Week 5 Observations

The worst part of fantasy football is lineup setting. You know you’re going to get some close calls wrong, and instead of being like me where you want to defenestrate over it and actually root against the guys on your bench (whom really you should be rooting for), you should accept it and calmly incorporate the new information into your subsequent decisions.

But in a season of lineup errors, this was maybe the worst week I’ve ever had on that front — or so I thought. And then, with that idea in my head, I made a last-minute switch that made it catastrophically worse.

I had Kirk Cousins in my lineup against the Chiefs in one league, but I read somewhere that Anthony Richardson’s points per minute were tops in the league (remember he got hurt early in one game, coincidentally the other one when I used him over Cousins the week Cousins went bananas against the Eagles), so I made the swap.

Richardson of course got hurt in the first half (again!), with five points, and again I have Cousins on my bench in a high total late game. As I’m stewing over that, I’m also upset I started CJ Stroud (even though I knew the Falcons were the type of team to grind games into the muck) over Matthew Stafford who has Cooper Kupp back. At this point, it’s the first half of the late games, and Stafford already has two TD passes and a decent amount of yardage. Everything I’ve done has been wrong.

But there’s more. I sat Jared Goff in the Steak League (for obvious reasons) and Goff (in this TD-heavy league) has three TD passes and a rushing TD! My alternative was Brock Purdy, who plays Sunday night, and I went Purdy.

Moreover, I had Kyle Pitts in as my flex in one league, due to byes and injuries, and at the last second I swapped him out for Skyy Moore because (and this is what drove me nearly to suicide) I looked on Fantasypros, and those midwits had Moore higher in their PPR flex rankings. Keep in mind this is the same Fantasypros that gave my Main Event NFBC team an F, the one that was in first place much of the year and finished second. I used Moore over Pitts and didn’t even consider Zach Moss with Jonathan Taylor coming back.

But I haven’t gotten to the pièce de résistance yet. Feeling positive Cousins was going to go bananas against the Chiefs and Stafford against the Eagles, I thought — well, I’m stuck with Purdy and his likely meager output in the Steak League, but I can still swap him out for Dak Prescott in the Sunday night game! After all, I had Prescott in initially, and (I did two seconds of research) the Cowboys defense is No. 1 against the pass. (Of course, it only dimly occurred to me they were No. 1 against the pass because they faced the Giants, Jets, Patriots and Cardinals.)

So I made the swap, watched the game this morning, and it’s only because I am able to express myself via this post that I haven’t pulled a Jeffrey Epstein. (Just kidding, everyone knows Epstein didn’t kill himself!)

And the final kick in the nuts (although it’s almost funny at this point) is that Goff outscored Purdy by one point from my bench in Steak, i.e., it was still a bad decision to have Purdy in, even though, I tried to hedge against that by inflicting utter catastrophe on my Primetime team which is 1-4 and pretty much drawing dead even when Saquon Barkley returns.

Free subscribers, for the full post, click here.