Here are my numbers for Week 11:

Free subscribers, click here for the full post.

Read more

I had Devonta Smith going in the Primetime which was nice and Jake Elliott going in the Steak League which was not so nice. It could have been better, and it could have been worse.

• The short-yardage push play the Eagles run is such a massive advantage, I can’t understand why other teams won’t just watch the tape and copy it. If you have 3rd-and-3, you can just run it twice.

• Patrick Mahomes missed two throws, but otherwise played an almost flawless game under pressure. There are QBs who can run like Lamar Jackson and go through progressions like Tom Brady, but no one makes better decisions when pressured and on the move. The only one I can remember who came close was peak Aaron Rodgers.

• Rashee Rice is the only convincing receiver out there other than Travis Kelce. MVS shouldn’t be on this team, Skyy Moore has disappeared and Kadarius Toney is fun for gadget plays and punt returns. Mahomes could probably win another Super Bowl with Justin Watson as the leading receiver, but they’re making it unnecessarily hard on him.

• Kelce’s fumble was also a crushing turning point in the game. He also had a third-down drop for which he made up on the next play.

• Isiah Pacheco runs hard every play irrespective of the imminent punishment he’s about to take. I don’t think he’s long for the league, but he’s a solid player.

• Jalen Hurts didn’t play especially well, but you never have to worry about him in fantasy with all the automatic goal line TDs. The real-life contrast between him and Mahomes was stark though.

Maybe it’s my going-nowhere fantasy teams. The Primetime was in fourth place coming in, with an outside chance for the playoffs, but I ignored a hunch to sub in Brock Purdy for Dak Prescott, and every 14 points count with only three more weeks to make up an 80-point gap. My heuristic was roll with the hot hand in Dak, but the Panthers ugly it up, and I kind of knew better.

In the end, all heuristics are bullshit except one: make your own calls, whether bold or chalk, and live with your own mistakes. Relying on any other heuristic is no better than relying on Fantasy Midwits or the local astrologer — it’s an attempt to avoid making the choice for yourself.

• I watched some of the Giants game. Kayvon Thibodeaux is a beast. I know Sam Howell is a walking sack, but Thibodeaux was everywhere, even in on some run plays. This is obviously a lost year for the Giants, but the Thibodeaux-Dexter Lawrence-Andrew Thomas nucleus is strong.

• Saquon Barkley had a great game. The Giants couldn’t run at all for most of the day, and then he broke two long runs, on top of his two TD catches, one of which was a spinning back-shoulder grab while taking a hit in the end zone. In a parallel universe, he’s in the pantheon at the position.

• Tommy DeVito took nine sacks, which wipes the shine off that 9.5 YPA, but he didn’t turn it over, and that throw to Saquon was perfect. Brian Daboll coached his destroyed team up pretty well under the circumstances. It also shows the difference between DeVito off the practice squad a month ago and after playing and practicing with the first team. When people act like the QB is so important because of the cavernous drop-off from starter to no-name backup, that’s in large part because it takes a month of good coaching for the no-name to be even marginally competent. It’s not because the league-average QB is worth $35M a year in his own right.

• I watched a bunch of the Bears-Lions too. I started Goff, against Alan Seslowsky’s recommendation, over Kyler Murray in the Steak League, which cost me five points. But that was despite the Lions running in the game-winning TD, and Goff playing his worst home game of the year, i.e., this was a wrong call I can live with.

• I had the Bears +7.5 as one of my picks which was a no-doubter all day — until the last 30 seconds when Aidan Hutchinson knocked the ball out of Justin Fields’ hand, and it was rolling around the end zone before getting knocked out for a safety. Had the Lions pounced on it, it would have been an epic bad beat.

• Fields looked pretty good to me. If the Bears get the first overall pick (from the Panthers), they’ll have an interesting decision to make with respect to trading down or trading Fields. If I’m the Bears I let the market for each guide me. If a team wants the pick badly enough, I’d be okay to roll with Fields behind an absolutely monstrous stack of talent.

• I’m glad the Chargers lost. I hate that team. It was also nice to see Christian Watson finally catch a TD.

• Not that much else was interesting to me. The De’Von Achane and Kenny Walker injuries soured me a bit, and having Garrett Wilson in two leagues wasn’t ideal, but someone (not me) started Aaron Jones, Cooper Kupp, Stefon Diggs and/or Najee Harris, so I take some solace in that.

• I’ve mentioned this before, but it occurred to me again: Does no one else find it odd that a few months after 9/11, out of nowhere, a historically unparalleled NFL dynasty formed called the “Patriots?” just as congress was passing one of the most pernicious, invasive and consequential laws in US history entitled the “Patriot Act.” And like the dynasty which seemed set to expire a few times, it got renewed over and over. Certainly a strange coincidence, but probably too on the nose to be anything more.

