Football Recap

The Falcons looked horrible, and at 6-6 may not even break the curse of consecutive winning seasons. With the Saints coming in next week, I'm a wee bit scared.

Tech: nice job going to the Orange Bowl, even if you got your butts handed to you by a down SEC team in the Dawgs.

Texas: buy a watch.

Fantasy: Our regular season ended last night. I wasn't too high on my team at the start of the year, and I had good reason to be worried about age and injuries. Let's see what happened (original comments from August in parentheses, additional comments in italics)

QB: Donovan McNabb (Rd. 6, which I chose over Matt Ryan, and might haunt me all year) Damn straight it haunted me - he missed weeks 2-5 with a broken rib and then alternated between 30 and 5 points all year. Finally benched.
Backup: Carson Palmer (Rd. 8) Saved my team this year from the likes of Matt Stafford.
Backup: Chad Pennington (Round 16) Replaced by Matt Stafford after getting knocked out for the year.

RB: Tomlinson (Keeper, Round 3) The wheels on the bus start falling off...missed a couple weeks early on and is probably never returning to form, has had one 100-yard game all year.
RB: Michael Turner (Keeper, Round 1) Hurt with a high ankle sprain and could miss the rest of the year.
Backup: Jamal Lewis (Round 9) Concussed again, and retired.
Backup: Leon Washington (Round 12) Broken arm, out for the year.
Backup: Ricky Williams (Round 13) THIS is the guy who stayed healthy all year? Wow. Also saved team from total despair.

WR: Anquan Bolden (Keeper, Round 2) Missed two weeks, and whined several others, in a down year. Not helping the case to change scenery for more moolah next year until Sunday night.
WR: Roy Williams (Round 7). Decent week 1, missed a couple weeks, and traded while out of lineup.
WR: Wes Welker (Round 4). Missed weeks 2 and 3, but has been taking in 12 catches a week since.
Backup: Laverneaus Coles (Round 10) Cut before the season started.
Backup: Nate Washington (Round 17) Hurt, and cut.

TE: Tony Gonzalez (Round 5, yay, another Falcon) Stayed healthy all year and has set records for Falcon TE's - which weren't too hard to break.
Backup: Tony Scheffler (Round 18, meh, it was the last pick of the draft) Useful for the one Falcons' bye week.

Defense: New England (Round 11) Good when it needed to be.
Backup: Dallas (Round 15) Cut after week 3.

Kicker: Adam Vinatieri (Round 14) Injured, missed several weeks, and cut.

After all of this, one would think a 2-11, or even winless season, right?

Well, after the bad news, some good news from the season:

Week 2: With McNabb out (big shocker) Carson Palmer stepped in as starting QB and began lighting it up. The Bengals, at 9-3, are still doing so.
Week 3: Snagged the Saints' defense off waivers. At 12-0, that's looking pretty good.
Week 5: Snagged Rashard Mendenhall off waivers to replace the downed Tomlinson.
Week 6: Traded the disgruntled and overrated Roy Williams, and replaced him with Miles Austin off the waiver wire.
Week 7: Picked up Sidney Rice.

The year was also filled with stupid moves (such as a one-week play of the Arizona defense when I refused to play the Saints against the Falcons) which cost me games as well.

I even looked at a fire sale when I was 4-6 and had almost impossible odds to make the playoffs - winning out and several other teams spitting the bit - but ended up not making any moves.

Somehow, though, I somehow squeaked into the playoffs as a wild card with a 7-6 record. after winning the last three games by an average of 44 points and other teams did not fare so well. As it ended up, in a strange development of parity, all team ended up with records between 8-5 and 5-8, and 7-6 was indeed good enough to make it.

It's gonna take more than the mess above to knock out the reigning champ :)