Is this the Real Life?

My first encounters with Fantasy Football (round ball version) were in the early nineties. Every summer, I'd study the statistics in the newspaper before carefully filling in my team and posting it off.  Then the season would roll round and by the end of August I'd realise that I had no chance of winning the thing, Brian Deane (the Roy Williams of his day) was not going to score 30 goals, and that Jamie Redknapp might be a decent passer but you don't get points for a nice haircut and a pulled hamstring.

However, such trivial matters wouldn't perturb me and I'd gamely try my luck every season, even expanding my Fantasy efforts to cricket and rugby, but every time I'd fail miserably.

I tried joining smaller, private leagues, in which the players were "auctioned", so each player could only play for one team.  But still I'd find myself off the pace early on, with no chance of winning.  Clearly, the biggest problem was my lack of management skills but there was surely more to it than that!

The solution presented itself when I started getting into the NFL.  Here was a much more fun way of playing Fantasy Football  - join a league of ten players (nfl.com and/or many other sites run such leagues), have a draft, pick a squad. pick a starting line up (Usually a QB, 2RBs, 3WR, a TE, a Kicker and a team Defence - but there are variants) and then play 1v1 matches every week with another league member.

It's a brilliant way of playing Fantasy Football.  Have a bad week and you lose that game but it's only one game so you're still in contention.  Sometimes you may have a bad week but your opponent has a worse one so you still win.  In short, it keeps things close.  What's more, the league is decided by a play off between the top 4 teams over the last 2 weeks of the season.  Again, this keeps it interesting for players as they are striving to get in the top 4 rather than having to finish first.

Fantasy Football US style

As you may have guessed, I'm quite a fan of NFL Fantasy Football and I usually have one eye on my teams' progress on a Sunday evening. Having a player in your Fantasy team can make the most inconsequential NFL game relevant.  Seattle v St Louis -nothing to play for? Maybe for them, but I've got Brandon Lloyd as one of my Wide Receivers!

Fantasy Football English Style

If I've got one criticism of Fantasy Football NFL style, it's the sometimes over serious way in which it is reported.  Sites such as NFL.com have excellent Fantasy sections, with plenty of advice and stats. But they also employ people like Michael Fabiano, to purely talk about Fantasy Football and to even host shows entirely dedicated to Fantasy Football.  Fabiano is a good journalist, but the way he discusses Fantasy Football, you'd think he was talking to people who genuinely owned the players.  I like his enthusiasm, but sometimes he needs reminding that it's not real!  At times, it feels like you're watching a Finance programme. It's all a bit serious for what essentially is a fun game to play whilst watching the NFL.  Give me Skinner, Baddiel and Statto any day of the week! Well, any day before they moved to ITV that is.

Anyway, what's this all got to do with eliminating a team?  Well, it'd be great if I could draft a couple of players from my real life team into my Fantasy team.  I'm not talking about "mass team drafting" - this is the process whereby a supporter of a team will fill his Fantasy team with players from the team he supports. This  invariably ends in abject failure.  No, just a couple of players will do.
So, I'm going to look at the Fantasy totals achieved by the best team available from each of my 12 remaining teams and eliminate the lowest.  To complete this I will be using the end of season totals from nfluk.com, the team's highest point scorer for each Fantasy position and approximately 5 cups of strong, black coffee.

If you didn't follow all that then don't worry, just look at the pretty numbers below:

1. Detroit 1122
2. Green Bay 1109
3. Philadelphia 1072
4. Atlanta 1069
5. Carolina 1011
6. New York Jets 919
7. Cincinnati 916
8. Houston 872
9. Buffalo 856
10. Tennessee 848
11. Minnesota 842
12. Denver 768

There we have it, by virtue of having the lowest Fantasy score of the 2011 season, I'm eliminating the Denver Broncos.  As usual, it's not an entirely fair way of eliminating a team but rules are rules.  Detroit topped the charts, largely thanks to the Stafford-Johnson partnership that terrorized Secondaries in 2011. The only rivals to Denver were the Vikings, but a team with arguably the best running back in the league were always likely to avoid the wooden spoon.

Some bloke kneeling down.
He's probably a bit tired

Hmm, I'm torn over whether I'm happy with this elimination or not.  On the one hand, Denver's 2011 story was one of the most extraordinary I've encountered in any sport I've ever followed. Some of their comebacks beggared belief and in Timothy Tebow they have one of the most polarizing sportsmen on the planet.  I actually like Tebow, as say what you like about him, he undeniably works so hard at his game and has an unshakable belief in his potential.  Besides, how can you not love this  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CWdPXn4xqo&feature=related

Having said that, there is still a large part of me that can see it all ending in tears next season. The experts can't all be wrong.  Surely Tebow will get found out and the Option play will be exposed as the out of date strategy that it is?  When it's bad, it's really bad (See the last 3 games of the regular season) and no matter how often you talk to God, if you can't adapt into an efficient passing QB then your days in the league are numbered.
Believe it or not, Denver also have other players! And it's a shame to lose talents such as Von Miller and Denaryius Thomas, but there you go.  Seeing as I've got no teams left from the AFC West, I'd like to see Denver have a good 2012 as it'll make for some unmissable viewing and "experts2 going into meltdown at the implausibility of it all!

I'm down to 11 teams now.  Next time, I'll be listening to my heart and getting rid of the remaining team that I cannot ever see myself supporting.