The King Reigns!!

Records, as they say, are meant to be broken. For two years and three weeks, the record for the most points scored in one week has stood at 145 held by the Coors Light Drunk Guys. But with an absolutely monstrous performance, SOFA KING GOOD broke through that mark and scored an unprecedented 148 points!! The KING dominated everyone this week, as the next closest team was 39 points behind. It was rather fitting too that James broke the record playing against the previous record holder, Shawn. The MVP for SOFA KING GOOD was Darren McFadden, who scorched the Jets defense for 171 yards and 2 TD’s! Well done Cap’n!! May this record stand until it is broken!

In other news, it appears that Timmy has really taken my advice to heart about the irrelevance of kickers and has decided to not even save a roster spot for one. Also, two of the non-playoff teams from last year are undefeated (Frito Pie and Moves Like Jagger), while my defending champion Rebels are winless. Does this mean that my quest for a repeat championship is over? Hardly! A complete analysis of playoff results from the last four years tells a very interesting story…see more below. Also this week, I look at what qualifies for a pass being “nearly intercepted” and get back to some good old-fashioned bashing of the Federal Reserve. First, some notable observations…

NICE

• Wes Welker, WR – Frito Pie – 37 pts – Welker is the current NFL leading receiver with 458 yards and 31 receptions. That’s an average of 152.7 yards and 10.3 catches a game! Oh yeah, and he also has 4 touchdowns through only three games.
• Torrey Smith, WR – Free Agent – 37 pts – If you don’t know who this guy is, don’t worry… the Rams defense didn’t pay any attention to him either. On his first career start, replacing injured Lee Evans, they let him run wild for 152 yards and 3 TDs! And you gotta love this quote from the guy: “I've been playing football forever and I've been making plays forever.”
• Darren McFadden, RB – SOFA KING GOOD – 32 pts – McFadden has a league-high rush yards per game of 131 yards. Weren’t the Raiders supposed to suck this year?
• Joe Flacco, QB – Moves Like Jagger – 30 pts – Nice outing for Torrey Smith’s new best friend. All told, 389 yards passing, 3 TD’s and 27 yards rushing.
• Drew Brees, QB – Coors Light Drunk Guys – 29 pts – Playing the way a keeper quarterback should be playing, Brees is averaging 27.3 ppg through the first 3 games. His total would have been even higher, but he tossed two interceptions against the Texans, with his first being his first pick in his last 168 attempts.
• Jermichael Finley, TE – Moves Like Jagger – 26 pts – Tell me what you think of this stat line for a tight end… 85 yards and 3 TD’s! My team didn’t have 3 touchdowns across 8 players, and a tight end gets three?! Damn!

NOT SO MUCH

• Scottish Rebels, ALL – Scottish Rebels – Not one player on my entire roster scored in the double digits this week. Only one place to go from here!
• BenJarvus Green-Ellis, RB – American BadAss – 1 pt – The Law Firm was closed for business Sunday, managing 16 yards on 9 carries for a pathetic 1.78 average.
• Deion Branch, WR – Coors Light Drunk Guys – 0 pts – Branch went without a catch for the first time since his rookie season in 2002.
• James Starks, RB – sprouts – -2 pts – Starks gained just under half a yard on each of his 11 carries, and only managed 9 yards receiving. Add a lost fumble to the mix and you end up with the rarely seen negative score for a player who wasn’t injured during a game. Ouch.

ANNOUNCER UPGRADES

Announcers love to make games sound more exciting, and make the action more complex than it actually is. The “end around” is routinely referred to as a reverse, a reverse is routinely referred to as a double reverse, and a five-man rush has become an “all out blitz”. These are bearable throughout the course of a game, but the one that just drives me crazy is when announcers describe a pass as almost intercepted It seems like any time a defensive player is within a 5-yard radius of an incomplete pass, announcers will fall all over themselves to say “Wow! That pass was nearly picked off!!!” And you can forget about it if a defender actually happens to tip the ball with his hand… those will be described as a play that “should have been a touchdown for the defense.”

