Fantasy Football: I Can Quit Anytime I Want!

As I have stated previously I am a very boring man. I don’t drink, I’ve never done drugs, and I even try to avoid caffeine whenever possible. Legally I may actually be able to claim Mormonism, but that would more than likely involve lots of paperwork, moving to Utah and cutting into my sitting around time significantly, plus I’m not a fan of BYU.

I’m not without my vices though, every year I go through a make-up/break-up with fantasy football. Every year I end up relenting and organizing a draft at the last possible moment. Then without fail I find myself losing to someone’s girlfriend who drafted players based on the cuteness of their behinds or how silly their last name is (I’m told TJ Houshmandzadeh fits both criteria nicely). Without fail this person surely hasn’t even looked at their roster since the draft and can defeat me even while most of their players are on a bye week. All of this despite the fact that I spent an embarrassing amount of time pouring over my roster, moving players around, sacrificing chickens to the fantasy football god “Ted”....anything that will help.

Once this happens I vow to never play fantasy football never ever ever again. Without fail though I find myself at Wal-Mart at 2 am buying a fantasy football magazine and calling all my nerdy friends a week before the draft and talking them into playing even though most of them still probably could not tell you what color a football is.

Things have gotten progressively worse over the years until last year when I was actually tired of fantasy football and the people in my league before the draft was even over.......

But I’ll admit to my madness, I attend regular F.F.A.A meetings:

Me: Hi, my name is Andy and I’m addicted to Fantasy Football
Everyone: HI ANDY
Me: It’s been 3 days since I’ve updated my line-up....

I was hoping the NFL lockout would last longer so I would have no choice but to not draft, but it looks like the millionaires are totally going to patch things up with the billionaires (how touching, it really warms your heart doesn’t it?). So I’m going to try something different this year. I’ll admit right now that yes,...I will at least hold a draft for fantasy football, and yes I will get sick of it and pissed off, and yes I will vow to never play again....but since all of that is going to happen anyway, I am planning on doing things a little different this year.

First off I’m going to tie it into my blog so I can whine to all of you folks (lucky you). Also I’m going to involve my entire blog staff and make them participate (they don’t know this yet) and I’m going to employ the tactics I’ve used to make fantasy baseball interesting for me.

Namely I’m going use dummy teams filled with horrid Jay Cutler type players and name them after people/places I don’t like and proceed to watch them get stomped every week. This will hopefully lesson the sting when Jacque’s team made up almost entirely of Seattle Seahawks (because she actually likes their barfy metallic dark teal uniforms) beats me by 40 points even though she never bothered to start half her team.

I’m thinking the S.B.F.F.L (Smitty Blog Fantasy Football League) will consist of:

• My team
• Jacque’s team: Bellevue BattleToads (she’s already told me what she’s going to name her team, even though up until just now I’ve insisted that I am not playing this year,...what can I say...she knows me...)
• Dave’s team, no doubt will involve a gecko in some manner,
• My secretary’s team will most likely be based in Florida.
• Plus 4 teams cryptically named after people/places that have wronged me in the past

So be nice to me, buy me nachos,..write lots of comments on my blogs, check the facebook page even though it doesn’t exist yet,...or you may have a fantasy football team named in your honor with Terrell Owens set as your starting Wide Receiver. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s 2 am, and I heard Wal-mart got the new fantasy football magazines out already this year......

Greetings to all of my loyal blog readers, or should I say “Hi mom” ? (That seems more accurate).

AFL playoffs start this Friday so I need to hurry and get my predictions down in blog form in a hurried/half-assed manner before they actually start.

First off here is the bracket . As you can see my Preds are in the playoffs for the 19th consecutive year in their 20th year of existence,....not too shabby, unfortunately they draw the number 1 seeded Jacksonville Sharks in the first round. No amount of one handed Bobby Sippio touchdown catches can stop the Jacksonville Sharks from taking advantage of the laundry list of penalties my beloved team is sure to commit, so the verdict? Jacksonville lives up to their number one seed and advances over the bloated carcass of my beloved team (jerks) while wading through a lake of penalty flags sure to be called on my Preds. The flags should be at least waist deep by the 3rd quarter. Not that I’m bitter or anything...

Moving to the other match-up in the American Conference side of things, the Georgia Force travel to Cleveland to take on the Gladiators. I could see this one going either way, but I’m going to stick with my gut and go with the home team. Georgia struggled to beat lowly Iowa last Saturday night a game which, if they had lost, my Preds would have gotten the number three seed and a much more winnable game at Cleveland,...but Iowa lost of course, I guess that’s okay, it was hard rooting for them. If you know me at all you know just how hard it was for me to root for a team from Iowa....I forced myself to do it though, and then they lost,...I hate you Iowa,...I hate you with every nacho filled fat cell in my body.

On to the National Conference side of things and perhaps the most intriguing game of the first round of the playoffs. Arizona coming in with the best record in the AFL this season at a blistering 16-2 versus the fiery defending champion Spokane Shock with the worst record in the playoffs coming in at 9-9. I think this will be the closest game of the 1st round and wouldn't be at all surprised if the Shock pull off the upset. This is the game the NFL network should have broadcast but instead went with Jacksonville/Orlando. I’ll flip a coin and say the Nick Davila and Co. hold off the feisty Shock team. Look out though, if Spokane can sneak past Arizona, they would be my pick to win the championship this year.

