A Pregame Update (and New Polls)

The real "Must See TV" starts tonight as NFL Network brings back Thursday Night Football. Our first Thursday matchup inspired the first Thursday night poll of the season for the People's Pigskin. We asked you, the Internet, whether we should start Michael Bush this week. And you voted unanimously to put him into the starting lineup tonight against the San Diego Chargers.

We'd like to thank all of those who voted in that poll. And we have plenty more opportunities to make your voice heard. In addition to the fantasy NASCAR polls, which will close Friday night, we now have a full complement of fantasy football polls. After all, Bush can't carry the Internet's favorite fantasy football team by himself. The football polls will close on Saturday night. Please note that we now need you to vote for only two running backs, since Bush has already claimed a starting spot.

The People's Pigskin halted its losing streak last week. Now we need to build our winning streak into multiple games. And we need your help. So please vote now.

We'll be back with some more relevant thoughts.

An Early Taste of Victory

The streak is over for the People's Pigskin.

The Internet's favorite fantasy football team beat the Arcadia Roses by a score of 105-66. Our season record has been raised to 3-6, and even if we did ruin our chances to draft Andrew Luck, we'll take it.

Here is the most pleasant scoring breakdown we've run in six weeks.

Eli Manning, QB: 20 of 39 passing for 250 yards, 3 rushes for 11 yards, 2 touchdowns, 1 interception and 17 fantasy points. No, he doesn't get extra fantasy points for leading a last-minute comeback victory, but those last-minute points count just the same.

Ray Rice, RB: 18 rushes for 43 yards, 5 receptions for 43 yards, 1 touchdown and 14 fantasy points. Considering that he got those statistics against the Steelers in Pittsburgh, you have to call them impressive. And they'd be even more impressive had it not been for a certain holding call.

Michael Bush, RB: 19 rushes for 96 yards, 2 receptions for 33 yards, 1 touchdown and 18 fantasy points. Bush has been the big beneficiary of both Darren McFadden's injury and Carson Palmer's misadventures.

Larry Fitzgerald, WR: 4 receptions, 43 yards, 1 touchdown and 10 fantasy points. Who would have guessed the way to get Fitzgerald his first touchdown in a month was to get John Skelton under center?

Plaxico Burress, WR: 5 receptions, 79 yards and 7 fantasy points. There had been questions about Burress' back, but there are no questions about his hands.

Wes Welker, Flex: 1 rush for 13 yards, 9 receptions for 136 yards and 14 fantasy points. All that was missing was a touchdown.

Jason Witten, TE: 4 receptions, 71 yards, 1 touchdown and 13 fantasy points. Weeks like this are the reason Witten keeps showing up on "under-appreciated weapons" lists.

Pittsburgh Steelers, D/ST: 1 fumble recovery, 3 sacks, 23 points allowed and 4 fantasy points. Those last two figures were more impressive until Joe Flacco put that last drive together.

John Kasay, K: 2 for 3 on field goals, 3 for 3 on extra points and 8 fantasy points. Kasay is not the top fantasy kicker anymore, but he remains serviceable.

Bench: We would have been all right with Tony Romo, after all. He scored 20 fantasy points. Damian Williams scored 9, and Danny Woodhead scored 5.

Now, we have to deal with a new fantasy football wrinkle: Thursday Night Football on NFL Network (the same network that told us the greatest touchdown celebration of all time was by Barry Sanders). We have one player involved in this Thursday's match between the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers. That would be Michael Bush. And the decision on whether to play him won't wait until Saturday. So we have a special poll set up for him now. That poll will close Thursday evening before kickoff. Please vote now.

We'll be back shortly with the fantasy racing results.

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.

Saturday Afternoon Reading

This would have been posted earlier, but we were unavoidably detained at Sofia Restaurant, the unofficial second home of the People's Pigskin. Anyway, here are some links to peruse while you decide how you will vote in our polls. (Reminder: the lineup poll will close Saturday night.)

Maybe he and the producers should huddle. I wish I could find video to support my point here, but I can't, so you'll just have to trust me on this one.

The NFL Network has a show called Playbook, where several National Football League veterans, including the inimitable Sterling Sharpe, analyze game film and try to use what they see on that film to predict the outcome of the upcoming games. If it sounds familiar, it's because ESPN has been using that format for years for its "NFL Matchup" show with Ron Jaworski and Merrill Hoge. (If you're looking for that show on your TV listings, it's easy to find -- just look in the boxes marked "3:30 a.m. EST Sunday" and "7:30 EST Sunday." You know, the times when every football fan's TV is on.)

Anyway, this week on Playbook, Sterling and company were analyzing this week's titanic matchup between the Cleveland Browns and the Detroit Lions. Sterling was telling us that the Lions would prevail, because he likes what he's seeing from the Lions defense. While he was praising the defense, the producers were showing three plays from last week's game between the Lions and the Minnesota Vikings. The plays: a long Sidney Rice touchdown, a long reception by Percy Harvin and a touchdown run by Adrian Peterson. In at least two of the plays, the Vikings player broke at least one Lions tackle.

