One Year Later

It’s been almost a year since I posted. Anyone still out there? I feel the pull to scream into the void again. I also feel like I may leave social media soon. I keep thinking about it but for some reason I am scared. Acknowledging this fear makes me want to do it more though, given it can have such an effect on me. What do you think?.. is this thing on?

Getting away

I went camping over the weekend, it was beautiful. If you have never seen the Columbia Gorge, I highly recommend it. It was interesting to see people in their phones when while there was life all around them. I took full advantage of being outdoors and I feel great, can’t wait for the days ahead.

I had a longer thought but it’s evading me. Gonna sleep on it and hopefully have more tomorrow.

Relative

This morning I am reminded of how so many things are relative. Talking with two friends at work about how many leagues I am in , four, and they were flabbergasted. Telling me about how they can barely handle two. I laughed because I used to be in ten but I found more leagues didn’t necessarily mean more fun. I told them about some friends I have who are in the 20’s or even 40’s, but those people breath fantasy football.

Part of me misses playing in a lot of leagues but as I just illustrated, I do play in a lot too some of my friends. I do really enjoy the small community of people with a common interest each league creates. The social interaction is probably the main reason I play the game. All my leagues are dynasty now too. I used to run a locals only redraft league every year but last year we converted to dynasty. It has been the same core of people for years and getting to do more trades with each other has been a blast. This again is relative because I know hyperactive leagues probably double our transactions.

How many leagues are you in? What’s too many?

What’s in a name?

I changed the title of my blog for now as I’m not sure yet if this will be 100% Fantasy Football content. The nice thing about this blog is I can do what I want with it. Which as of now is to have a longer form space for my thoughts, ideas and observations of trends in my life and in the games I play. For those of you who have not heard of me or read my content before I took a break from writing, I suppose an introduction is in order.

Hello,

My name is Joey. I used to write for Under the Helmet, a fantastic Dynasty site lead by Chad Parsons. I used to also write a lot more here in this blog. A little over two years ago now my youngest daughter was born and needing to spend more time with my family is why I slowed down and eventually stopped writing all together. My daughter was born with a cataract in one eye and my family had never heard of this being possible until her. Since then we have learned a lot about eyes and about the great community around children born blind for various reasons. Two surgeries later and she now has an artificial lense in one eye and is doing great, it has been a very long road though.

I feel like I am getting some semblance of normalcy or maybe I am just getting used to the chaos. My wife and I have been married for 9 years now and we have 3 daughters. My wife is incredibly supportive of me and my girls, I can imagine life without her and it sucks. Without her support I would have never published any of my writing.

What else… I am an automotive technician for Audi and I enjoy working on cars. It is one of the few things I consider myself good at.

I enjoy reading all kinds of books and I collect comic books. I also play Magic the Gathering. Can you tell I’m a huge need yet? My favorite authors include Chuck Palahniuk, Neil Gaiman and Garth Nix. My favorite comic authors are Frank Miller and Jeph Loeb. Transcendent authors like Stephen King, Mark Twain, and George Orwell. I also really enjoy books that teach me more practical things so I read Thich Nhat Hanh, Malcolm Gladwell, Tim Ferris, Cal Newport, Marc Manson, and Michael Pollan. There are more author’s I enjoy but these are my top and are here to give you an idea of my wide variety of interests.

This is enough for tonight, I should sleep. Thak you for reading and getting to know me. I hope to bring value to you as I share my experience and findings in my future entries.

Intention

Today I choose to embark on a journey through a more intentional life.

Hopefully these first steps are not in vain. My goal is get back to creating content and not just engaging with others but actually providing value. Not just retweeting whatever triggers something in my brain but actually providing a thoughtful response or idea.

This is my goal. I hope I can reach it for you and for myself.

Here We Go

The season is here, what should I write about?

Today I have been thinking about how to exploit a dynasty league by using Redraft overall ranks this time of year against dynasty ADP to find the values. Here are a few guys to check out:

Using fantasypros.com

Golden Tate – Redraft 35th / Dynasty 50th

Larry Fitzgerald – Redraft 26th / Dynasty 104th

Dion Lewis – Redraft 51st / Dynasty 90th

Alex Collins – Redraft 43rd / Dynasty 79th

Jay Ajayi – Redraft 50th / Dynasty 61st

The value will depend on your league of course, but this shows guys who can be had for cheap relative to their potential fantasy production this year. Check it out for yourself and let me know who you are gonna a target in your league.