Going forward, I am proposing the following criteria for a pass to officially be declared “nearly intercepted”. Jon Gruden, I hope you are paying attention:

1. The defender must be looking at the quarterback AND at the ball. (A defender that is face guarding a receiver is not going to intercept that pass.)
2. The defender must get two hands on the ball. (Even wide receivers, guys that are paid to catch a football, will only very rarely catch the ball with one hand.)
3. The defender must fall to the ground immediately afterwards and punch the ground a minimum of two times in frustration. (Defenders know when they almost had an interception, so if they’re not mad at themselves, it wasn’t close to being intercepted.)

If the play in question does not meet those three criteria, then the play can only be referred to as a “pass defended”.

WANNA MAKE THE PLAYOFFS? START 3-0 OR 0-3

You always hear that it is important to get off to a strong start if you want to have any hope for making it into the playoffs. Three weeks into a season would seem to be a pretty good indicator for how the season is going to shape out. So I’ve gone back and analyzed the records after the first three weeks of the season from 2007 on to see how things ended up, and here are the findings:

- Teams that start the season 3-0 qualify for the playoffs 83.3% of the time (5 out of 6 times). Remarkably, teams starting 0-3 qualify for the playoffs 75% of the time (3 out of 4 times).

- Statistically speaking, you are most likely to qualify for the playoffs (100% of the time) by starting with a record of 1-1-1 after three weeks as the Midnight Maulers did last season. You are least likely to make the playoffs (0% of the time) with a starting record of 0-2-1 after three weeks, as Frito Pie also did last season.

- A starting record of 2-1 has happened 9 times in the last four years, and only 44.4% of those teams made it into the playoffs.

- The most common starting record after three weeks is 1-2, having occurred 17 times, with 58.8% of those teams qualifying.

The bottom-line is that because no team has started 1-1-1 or 0-2-1, no one is a shoo-in and no one has been eliminated. Based on the probabilities, my playoff team predictions are: Joe’s Pats, Frito Pie, Moves Like Jagger, Midnight Maulers, Scottish Rebels and SOFA KING GOOD. Booyow!!

FEDERAL RESERVE REBRANDING

There is an old expression, “If all your have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The Federal Reserve showed us last week that their only tool is a hammer and they are going to continue using it to bash the United States economy. In case you missed it, the Fed’s latest plan for getting the economy going has been dubbed Operation Twist. Without getting into the details, the plan basically entails swapping short-term debt for long-term debt. But however they try to spin it, it is still the same method that they have always used to try to fix the economy… printing more money.

If I am going to give the Federal Reserve credit for one thing, it is their marketing strategy. They have continually thought of new ways to describe the same activity, while at the same time keeping the American public and the politicians confused about what they are actually doing. First it was a “stimulus”, then it was “Quantitative Easing, Parts 1 & 2”, then there was talk of “policy accommodation” and now “Operation Twist”. All of these plans employ the same method—flooding the market with dollars in an effort to boost consumption. Only this method has not worked and will not work to fix the economy. All it does is serve to devalue dollars already in circulation, drive interest rates lower (which discourages saving and investing) and raise the prices for goods.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. It is long past due for the American people to recognize this insanity and put an end to the most insidious and corrupt organization ever established, the Federal Reserve.

GAME PICK RECAP

Three owners picked four of the games correctly this week, Jens, Joe and Shawn. Since there is a tie between the most correct picks this week, the waiver order will simply be the inverse order of the league standings.

BEST BENCH

It was a pretty good week all around in terms of teams playing their optimal roster. Ultimately, it was last week’s high scorer, Moves Like Jagger, that took home the title of Best Bench for Week 3. Jens could have improved his total by 43 points with four roster moves: J. Flacco for B. Roethlisberger (+14), S. Rice for K. Britt (+11), A. Bradshaw for B. Tate (+11) and the Giants D for the Jets D (+7).

Get your waiver claims in and get your rosters set for Week 4!