Week 2 - Maulers Dominate!

For two weeks in a row now, the Monday night game has proved to be a major factor in fantasy. Frito Pie trailed SOFA KING GOOD by 35 points going into Monday night’s game with only Peyton Manning and Dallas Clark to play. Despite Indianapolis only having the ball for 14:53 and only running 35 offensive plays, Manning and Clark managed to score 47 points between them, largely due to an 80-yard touchdown strike on the game’s first play. So Rachel has improved her record to 1-1 along with four other teams with that same record. Amazingly after two weeks of play, there is only one team at 2-0--the Lords of Lumberg!

Congratulations this week belong to Jamie George and the Midnight Maulers for posting the high score of 111 points! Apparently Frank Gore was alerted to the fact that Jamie was without LT this week, so he decided to really step it up and dropped 38 points. Also, Jamie did a great job of managing his bench this week, as he could only have improved his point total by 3 points by swapping his defenses. Good job Jamie!!

So this week I examine whether being the first movie of the summer is really anything to brag about, I take a look to see how defenses are doing, and I reveal the greatest bench in the history of Sacred Sundays! But first, some quick observations…

Nice!

Chris Johnson, RB – sprouts – 48 pts – It looked like a professional player running through a high school defense. For those who didn’t see it – 197 rushing yards, 87 receiving yards, and 3 TD’s. Here’s the most amazing part. On the Player list, it shows that Chris Johnson is owned in 99% of Yahoo! leagues. Seriously, I want to be in the league where this guy is a free agent.

Frank Gore, RB – Midnight Maulers – 38 pts – 80 yards one way and 79 yards the other way. Those were Gore’s two touchdown runs on the day.

Matt Schaub, QB – sprouts – 33 pts – So much for Tennessee’s vaunted defense… Schaub shredded them for 357 yards and 4 touchdowns!

Dallas Clark, TE – Frito Pie – 27 pts – Clark accounted for 51% of the Colts total offensive production for the night!

Andre Johnson, WR – Tailgate Approved – 26 pts – Finally living up to his first pick status, Johnson went wild on Tennessee with 149 yards and 2 TD’s.

Philip Rivers, QB – SOFA KING GOOD – 25 pts – Career game for Rivers as he passed for 436 yards on 45 attempts.

Mario Manningham, WR – Free Agent – 24 pts – Expect this guy to be the hottest waiver wire pick up this week as he is only owned in 39% of leagues, yet leads ALL wide receivers in scoring. Side note: There have been cool sports name connections in the past (Stockton-to-Malone, Montana-to-Rice, Keys-to-Channing, Aikman-to-Irvin), but I can’t decide if Manning-to-Manningham is cool or gay.

Crappy Day to be a Wide Receiver…. or Named Pierre

Randy Moss, WR – Joe’s Pats – 2 pts – Here is something I never would’ve expected to write – The Jets defense really shut down the Patriots. Scary…

Santana Moss, WR – sprouts – 1 pt – I can’t say that I watched this game (STL @ WSH), and obviously there were no Santana Moss highlights from the game, so I don’t have any first hand knowledge, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that he sucked pretty hard in this one.

Roy Williams, WR – Scottish Rebels – 1 pt – The ginormous video screen at Cowboy Stadium must’ve been blocking Romo’s vision, because he never found Williams.

Greg Jennings, WR – Scottish Rebels – 0 pts – There were 98 wide receivers that outscored Jennings this week, along with 40 tight ends. I could’ve played Keenan Burton and at least scored 3 points. (Kudos to anyone who knows what team Keenan Burton plays for.)

Pierre Thomas, RB – SOFA KING GOOD – 0 pts – Actually, isn’t every day a pretty bad day to be named Pierre?

Defense Watch

Philadelphia had an unbelievable week last week against Carolina, where they logged an unprecedented 43 points. At the time, I made a comment that I figured there would be defenses that don’t score that many combined points for at least the next 5 weeks. So, I’m going to track this stat going forward to see how long it takes the lowest scoring defense in Fantasy to post 44 points.

As of now, only one team has scored more than 43 combined points, and that is Philadelphia. Arizona and Denver are close (with 37 and 36 points respectively). Dallas has posted a dismal 6 points through two weeks, so right now they look like the team to watch! Dallas, by the way, is the only team in the NFL that has yet to post a sack or a defensive turnover.

Interesting note – The top 2 defenses selected in our draft (Baltimore and Pittsburgh) are tied for 24^th place, each having only posted 18 total points.

Wolverine – "The first" blockbuster of the summer

The tag line for the Wolverine advertisements is “Now you can own the first blockbuster of the summer!!” This has just made me chuckle. First off, this movie was released on May 1, 2009, so technically it wasn’t even a summer release. Secondly, when has the “first” release of anything been the best? You don’t hear Apple advertising, “Come buy the first generation iPod! It’s bigger than a graphing calculator!!” No…the first release of anything always sucks!

The only reason to advertise a movie as “The First” is if that really is the best thing that it has to offer. And in Wolverine’s case, that is really not far off the mark…

Best Bench

This was truly an achievement of epic proportions! The bench players on sprouts this week were the greatest bench players in the history of Sacred Sundays. To give you an idea just how good sprouts’ bench was this week, you could make a team from only those seven players that would have beaten Jamie’s high score for the week by 14 points. And that would be with only using 5 players!!!

Here is what that roster would look like:

QB: Matt Schaub-33 pts

WR: Donald Driver-15 pts

WR: Devery Henderson-7pts

RB: Chris Johnson-48 pts

RB: Darren Sproles-22 pts

TE: -empty-

K: - empty-

DEF: -empty-

TOTAL: 125 pts

So Russ takes the title this week for best bench, as he could have more than doubled his score and improved by 89 POINTS with four roster moves. C. Johnson for C. Portis (41 pts), M. Schaub for B. Favre (19 pts), D. Sproles for M. Jones-Drew (15 pts) and D. Driver for S. Moss (14 pts).

Two weeks down, and still a lot of football to go!! Get those rosters ready for Week 3! BTW – In case you hadn’t already looked it up – Keenan Burton plays for the St. Louis Rams…