Things didn't quite work out as I hoped. Looking back, if you had told me that I'd have Ronnie Brown and Rudi Johnson, Ronnie Brown, Steve Smith, Laveraneous Coles, Kellen Winslow and Ben Roethlisberger as anchors to my team, I'd say well-played and probable playoff team. Instead, we finished a mediocre 4-9. So we're kind of the 49ers of fantasy football. Big expectations, very poor results.
One interesting feature of CBS's fantasy site is that in draft results, they list the total points for each player drafted. With the 9th overall pick I selected Rudi Johnson, which is something most everyone would do heading into the season. Johnson has been a very solid back the last few years and even a bit underrated in my opinion. This year? 58 fantasy points on the season makes him the worst performing first round pick. On the other hand, before Ronnie Brown went down we were right in the thick of the playoff race. Even having missed all this time with injury, Ronnie Brown is still 4th among second round picks in performance. Looking at fantasy points versus draft position, our worst pick was clearly Rudi Johnson, although anybody would make that pick. Instead, I'd say the worst pick would be Mark Clayton in the 7th round who finished with 30 fantasy points on the year. Some other receivers we could have had that were actually drafted include Santonio Holmes, Brandon Marshall, Greg Jennings and Wes Welker.
On the other hand, our best pick was probably Ben Roethlisberger in the 10th round. His 248 points put him ahead of the second best player that round, Greg Jennings, by 112 points (which happened to be the point total of the 3rd best player, Jason Witten).
So all in all, not such an exciting season. One thing we can take with us to the grave is that while we finished with the 10th overall record, we finished 7th in the power rankings. The power rankings were based on how your overall record and how your team would perform against every other team every single week. We finished 6th in total points scored while finishing first in total points against. So basically, teams got up off the mat when they faced it and gave us a stiff challenge. Basically, as with our 49ers, I'm doing my best to make excuses for a relatively poor performance. Hopefully next year will be better.
In the meantime, many fantasy leagues wrapped up their regular season yesterday and it's entering playoff time in the fantasy football realm. Feel free to discuss your teams, your performance, excuses, praise, bragging or whatever here. I will say that personally, it was an otherwise satisfying fantasy football here. I had 3 important fantasy teams (aside from the SB Nation team) and two made or will make the playoffs. I have a 9-4 team in the keeper league looking to defend my championship from a year ago. I also have an 11-2 team in first place in a league where the playoffs start next week and I get to keep Joseph Addai as a 5th round pick next season. Mini-dynasty perhaps? We'll see. My final team finished 4-9, but it's a dynasty league where you keep 28 players and we took over a horrendous team at the end of last season. Our one big chip is Joseph Addai and now we get the #1 pick and Darren McFadden. Needless to say, my co-owner and I are pleased.