The last match-up for week one of the playoffs, douche bag Clint Dolzel’s Dallas team comes to Chicago to face the rush. I’m going with the Rush here, not because I think they’re better or anything but because if they let Clint and his stupid jazz musician-esk facial hair* into the next round of the playoffs I will never forgive them, ever.

See you next week where I will be apologizing for getting all of my picks wrong and trying to right the ship by making my predictions for the conference championship game.



*couldn’t find a clint dolzel facial hair pic, prolly got lucky on that one,...didn’t need to be reminded of that.

Mini Blog: Blame Jacque

Don’t forget to vote on what the next blog topic will be, still don’t have
any votes yet, I blame Jacque.......

Send your vote to TheSmittyBlog@gmail.com to redeem her good name.

Mini Blog: Twitter Account

New Twitter account-----> @TheSmittyBlog

Follow it or die, or just be badly badly maimed.

Introductory Blog (and stuff)

Hello everyone,

First I should explain how we got here. The editor of my previous blog, for arguments sake,..we’ll call him “Dave” had been pestering me for some time to resume blogging. Finally I told him that if he could find enough signatures I would indeed resume blogging. I know that makes me sound like an ego freak, but really, part of the enjoyment for me when I did blog was that others also enjoyed reading the darned thing. I could write the blog just for Dave, but that wouldn’t be very challenging. All I would have to do is post pictures of and discuss things that are shiny**.

He claims that I’m good at this. I think he just missed corecting* me. I put the number way too low and he was successful. So thank you everyone who signed the petition (jerks).

Now a little about myself and my blog. I’m actually a pretty boring individual, I love football, nachos, I don’t drink or do drugs, or jump out of airplanes...what do I do then? I write, mostly for myself, this little bit is just the stuff I’m willing to share.

My blogs tend to fit rather snugly into three different categories, Nebraska football, Arena/Indoor Football/UFL, and sports in general. Oh, and I tend to rant a lot on how annoying football commentators are. Now for all of you non-sports fans out there, don’t fret I write them in a way that (hopefully) is enjoyable to everyone. My editor doesn’t like sports all that much either, but still enjoys my blogs,....just sayin’.

Aside from sports I tend to share my humorous life experiences, unfortunately most of which occur in public restrooms,...long story there,....but that’s the second category.

Lastly, and this will be a new addition to my blogging types, I plan on including a lot of smaller mini blogs, adding updates to previous blogs, announcements and things. Something I’d like to do is live tweet, and I plan on occasionally posting something announcing the when/where and how of it. I know tweeting is no longer ‘cool’ and nobody does it anymore, but I really like the bite size format. Also that fact that it is no longer ‘cool’ and not many normal people tweet anymore makes me like twitter even more.

So I’ll say something like “I’ll be live tweeting during Monday Night Football this week, commenting on the game, the players, and more than likely the announcers.....” something like that. So if such a thing is of interest to you it may be in your best interest to create an account and follow yours truly. As of this writing I don’t have one set up yet for this blog, but when I do that would be the perfect example of one of those mini blogs I was just speaking of.

As far as style, I try and keep it humorous, life is too serious and boring...plus who really wants to read about someone else’s non-funny drama in their free time? I tend not to use curse words, not because I’m offended by them or anything, I find the cartoonish nature of the shift keys to have greater impact i.e. “I dropped the #%&#@^$ anvil on my foot!” to use as very simple example. Lastly, and this is my most important rule, it has to remain fun for me as well. If blogging becomes a drag the end product suffers, and eventually I just stop writing.

To help keep this blog from suffering such a fate I will have several people on staff helping me. Hopefully the number of people working on my blog will not dip below the number of people reading it. I would consider that a failure and it would totally make me Mr. SadPants. So here they are:

Dave Fosbinder: Editor
Jacquelyn Morgan: Public Relations Specialist/Sumo Wrestler Body Guard
Jamie Kirkpatrick: Secretary

They can all be reached through the email we sent out to all you kind folks, but just in case you missed it it’s TheSmittyBlog@gmail.com

The last piece of business is I’m going to let you the readers decide what I will blog about next. Below will be a list of potential topics, some of which I have pretty well hashed out, others are mere inklings of ideas not yet sprouted. Some I may end up writing about regardless for others though, this may be your only chance so vote! Just send an email to TheSmittyBlog@gmail.com I know most of you could tell one of us your vote in person, but the odds of us remembering are very slim, for we are all very simple creatures.

1. NU vs NU already getting old

2. Why Justin Bieber should be thanked by everyone (seriously I can make a good case for it)

3. A/C water apocalypse of death 2011 and my new found fear of water

4. My college football conference realignment

5. Good ol’ fashioned football announcer rant blog

That’s enough for now, any more and I fear I may end up with fewer votes than candidates and that too would make me sad.

Thanks for reading, hope to be read by you again soon,

-Andy

*= Editors Note: It should be spelled “Correct”....oh god that felt sooo goooooood.....
**= Editors Note: Ooooooh!!!! Did somebody say shiny?

Test

This is a test post, this is only a test post, if this were an actual blog the title you just read would have been followed (most likely) by fart jokes.

This was only a test.

This concludes our test of The SmittyBlog (tm) broadcast system.