Good day my HardCorps managers. Week 2 is down and man those injuries fucking STING. I knew I shouldn't have picked McCaffery. I was absolutely ready to pick Breece Hall at 2 and be happy I didn't have to decide between CMC and Hall at pick one. Drew made everything worse by picking Hall and leaving me without a similarly good alternative to CMC. AJ Brown-OUT. Tua-OUT. Puka-OUT. Pacheco-OUT. Deebo-Doubtful. Kupp-Doubtful. These are all some pretty roster ruining injuries, but we play on because we must!!!!
Let's do some game breakdowns:
Hall or Nothing v Captain Checkdown
And for the 2nd week in a row, Jason is getting posterized by the weekly high score. Shit man you're giving me flashbacks to the early days of this league. Drew put up the weekly high of 128.12 and hand Captain Checkdown his 2nd L. I was at Jason's BBQ shack with him for the Thursday night game when Buffalo DST dropped 18 pnts and James Cook put up 28. Jason went from a 30% chance to a 67% chance to win on Thursday alone. We both thought he was safe. But it turns out that, when your team sucks, even two really good performers can't save you! On the flip side, Drew's team only had Calvin Ridley as the real stand who outperformed his projection of 9 points by 250%. Everyone roughly performed at or slightly above their projections (minus Kelce and Diggs...oh the irony). But hey that's how you win in this league. Solid performance from most of your players is gonna get you over the hump in most weeks.
OP McFury v Berserkers
We had two nail-biters this week with both of them coming down to the Monday night matchup between Philly and Atlanta. I chose to cover the one that didn't have a weak ass final score on both sides. Steve and Lance both had players going in on Thursday night and neither breaking into double digits. But after the early Sunday games both players rocketed up to hover right at 100 points with Steve retaking the lead by 1.5 points. Lance regained his lead after the late Sunday games. Sporting a mere 4.4 point lead. After that, Lance was spent and was left by the bedside smoking a cigarette, while Steve still had some players ready to grab him a win. But alas in the Sunday night game Tank Dell, projected for 11 points, put a mere 1.8 points on the board, with his lone reception responsible for almost 1/3 of his total points. OUCH!!! Lance still had a chance!!!!! Still sitting on a 2.6 point lead, there was a glimmer of hope. As Monday night rolled in, we all watched with bated breath to see if Kyle Pitts would finally perform to his projected points (8). The answer was .... OF COURSE not. But let's be honest, he only need 2.6. Ensuring everyone anxiety till the end though, he didn't pass that mark till the 2nd half when Steve let out a sigh of relief and won the game by a mere 9 tenths of a point. Wooof what a matchup.
RE RE....Set v Put Your Dak Into It
The biggest blowout this week also happened to be the first (and only I think) side bet game. Travis slapped a 20 dollar H2H bet on me for our first matchup. That turned out to be a less than great idea. True, he did have Keenan Allen screw him over by not playing. Oh and Evan Engram was also sidelined in his game. And I suppose the 2 points from Allan Lazard didn't help too much either. Actually the entire team performed under expectations except for Pollard, and Cleveland DST who outperformed by .08 and 4.01 points respectively. That just isn't a recipe for winning. Meanwhile I got to see more of what I should probably expect from Jayden Daniels with 13 points (unlike his 28 last week). But, apart from Garret Wilson and Rachaad White having bad games, my whole team was able to break into double digits, and most times that's good for a win. Apart from the three players mentioned, all my players beat expectations, and Trey McBride finally flashed that TE1 he was sporting pre-draft by almost doubling his projections. I mentioned another close game, and it was exciting to watch, but with both teams being below 100 on their totals, it was more akin to a bum fight than a quality Fantasy matchup. The best part is Call of Jeudy had a 1.3 point lead going into the Monday night game. Missy had Saquan and Larry had Bijan. We all knew this would be exciting. Saquon edged Bijan by a mere 1.4 points leading to a 2.7 point victory. A later 1 point correction was not enough to get Larry over the hump and Missy secured the W. What a way to end the week for those two (I stayed up the whole night to watch it which I don't normally do on MNF). Let's check in on the points where Odin made up some ground, Freya had a worse performance than Odin's WK1, and Thor saw every single one of their managers break 100 with going over 120. They were also the only league to retain 2 undefeated managers. However, next week one of the remaining undefeated managers will eat their first L of the season when Steve faces off against Drew.
ODIN: Travis' 2nd turd of a game didn't quite hurt as bad this week since every other manager broke 100...even if 1 was barely (Dave). Total-782.34
THOR: Looks like this league performed even better this week than last week and is firmly in the point lead. Total-901.58
FREYA: Freya did not have a single manager break 100. That's really sad. As such they find themselves in 2nd place but with only a tiny 9 point lead. Total-791.4
Side note: I don't want to get into individual PA v PF just yet, but it is tragic that Jason already has 30PA (almost 15%) more than the next closest manager. If this luck holds, its gonna be a long season for Captain Checkdown.