Here are this week’s picks:

Free subscribers, click here for the full post.

Read more

There was a predictable outcry from the pearl clutchers:

Some midwits even tried to bring race into it!

My take is you should have a code of journalistic ethics when you are journalist — so many for the last 10 years did not when the stakes were infinity higher — and none of these Karens made a peep. Were they calling out Rachel Maddow for lying about the efficacy of the mRNA shot? Any blowback for Mina Kimes after unjustly impugning Aaron Rodgers’ character while it was she who was utterly misinformed?

But Thompson was doing a bullshit job that only exists because network execs and league officals thought it would be a good idea to have coaches use some of their scarce time between halves to speak, against their will, on camera. So they mouth inane truisms that add nothing of value.

To her credit, Thompson knew this was the case and just supplied the truisms for them which was a win/win. Now the coach could focus on second-half prep, and she was spared the unpleasant task of wringing something out of them. Neither the audience nor the executives were any the wiser.

If you have a real job, do it earnestly and with integrity. But when you see something is obviously fake and stupid, go ahead and break the rules. Those feigning outrage on account of their trust being broken sound ridiculous. You really put stock in Coach X saying: “we need to tackle better and take care of the ball?”

I also had the Bengals +4 in my home pool, but once Burrow got hurt, that was toast. I had Justin Tucker in a few leagues (he did fine) and Zay Flowers in one (he had his usual modest, short-pass-catching week), while it’s pretty clear OBJ is now the team’s No. 1 on the outside.

• Burrow sprained his wrist and is awaiting an MRI. He’s a great quarterback when healthy, but the injuries are piling up.

• I wasn’t pleased to see Ja’Marr Chase partially salvage his day with that garbage-time TD. If my players are going to bust, I want others to suffer too.

• I only watched the highlights, but Lamar Jackson looked smooth, even if he got lucky on the Nelson Agolor TD off a tipped pass. Odell Beckham is accelerating after the catch like he did with the Giants. The Ravens are going to need him, especially after Andrews’ apparently serious injury.

• I’m soured Flowers who seems like he’s all moves and no production. Maybe with Andrews out he and Rashod Bateman will get a boost, but it’s hard to count on either.

• Gus Edwards got two more TDs. I was going to nominate him in our TD-heavy Steak League for a buck in the end game, but changed my mind, got outbid on the guy I nominated, and then someone else got Edwards for a buck before my turn came back around. He’s the NFL’s leader in rushing TDs with 12.

• Roquan Smith got me 10 tackles which isn’t bad, but a bit of a come-down after last week’s 21.

Read more

The Keynesian economist thinks value is determined by the cost it takes to produce something — for our purposes consider that the ADP at which you’d have to take him.

The Marxist thinks value is determined by how much labor went into it. Anyone who mentions the word-count of the article they post is engaging in that frame. (I’m not sure what the analogy would be for that on draft day, as all players take the same click of a button to draft.)

But the Austrian is talking about everyone doing his own subjective cheat sheet, and the market value being the ADP only after all those people come together to create that market.

At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the Keynesian’s ADP and the Austrian’s, but in practice there is. In the Keynesian view, the ADP is the ADP. In the Austrian view, the market value is only determined by the personal subjective value judgments of the drafters. In other words, they have to make their own cheat sheets first, and only then will the market value really be known.

I’d argue the NFBC ADP (and that of other platforms) are more of the Keynesian variety. Some people are doing their own projections or cheat sheets, but many (including me at times) are just looking at the ADP itself as the baseline and making small adjustments to it. And the ADP itself is also heavily influenced by the projections systems to which everyone has access. In other words, people are treating as-is ADP roughly as value, even though it’s not really the true aggregate of everyone’s subjective preferences.

If no one had access to ADP or anyone else’s projections, the cross-off list in the draft room were only alphabetical (or sortable by individual stats like last year’s HR, RBI, etc.), then everyone would have to come up with their own rankings. (Even better if there were no tweets, podcasts, cheat sheets, etc. influencing anyone’s rankings.) If each person had to generate a cheat sheet solely through his own research, that would be an especially information-rich, Austrian-style ADP.

And this got me thinking. If our group-think ADP that feeds on itself, i.e., “Why did you take this player in the third round? Because he’s a third rounder,” it might not be an especially good baseline for value. We won’t ever again have the real Austrian-style ADP (maybe we were closer in a brief window 20 years ago), but what we have now is really set by a few early drafters and projectors and mostly adjusted due to news and hype.

As such, I’m resigned to do my own MLB cheat sheets this year, maybe starting in December, and I’ll take great pains to avoid even knowing what the ADP or the big projection systems think until just before the drafts themselves, so I know who to jump and who to wait on.

In fact, I plan to do my first draft blind, so to speak, without even looking at ADP at all.