I still don't know whether the producers were paying tribute to Alanis Morissette's take on irony, or whether they didn't get the memo that all three analysts were picking the Lions to beat the Browns. Or maybe it was just easier to find three plays where the Lions were schooled.

Conflict of interest? By now you know that Maurice Jones-Drew's taking a knee at the 1-yard line last week hurt a lot of fantasy football players last week. Well, the Chicago Tribune learned that one of the players burned by the decision was Robbie Gould of the Chicago Bears. He has a team in the NFL Players Association league, and his team had Jones-Drew in its lineup.

That's right. The NFL Players Association has a fantasy football league. Now, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to criticize NFL players for playing fantasy football. But it is interesting that a league that sued to keep Delaware from taking bets on football games allows its players to play fantasy football, a game where inside knowledge about who's starting and who's healthy (and who's lying about their injury reports) would be worth a king's ransom.

Your weekly "opposing view" update. A fellow WordPress blogger, Pigskin Is the New Pink, has something to say about fantasy football. In the post "Fantasy or Loyalty," the blog (which, to be fair, is written by a fantasy player) tells us that fantasy football "has shamed the way fans treat their rivals." The thesis: Playing fantasy football encourages you to root for players on your archrival's team, in the hopes that said players will reward you with points and victories.

"I encourage you all to stop playing fantasy football for money and start cheering for what really matters, when your most hated team and/or player has a TERRIBLE GAME and LOSES!"

Ummm...good luck with that.

Now to the important stuff. Remember what's truly important about football: the chance to enjoy whatever your favorite beverage may be, even if you feel the same way as this guy.

We'll be back Sunday morning with an update on our lineup.

The Weekend Batch of Links

Remember that our polls on our fantasy football team's lineup and your fantasy league's prizes will close tonight. While you think about how you will vote, here are some stories to explore.

Don't cram ads down fans' throats. That's our job. The first time I saw Brent Celek strike the "got a little captain in ya" pose, I remember thinking it was the lamest touchdown celebration since this one. In fact, I agreed with Tony Kornheiser when he said the pose "looks like a guy is about to pee on a fire hydrant."

But now we've learned that it wasn't just Brent trying to impress the ladies. He was part of a marketing campaign for Captain Morgan rum. The makers of the rum said they would donate money to the Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund for every time an NFL player struck the pose on television.

The National Football League quickly put the kibosh on that plan, saying "A company can’t pay a player to somehow promote its product on the field." This means we'll have to settle for the National Football League telling us which beer to drink and which shampoo to use if you have more hair than Bigfoot. And Brent will have to settle for being a start-him-every-week tight end for fantasy players.

Smile, fantasy players. You've got the power. If you've played fantasy sports for any length of time, you've answered questions ranging from "What is that?" to "Do you simply not have a life?" But you can take comfort in this Bloomberg article in which fantasy football gets credit (some of it, at least) for increasing the reach of NFL Network. Neal Pilson, the former president of CBS Sports, said the network's RedZone Channel, which cuts immediately to games where a team is in the red zone, is a popular feature with fantasy players.

Urban Legend, the Gridiron Version. Earlier in the week we discussed the dangers of believing what you read in preseason publications. Now the folks at NFL Soup point out another danger: believing what you see at the start of the season. The blog's point (and a very valid one) is that some early defensive "trends" don't hold water as the season progresses. "The Houston run defense got better. It got much better." That's true. Of course, it's also true that the Browns defense...well, it's not good.

Let's hear it for the big uglies. If you're the type of person who says quarterbacks get too much credit for what happens on the football field, here's a Web site for you to check out: TrenchFantasy.com. This site offers a different type of fantasy football. Instead of drafting running backs, receivers, etc., you draft a team consisting of an offensive line, a defensive line, a secondary, a punting unit, a defensive special team, a field goal unit, and a kickoff squad. One example of the scoring: an offensive line gets 2 points for a first down, with a 5-point bonus if the first down was made on fourth down.

I can't believe I benched Scalia this week. And for a truly different fantasy experience, you can check out a fantasy Supreme Court site, FantasySCOTUS. This site lets you predict the outcome of each case considered by the high court, what the split will be (8-1, 7-2, etc.), and whether each justice will side with the majority or the minority. Credit to fellow WordPress blogger La Flog for the assist on this one.

We'll be back tomorrow with the results of our polls. In the meantime, enjoy the college games.

A Midweek Link Batch

The NFL gets a head start on week 10 tomorrow, when the San Francisco 49ers will face the Chicago Bears. While you get your lineups ready (and decide what to do with ours), here is some recommended reading.

Further review? I've got your further review. If you feel your fantasy football team was robbed when Ryan Moats fumbled the ball last week against the Indianapolis Colts, think how Houston Texans coach Gary Kubiak must feel. Kubiak said he has filed a report with the NFL about how the replay of that fumble was handled:

"The bottom line, they're saying that the ball was not touched by anybody who was out of bounds. Or if it was, it was only touched by Ryan (Moats), who was on top of another player. We thought looking at it that 41 (DB Antoine Bethea) is touching the ball and he's out of bounds."

