Your Vacation Is Officially Over

A generation ago, even the most diehard football fans wouldn't have dared to think that the National Football League could form its own television channel and keep people tuned to it 12 months a year. But these days, you might feel cheated when this channel interrupts its live updates to bring you a Super Bowl rerun.
That's the way sports are these days, especially if you're a fantasy player. When the NFL had its lockout, all we wanted to know was when it was going to end. Now that the lockout and preseason are over, we want to know who's going to play. If you have a fantasy football team, you better not think you can ignore it for six days, come back to it on Sunday and rest assured that your team's fortunes haven't changed.
On Tuesday, if you were paying attention, you learned that the Jacksonville Jaguars had waited until five days before their season opener (and after he appeared at a chamber of commerce luncheon) to fire David Garrard. At first glimpse, this may not seem like a major concern to fantasy football players, since the only reason you would have been starting Garrard is because you had found a bad quarterback league. But football is a team sport, and one player's misfortune affects so many others. Did you spend your late first round pick on Maurice Jones-Drew? Will he now be facing a defense featuring 11 nose tackles? Maybe you took a flyer on a Jaguars receiver in the 13th round. Are you sure Luke McCown even knows that receiver's name?
Then, on Wednesday, if you were paying any attention at all, you learned that Peyton Manning won't be ready to play Sunday. If you rolled the dice and drafted him anyway, do you have a reliable quarterback to start this week? Do you need to go find Kerry Collins (and pray your opponent for this week didn't just get him off the waiver wire just to burn you)? Do all the other Indianapolis Colts players littering fantasy rosters remain valuable now that Collins is calling the shots? If you wait until Sunday to ask yourself these questions, you may find your alternatives to be quite slim.
And those were the relatively easy calls. We haven't even gotten to things like Arian Foster's photogenic hamstring or Ryan Grant's playing time or whether the Cincinnati Bengals really are stupid enough to let Carson Palmer rot on the shelf to make some short-sighted point. Some of these questions may be resolved by the time this post is published. Some of them may still be in the air at 12:59 p.m. Eastern on Sunday.
All of them are why NFL Network won't have to worry about going off the air anytime soon.
Quick reminder: There are polls that need your votes. The kicker poll closes at 5 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. The fantasy NASCAR polls close Thursday night, and the other fantasy football polls close Saturday night. Please contribute your votes to this experiment in fantasy democracy. Thanks.