End of the Year

I still have a link on Twitter to this. If you came here through there, thanks. Life has been intense this year so my writing hit the back burning. I hope to return to it in ’18 though as things have evened out and I am finding more balance. Thank you again and I hope you have a wonderful December. Be kind, be true, be you.

A Trade I Made

I consider my league mates friends and try to keep conversations honest and open. This game requires a little tact though and a poker face is needed from time to time. Even when I am looking for fair trades I know if I tip my hand the other owner might try to take advantage. I know I will try and get a little extra value if the opportunity presents itself and I expect others to do the same as part of the game. This being said, the key to keeping good relationships through this dance is always trying to keep transactions mostly fair and even. Just because you can take full advantage of something does not mean you should, skimming a little extra value is fine. Also, nobody wants to deal with commissioners or owners crying collusion. 
Now, on with the story.

This last week I made a trade in a 2QB league. This league also gives 0.2 ppc and 1.25 ppr to runningbacks and he his main guys were Devonta Freeman, Melvin Gordon and Derrick Henry. The running backs are who I really wanted but I didn’t want to tip my hand.
I was eyeing Devante Adams and started by offering Odell Beckham Jr. for Adams and a runningback of his choice. My hope was to get Freeman but after some thought he let me know he was more interest in my quarterbacks. This made total sense because I had Kirk Cousins, Jameis Winston and Alex Smith with Patrick Mahomes. He had Ben Roethlisberger with Landry Jones and Carson Palmer. Losing Colin Kaepernick in this league hurt him, those rushes are huge. For me, I think Winston is a first or second round start up value, so without getting another stud player I would take in that range I couldn’t do it. Potentially I could have done Winston for Freeman or Gordon but I didn’t want to trade Winston in the first place and did not put it on the table. So I started the offers with Cousins as my main piece. I offered Cousins for Adams and Freeman. Then before he could respond I was feeling like I needed to add a reciever to the group to make it fair so I let him know I could throw in a wide reciever three type guy.

At this point in talks I still didn’t want to seem too anxious about getting Freeman or Gordon because I was totally fine with “settling” for Derrick Henry. Henry may still have another year as the number two guy but I think he has great potential and I am willing to wait. Since I was not giving up OBJ I didn’t need to get Adams and could shift talks toward the running back as the main asset on his side. I offered Cousins for one of his top backs plus something little. Leaving which back and the little piece up to him. This league might have ppc but in a twelve team 2qb league, quartback is still king to me. His reply was honest and valuable, here is where I had to look in the mirror. 

Sometimes we need to recognize our own bias towards players on our teams. I could see my bias towards Cousins. He let me know he’d rather give me back one of his older quartbacks and a guy like Doug Baldwin because he felt his runningbacks deserve a premium. He wasn’t wrong, I just knew we were gonna be a little bit further apart than I liked to be in a trade. So I offered to “step down” to Henry and he let me know it would be easier to get a deal done this way.

He let me know he was uneasy about Cousins potential to leave Washington and the uncertainty which would follow. His initial thought was Winston for Devante Adams and Derrick Henry but he didn’t think it would be enough on his side. The open dialogue we were able to have with each other was very helpful for both of us. Sharing an honest thought process, if kept short, can be useful and is still polite conversation. This is not the same as when someone sends paragraphs about why they are sending an offer and why it should be accepted. Those kinds of things are rarely accepted with anything more than a laugh and decline. Keep it simple. 

I countered with Cousins for those two players, Adams and Henry. I also put in a note saying I could add Golden Tate or Jordan Matthews if it would help soften the blow of losing Adams. He added Matthews to the deal and it was done.

I went through all this and you may be sitting there wondering why I didn’t just send Winston for Gordon. This is a fair question. My answer is I do not like to buy players at their ceilings. I believe Henry will gain value over the next 12 months and his production will go up substantially from here on out. Did I buy Adams at his ceiling though? I do not think so. He is still a third round pick in normal start ups who could easily jump to the start of the second when he has another great season.