I’m not a man that asks for much when it comes to fantasy football. I want a solid season with a good team and a chance to take home the (admittedly meagre) office fantasy football pot. However, thanks to the absurdity of this NFL season thus far, I stand on the precipice of football oblivion, screaming into the gnashing maelstrom, “HOLY FUCKBALLS YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKERS STOP GETTING HURT EVERY FIVE MINUTES AND JUST SCORE SOME GODDAMNED POINTS!!”
My season started out looking great. I had a healthy and not-suspended-for-saggy-balls Tom Brady, a running back that broke rushing records last season at Dallas (and pay records at Philly) in DeMarco Murray, a wide receiver known for putting up 30 point games on the regular and a series of rookies that all should have been promising starts each and every week of the season. If this fantasy football season was Mount Olympus, I was motherfucking Zeus.
Then came week 3. Murray went out with a hamstring injury FROM PRACTICE. Tony Romo, my back-up QB, is now effectively dead for the next 12 weeks. At least, he’s dead to me. Who goes out with a clavicle injury? A bitch, that’s who. You make millions of dollars a year and bang a model for a living, Tony Romo. Get your shit together. He wasn’t starting though, so I figured I could weather the storm. No, no no no. The football gods had more pain in store for me. I was no longer Zeus. I was Odysseus, on a boat, stuck in the middle of the ocean of giant, angry middle fingers. The universe’s collective fantasy sports “fuck you” was about to go to 11.
Following Murray and Romo, I lost LeSean McCoy and another guy deep on my player depth chart. I am now more injured players than healthy players, like some weird football injury recovery institute masquerading as a fantasy football team. “Whiskey Ginger’s Home for Ironically Injured Star Athletes” should be my team name at this point in the season. My team is literally Tom Brady and 11 people you’ve never heard of before. I’d prefer to start college football players at this point. At least they won’t break every five minutes and there’s a nigh endless supply of them.
I have gone from the 2014 Patriots to the 2001 Redskins faster than Dan Snyder could sell off his dead grandmother’s shit at a half price yard sale. I am the Browns of fantasy football: doomed to bad luck for the sake of bad luck. If I had a front office, it would look like Wall St. circa Black Monday, 1929 before the Great Depression.
What is my recourse? Prayer? Hope? Personally sabotaging the season for every major NFL playmaker until only the guys I scrapped from the bottom of the waiver wire barrel are left? No, my friends, I think I must resign myself to turning into a Sunday drinking game called “watch the game and hope my opponents players end up in a re-enactment of that stadium scene from The Dark Knight Rises
At this juncture, I find myself asking, “WWJJD”, or “what would Jerry Jones do?” Not that I like Jerry Jones. He’s like Skeletor had sex with Lex Luthor and they had a weird, football-obsessed love child that also delighted in the tears and suffering of the innocent. However, the man is an astute strategist, and begrudgingly, a not-terrible owner.
After a long period of reflection, including some brief planning of things like kidnapping the commissioner and fending off a Taken-esque rescue attempt by the rest of the league or becoming a supervillain dedicated to destroying the National Football League (Roger Goodell beat me to that one), I settled in on something much more reasonable, but equally as devious.
My soulution? Sabotage the league by trading for a few decent players with what I have left, then dropping them to the waiver wire and picking up a cadre of backups. The league’s careful balance of power will be thrown into chaos, giving the worst teams in the league a chance to pick up decent players and bolster their rosters! Some men just want to watch the world burn, but I’m over here, content watching the red-blooded American’s equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons burn for one season. I’m a man of modest goals, like I said.
While this season may be more finished than Tim Tebow’s brief NFL career, hope springs eternal, as does my willingness to throw small sums of money at the hope that I will one day not be the best guy around for picking out the big injuries of a given NFL season. If not, I can be content in my role as the Loki of fantasy football- always willing to show up and spoil the party if I feel the injuries of the fantasy football season weighing too heavy on my shoulders.