How far will that report get Kubiak? I'm hoping he's not holding his breath (or anyone else's).

Well, they're both filled with large male human beings. That's a similarity. It can't be easy to be Eric Mangini right now. He has a quarterback with worse stats than JaMarcus Russell, his hand-picked GM is out, and he may be next to get the heave-ho if his owner brings in the football czar he wants.

But Mangini is mounting a defense. (Off the field, at least.) He claims that there are "remarkable similarities" between how his Browns are now and how the New England Patriots were when Bill Belichick arrived. "It was top-heavy financially, there were tough decisions that had to be made, and we didn't have much success that first year."

The Patriots went 5-11 in Belichick's first year there and 11-5 in his second. If Mangini thinks he can pull off something similar in his second year -- heck, if he thinks he can match that 5-11 record this year -- he might be sharing an office with these guys.

It's not just for slackers anymore. The Boston Globe has a nice story about a nursing home that started a fantasy football league for its residents. About a dozen people who are old enough to have watched Sammy Baugh are now monitoring Sammy Morris' stats. If anyone from that league is reading this, kudos to you (and don't be afraid to help our team out by voting in the polls).

If this isn't enough for you... The NFL Network, apparently afraid that some football fans may not feel invested in Thursday's tussle, is offering a Fan Challenge. It's basically a mini-fantasy football league in which you pick from the players involved in the NFL Network's eight Thursday and Saturday night games. No, this guy isn't available. But then again, neither is this guy.

We'll be back with more thoughts tomorrow.

Looking Back (and Ahead)

Even though the Monday night game has yet to kick off, the People's Pigskin has racked up another loss. We currently trail the Northeast Dragons by a score of 93-83. The Dragons will start Brandon Marshall and the Steelers defense/special teams tonight, but unless Brandon has a few "Wrong Way" Marshall plays in him, the Pigskin's record will drop to 4-5.

Here's a breakdown of our results.

Kurt Warner, QB. The stats: 22 of 32 passing, 261 yards, 5 touchdowns, 1 rush for 3 yards, and 30 fantasy points. A week after his disastrous five-interception outing, Warner made mincemeat of the the Chicago Bears defense. If the rest of our fantasy football team played the way he did, we'd be talking about a resounding victory instead of a defeat.

Matt Forte, RB. The stats: 5 rushes for 33 yards, 6 receptions for 74 yards, and 10 fantasy points. For what it's worth, Forte is one of the few running backs who doesn't become irrelevant in fantasy football when his team gets behind, because he can do as much damage as a receiver as he does as a runner.

Steve Slaton, RB. The stats: 6 rushes for 17 yards, 3 receptions for 12 yards, 1 touchdown, and 8 fantasy points. This week it was Ryan Moats' turn to fumble the ball for the Houston Texans. Slaton held the ball long enough to get it in the end zone -- always a plus for fantasy players.

T.J. Houshmandzadeh, Flex. The stats: 6 receptions, 34 yards, 1 touchdown, and 9 fantasy points. The Seattle Seahawks were able to beat the Detroit Lions, but no Seahawk covered himself in fantasy glory.

Greg Jennings, WR. The stats: 5 receptions, 61 yards, and 6 fantasy points. Jennings should have had a much bigger day against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who got their first win of the season in spite of their ugly Popsicle-colored uniforms.

Chad Ochocinco, WR. The stats: 5 receptions, 66 yards, 1 fumble, and 4 fantasy points. It's never a good sign when the most memorable part of your starting receiver's day is his attempt to give an official a dollar in exchange for a replay call. (He may end up giving the NFL more than a dollar for that stunt.)

Jeremy Shockey, TE. The stats: 3 receptions, 26 yards, and 2 fantasy points. You would think Shockey would have gotten more involved in the New Orleans Saints come-from-behind win over the Carolina Panthers.

Nick Folk, K. The stats: 2 for 2 on field goals, 2 for 2 on extra points, and 8 fantasy points. Folk made the most of his chances in a surprising Dallas Cowboys victory over the Philadelphia Eagles. Speaking of which...

Philadelphia Eagles, D/ST. The stats: 1 interception, 4 sacks, 20 points allowed, and 6 fantasy points. The Eagles did everything right except keeping the Cowboys out of the end zone.

Bench. Matt Cassel got 20 fantasy points in his debut on the People's Pigskin bench, while Derrick Ward earned 11.

Now, while we wait for the Monday night game, it's time to look ahead to another night: Thursday night. The NFL Network Thursday slate starts this week with the Chicago Bears taking on the San Francisco 49ers. That means we can't wait until Saturday night to make the call on whether Matt Forte should start. As a result, this week we'll have a special poll for Forte alone. This poll will close Wednesday night. Please vote.

We'll be back tomorrow with a more detailed look at next week's matchup.