• Senior Fantasy analyst for ESPN
    • Member, FSWA and FSTA Halls of Fame
    • Best-selling author of “Fantasy Life”

Playoff week.

A week when emotions run high.

It’s tense in every league across the country.

Very tense.

Just not as intense as it was a few years ago in “The Hotness,” Carolyn M.’s eight-team family league.

Carolyn explained to me, “I just want to throw out the fact that I am a 20-something actress in NYC and my mom is a microbiologist in her mid-50s. Somehow, I think everything becomes funnier when considering how atypical we are for fantasy football.”

Indeed it does, Carolyn. And before we begin, she’d also like you to know that “I’m not proud of what I did. But I did it for the sanctity of the league.”

The league started as a six-person family league and expanded to eight in Year 2, the only problem being they didn’t have an eighth player and draft day was fast approaching. So, despite not being a big sports fan, Carolyn’s best friend, “David,” said he’d play. With no viable alternatives, she agreed, although she did issue a warning: “If he wasn’t gonna take this seriously, he would lose his privileges.”

Obviously, Carolyn is hard-core into this. David, however, is not. He’s from Boston originally, so he makes sure to draft quarterback Tom Brady first and then auto-drafts the rest. “He ends up with a pretty bad team, regardless of the fact that our league is so small,” Carolyn said. “His team was a hot mess.”

And not only was David’s team, uh, an auto-drafted hot mess, but David didn’t touch his lineup, at all, for the first seven weeks; bye week and injured players in his lineup and all.

So what happens? Tom Brady goes off, of course, and the fantasy scheduling gods clearly favor David’s side. Every week, he plays the team with the lowest score, and each matchup, by just a few points, he keeps managing to win.

Carolyn continues the story.

Source: Read Full Article