I am a champion

Another pastime which stirs my insanely focused passions is fantasy football. I joined a new league this year and am proud to report that after 17 grueling weeks the Durham Bullmastiffs has won the first title of the Tony Dorsett Division in the fantasy leagues hosted by No-Offseason. It's a little site but in the ever noisier world of fantasy football commentary it is nice to find some folks who actually know of what they speak. Although the one remark there that first caught my eye with which I most emphatically agreed turned out to be dead wrong. Anyway, I finished at 12-5 in a very competitive league - no one was mathematically eliminated from the Championship with four weeks to go - even though on paper I've got a middle of the pack team. I'd like to thank Tony Romo, Braylon Edwards, Anquan Boldin, Jerricho Cotchery and especially my linebacking corps of Patrick Willis, Nick Barnett and E.J. Henderson for this glorious victory. My LBs totally dominated.

This joy of finally winning an FF title is tempered by having the worst season ever for the team I share with Lee Wrights in our home league, the Carolina Huddle. 3-11. Ugh. But there is a silver lining, we get Darren McFadden next year. Which may not be a good thing. The Huddle is notorious for ruining players in the most spectacular ways. Players who ended their careers (figuratively if not literally) on the Huddle include Rae Carruth, Fred Lane, Jamaal Anderson, Priest Holmes and most recently, Michael Vick and Travis Henry. We can probably take the blame for Daunte Culpepper too. Which is too bad, I really liked Daunte. It happens in all the little things too. This year we picked up Anthony Gonzalez off the waiver wire, an excellent acquisition, but wouldn't you know it he broke his thumb on his very first play after we picked him up. I'm reduced to making trade offers for players I hate in hopes that they too will suffer. I mean, if we are stuck with this curse we might as well use the power for good.

If you want to hear the long glorious detailed history of how I built a winning dynasty team, I posted the legend under my sports message board moniker MahSoonerz here. I spend so much time studying fantasy football that I am getting it together to write regularly on it. I'm putting together my off-season IDP cheatsheets and team-by-team analysis and will be shopping them around soon.