage. I didn’t just want to win, I wanted to destroy my opponent. As a result, I really tweaked and over analyzed my line up and scoured the waiver wire—trying to get the right player for each and every position. No matter what I did, I could only gather enough projected points to be 6 ahead. Sadly, I worried that this would not be enough. My opponent was notoriously lucky, and possessed a pretty solid team worth a lot more than their projected 72+ points.

My biggest concern was that one of my most consistent players, Portis, had a bye week, and I didn’t know if I had a good enough replacement. As a result, I did something rather foolish. No, I didn’t drop a stud for a dud. But I did play a more questionable second string player over a tried and true starter. See, I picked up Kevin Jones specifically because I thought the Detroit Lions would have a good year, which they were doing. And for the first few weeks, he was doing okay in a pass heavy offense. More important, there was talk the Lions would be diversifying their offense more, adding more running. Jones was supposed to be my replacement for Portis, and if I had used him, he would have given me 8 solid points. Instead, I listened to the guesstimation of the so called experts and played Norwood with the hope he would have another great week. This was a mistake mostly because I knew Houston had been doing well, while the Falcons had been struggling. Yet I believed in Norwood, so the advice of the experts was exactly what I wanted to hear rather than a more solid approach to the quandary.

Speaking of experts, I did have to grant them one note of success. They were correct about Rivers. They said that he would struggle against KC, and they were right: Rivers sucked this week. Thankfully, I did not play him, switching instead to Matt Schaub, my big surprise so far this year. Another big surprise, I left week 4 with a 3-1 record. Things were definitely looking up this year.